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Taylor Lincoln, Research Director of the Congress Watch project at Public Citizen, reports on “dark money” campaign operations in 2012 Senate races.Lincoln recaps the two primary types of outside campaign groups this year, the SuperPACs (which disclose donors) and the “nonprofits” (which are called dark, since they do not disclose donors). Then we list some of the big spenders, led by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, which dropped about $37 million into the top 10 Senate races alone. You can read the report here.
We also discuss aspects of the Citizens United decision, which allows unlimited direct spending by corporations, and note that most prefer to put their money into SuperPACs–or dark nonprofits, which we don’t know about–rather than the direct method. Chevron is one exception.
And we talk about related aspects of big money in this year’s campaign, which in general did not buy the results expected by the donors or observers.