The Right Wing Scam Machine

[Valin]

National Review/The Corner:

Jonah Goldberg
February 17, 2015

 

I’ve been saying for a while now that too many scammers and opportunists have been taking advantage of the tea party and conservative grassroots. I said so again a couple weeks ago when guest hosting on Bill Bennett’s radio show and I got a lot of grief for it. Well, here’s the latest proof. The folks at Rightwing News have a new report out showing that grassroots donors have been bilked of tens of millions of dollars that never went to the candidates they thought they were helping. For instance:

 

(Snip)

 

The report found a whole bunch of interesting stuff, including the fact that the Republican Main Street Project gets a whole pile of money from labor unions. But the most illuminating thing in the piece is simply this table:

 

*1 American Crossroads uses so many vendors who are either employees of the PAC or their surrogates that their real independent expenditure numbers are unverifiable in any meaningful sense.

*2 (Note: This section was edited after publication) The Senate Conservatives Fund thought it should get credit for money that was bundled and sent through its organization. Since bundled money is typically pass-through cash that is separate from independent expenditures and generally doesn’t reflect on how well a group is using the money it’s raised, we didn’t include that in the totals for any of the groups. That being said, the SCF may deserve more credit than most for the bundled money it raised because of a quirk in the FEC regulations. Long story short, the SCF reached out to people on its own email list and asked them to go back to its website and contribute to certain endorsed candidates. Because the SCF picked the candidates, that money doesn’t count as an independent expenditure. So, if a significant portion of the $4,712,667 it raised in bundled money came in that way, the SCF probably does deserve credit for it. If that bundled money had been added to its totals, that would have brought the numbers up to a more respectable 49% of the total spent, which would have put the SCF in 5th place overall. SCF also thought it deserves credit for non-candidate issue ad spending. We found $2,735,267 of that type of spending. However, since as a practical matter, issue ads are often just advertising for the group, we didn’t include those in its totals.

* 3 (Note: This section was added after publication) There is some controversy over the status for Americans for Prosperity. Our researcher said one of their committees was listed as a PAC at Open Secrets. AFP insists they’re not a PAC, says they aren’t doing PAC spending and says Open Secrets made mistakes with the data. Since AFP was listed as a PAC, we added their numbers, but the data at Open Secrets has changed over time. After getting an email from AFP this morning, my researcher dug deeper into their FEC data and says that it was a mistake by Open Secrets. Actually, AFP’s spending appears to be incorrectly classified 501c4 spending.

 

It shows what each organization spent on 2014 cycle “followed by how much each PAC gave to politicians either directly or through independent expenditures on their behalf. Then, last but not last, we have the percentage of their money they spent that actually went into independent expenditures & direct contributions.”

 

The footnotes are worth reading, and there are some legitimate caveats in the piece, but the general thrust is unmistakable. For example, the “Tea Party Army” spent zero money. Tea Party Express did better (though better than zero is not a high bar), but I doubt the average donor was under the impression that only a nickel out of every dollar he or she gave went to getting tea party friendly candidates elected.

 

(Snip)