Yesterday I flagged this NYT oped by Kathleen Donovan-Maher and Steven Groopman, “Why Dark Money is Bad Business.”
The second sentence reads: “So far two-thirds of election dollars have largely come from anonymous corporate donations, funneled through what have been referred to as “dark money” nonprofit groups that freely engage in electoral and legislative politics, but don’t have to disclose their donors, expenditures or even their members.”
There’s no hyperlink supporting the sentence and it strikes me as way off the mark. Any sense of where this number comes from?
The oped now posts this correction:
Correction: May 18, 2016
An Op-Ed article on May 10 about the regulation of “dark money” in political campaigns misstated the nature of two-thirds of anonymous, third-party spending during this election cycle. It is political advertising spending, not overall spending.
There’s no citation supporting this statistic and I don’t think this is correct either. Note the article refers to anonymous corporate donations. I’d love to see the evidence behind this claim.
Update: Robert Mcguire says that this is still almost certainly wrong.