Shane Goldmacher for the NYT: Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said on Sunday that it entered September with $466 million in the bank together with the Democratic Party, providing Mr. Biden a vast financial advantage of about $141 million over President … Continue reading
Category Archives: campaign finance
Politico: Republican Party megadonors are racing to bail out President Donald Trump’s cash-strapped reelection campaign, with a newly formed super PAC pouring a further$25 million into battleground states.Preserve America is set to begin running a trio of TV commercials savaging … Continue reading
NYU: Transparency in political ads is vital to ensuring safe and fair elections, but transparency is difficult if advertisers are not required to disclose details about targeting and sources of funding. While TV broadcasters must disclose information about political ads … Continue reading
CNBC: Casino magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson is plotting a spending blitz to support President Donald Trump with just under 50 days to go until Election Day, CNBC has learned. Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands, is looking to spend … Continue reading
NBC News: When allies of former President Barack Obama set up a super PAC to support his 2012 re-election, the White House disowned the group, The New York Times published a scathing editorial and former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin gave a … Continue reading
NYT: Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and presidential candidate, announced Sunday that he planned to spend $100 million in Florida in the coming weeks to support Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential candidacy.The pledge came as new polls showed a particularly … Continue reading
WaPo: President Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and two affiliated fundraising committees on Wednesday announced raising $210 million in August — a sizable sum that still lags behind Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s record-breaking haul last month.The RNC said $76 million … Continue reading
Politico: Most campaigns merely post their television spots on the site. Trump’s YouTube channel, however, is a voluminous and unique collection of news, campaign ads and original web shows. Negative ads like “Don’t let them ruin America” are paired with … Continue reading
Over the next few days I will blog some of the panels likely to be of interest to ELB readers. Here’s the first: Author Meets Critics panel Sponsor: Campaign Finance Research GroupSubject: “A Neo-Madisonian Perspective on Campaign Finance Reform, Institutions, Pluralism, … Continue reading
Bloomberg: President Donald Trump has discussed spending as much as $100 million of his own money on his re-election campaign, if necessary, to beat Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.The billionaire president has talked about … Continue reading
NYT: Five months later, Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the … Continue reading
Big story in WaPo. … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spellscy: Good news is infrequent when you’re on the anticorruption beat. Notable recent incidents, for example, have included the sentencing of a former U.S. congressman’s wife for misuse of campaign funds and the resignation of a North Carolina state legislator who … Continue reading
NYT: Mr. Trump’s tendency to turn to the courts — and the legal issues that have stemmed from norm-breaking characteristics of his presidency — helps explain how he and his affiliated political entities have spent at least $58.4 million in … Continue reading
Release: With the digital-dominated 2020 election shifting into high gear, OpenSecrets is releasing a new searchable, sortable online ads database that provides comprehensive details about political ad spending on Google and Facebook. OpenSecrets is tracking over 80,000 online political advertisers, more than four … Continue reading
Podcast: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy discusses her new book “Political Brands”, which examines the use of commercial branding in politics, and how its high costs paved the way for the runaway costs of elections, and the corrupted campaign finance system that funds … Continue reading
New study for the Institute for Free Speech: Ten years after the decision, this report asks if such claims about Citizens United were correct. Did the Supreme Court’s ruling that corporations and unions can speak without limit and contribute unlimited … Continue reading
Politico: Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee reported raising a record $365 million in August, surprising even seasoned party fundraisers and putting to rest fears that President Trump would drown him in campaign spending.The staggering cash coincides with Biden … Continue reading
CFI release: The surge in independent spending (IEs) in state elections between 2006 and 2018 cannot adequately be explained by the Supreme Court’s decisions that seemed to liberate IEs a decade ago. Moreover, the spending by ideological and issue groups would not be reversed … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy for the Brennan Center. … Continue reading
Brad Smith WSJ oped. … Continue reading
FundFire (subscription only): Asset management firms gave at least $1.5 million between 2010 and 2018 to Republican-affiliated groups that promoted redistricting efforts that were later struck down by federal courts for disenfranchising Black voters, according to data in a new report.At … Continue reading
Big win for more effective disclosure rules. … Continue reading
Roll Call reports. … Continue reading
NYT: Mr. Trump is hardly lacking for cash; he has received huge numbers of small donations online from a fervent grass-roots base, and he raised a jaw-dropping $165 million in July for his campaign and the two fund-raising committees that he shares with the … Continue reading
Paul Ryan analysis. … Continue reading
I’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether Kanye West, who is running for President and getting on the ballots in at least a few states, is somehow breaking campaign finance law by doing so given the possibility that … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy for the Brennan Center. … Continue reading
The Dayton Daily News reports. … Continue reading
Start here: NEW: We filed an FEC complaint alleging that the Trump campaign violated the law by laundering nearly $170M in spending through conduits controlled by Brad Parscale and other senior Trump officials, hiding the ultimate recipients of the money … Continue reading
WSJ reports. … Continue reading
The cert petition in Lieu v. FEC is designed to get the Supreme Court to address an issue addressed by the D.C. Circuit in the earlier SpeechNow case but never addressed by the Supreme Court: is it constitutional for Congress … Continue reading
NYT Dealbook: Walmart calls its employees “heroes” for putting their health at risk to work during the pandemic. AT&T champions L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Microsoft is undertaking one of the country’s most ambitious corporate efforts to eliminate its carbon emissions.At a time when Corporate America is … Continue reading
Mike Norton and Rick Pildes with a new ELJ piece: Little empirical attention has been paid to the possible relationship between the sources of money in campaigns and whether political parties within the legislature are more unified or fragmented. Using … Continue reading
NYT: Over the past year government officials have raced to help states replace voting machines that leave no paper trail, and to harden vulnerable online voter registration systems that many fear Russia, or others, could hijack to trigger chaos on … Continue reading
The CBC reports. … Continue reading
Politico: The articles and Facebook ad dollars look like the efforts of a run-of-the-mill political group. But they are actually from a news outlet: CourierNewsroom.com, also known as Courier, which was created and funded by the Democratic-aligned digital organization Acronym. … Continue reading
Good idea from Issue One. … Continue reading
CNN: An anonymous group with ties to Republicans has just emerged with the apparent aim of targeting Senate candidate Kris Kobach of Kansas, according to sources familiar with the effort.Kobach is an anti-immigration firebrand and voter-fraud crusader whose primary campaign has … Continue reading
NYT: Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party outraised President Trump and the Republicans for the second straight month in June, announcing a record haul of $141 million on Wednesday night only hours after Mr. Trump’s campaign had trumpeted his … Continue reading
OC Register: As she heads into the heart of her first re-election campaign, Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine is quickly becoming a power broker in the House of Representatives.She’s a Democrat in a flip district that still leans slightly red. But … Continue reading
NYT: But Mr. Barr spent weeks in the spring of 2019 questioning the prosecutors over their decision to charge Mr. Cohen with violating campaign finance laws, according to people briefed on the matter.At one point during the discussions, Mr. Barr … Continue reading
Important WSJ report. … Continue reading
Revealing Dave Levinthal interview. … Continue reading
Brendan Fischer and Kedric Payne blog. … Continue reading
BAN reports. … Continue reading
Opinion here. … Continue reading
Eliahyu Kamisher reports for The Appeal: But a ban on direct campaign contributions will have relatively little effect on the influence of police unions, said Robert Stern, a former attorney who has worked extensively on California campaign finance reform. He … Continue reading
Release. … Continue reading
Bozeman Daily Chronicle: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a case that challenged Montana’s law on disclosing the spending for political ads within 60 days of an election.In August 2019, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Montana’s … Continue reading