The stage is set for what could be the country’s most expensive election in history next year, with President Obama taking in record sums for his reelection bid and independent conservative groups ready to unleash as much as $440 million to defeat him.
The 2008 presidential contest won by Obama, along with congressional races, cost a staggering $5.3 billion, the costliest election ever.
2010′s brutal midterm elections, the first held in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” ruling that effectively dismantled most federal campaign finance regulations, saw an unprecedented infusion of outside cash and totaled well over $ billion in cost.
As it stands now, the 2012 presidential fight will likely top all of them, and set new records for money in American politics.
On Thursday, President Obama’s campaign announced fundraising totals for the most recent quarter that reached over $70 million in funds for both the president’s reelection and the Democratic Party. The haul was more than the campaign expected and set a course for what could be a record one-year total for any presidential campaign.
President Barack Obama’s campaign raised more than $70 million combined for his re-election and the Democratic Party during the summer, an amount that gives him a clear financial advantage over his Republican rivals even as faces economic and political headwinds.
The fundraising total announced Thursday exceeds a goal set by the campaign of $55 million combined for the July-September fundraising period but is about $16 million less than Obama raised during the April-June quarter.
Obama has dealt with declining poll numbers and a weakened economy during the summer, prompting the president to recently call himself the “underdog” in the presidential race. Campaign officials had said they would raise less because of canceled fundraisers during the summer’s debt ceiling negotiations and a typical summertime lull in raising cash.
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an e-mail to supporters that more than 600,000 people donated to the campaign in the most recent quarter, more than the previous three months. He said more than 980,000 people have given money to the campaign, and in the most recent quarter, 98 percent of the donors gave $250 or less, with an average donation of $56.
Thursday’s fundraising report brought the Obama campaign’s total cash haul for 2011 up to almost $90 million, a sum made all the more stunning considering that the Republicans have yet to select their nominee and the calendar has yet to hit 2012.
The money race is set to reach an even more frenetic pace for the president in the yearlong countdown to the November election. Obama amassed a then-record $750 million total during his first bid for the White House, shattering marks set for individual campaigns and surpassing the total raised by all candidates in the 2004 presidential race.
Obama’s financial goal for his 2012 reelection effort? Top the cash raised in his 2008 triumph, aiming for a 2012 total that would reach “just north” of $750 million and potentially flirting with a one billion dollar campaign. Such eye-popping figures will be met with the help of an army of Obama “bundlers,” influential supporters of the president tasked with raising at least $350,000 by the end of 2011.
As he prepares to formally launch his 2012 re-election effort, President Obama has settled on a massive fund-raising goal in his bid for a second term in the White House.
Per the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, has told top campaign donors the president plans to raise “just north” of $750 million for his 2012 re-election effort.
That figure is more than what Obama raised during the entire 2008 campaign and is a sure sign that the cost of the upcoming 2012 presidential election is likely to surpass $1 billion.
As The Ticket previously reported, Obama aides have already asked top Democratic donors to increase their giving for the 2012 campaign. While donors were asked to raise $250,000 during the entire 2008 effort, top supporters are now being pressed to raise at least $350,000 by the end of the year.
The 2012 cash goal offers further evidence that Obama, just as he did in 2008, is likely to forgo federal funding for his campaign so that he will have the ability to raise and spend as much as he wants without limits.
It’s possible that no single candidate could hope to match President Obama’s fundraising machine and the lofty goal of nearly $1 billion for the 2012 campaign. But the most important weapon in the Republican Party’s bid to unseat Obama is not a campaign war chest, but rather the host of “independent” organizations that came to prominence in the 2010 elections for their incredible ability to raise money and spend it lavishly on behalf of their favored candidates.
Two of the most well-known and prominent conservative independent groups have promised to influence the 2012 election by spending several times the amount of money they did in 2010. Their target is a combined sum of up to $440 million in cash, nearly all of it contributed by corporations and anonymous donors, to be used for their 2012 operations.
The billionaires and conservative financiers Charles and David Koch have set a goal of “steering” as much as $200 million to conservative candidates and organizations by the 2012 election.
As Politico reports, the Koch brothers have become so focused on expanding their successful 2010 money operation that they have run into conflict with similar groups more closely aligned with the establishment elite of the GOP, such as Karl Rove’s network.
Karl Rove’s team and the Koch brothers’ operatives quietly coordinated millions of dollars in political spending in 2010, but that alliance, which has flown largely under the radar, is showing signs of fraying.
And with each network planning to dwarf its 2010 effort, Republicans worry that the emerging rivalry between the two deepest-pocketed camps in the conservative movement could undercut their party’s chances of taking the Senate and White House in 2012.
The billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch plan to steer more than $200 million — potentially much more — to conservative groups ahead of Election Day, POLITICO has learned. That puts their libertarian-leaning network in the same league as the most active of the groups in the more establishment-oriented network conceived last year by veteran GOP operatives Rove and Ed Gillespie.
$200 million from the Koch brothers may be dwarfed by next November if Karl Rove’s “American Crossroads” organization attains its financial goals. The Rove network, made up of two affiliated groups that have boomed by taking advantage of the new campaign finance structure allowing for anonymous political contributions, has already doubled its fundraising goal for the 2012 contest.
The Crossroads group, which took in over $70 million in 2010, now says it will raise as much $240 million by election day next year.
American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have set a new fundraising goal at least twice the $120 million announced earlier this year.
The ambitious fundraising target by the two affiliated groups co-founded by GOP fundraiser extraordinaire Karl Rove reflects an increased optimism among Republicans that they could score a trifecta in 2012—taking both houses of Congress and the White House.
“We see a pathway to at least doubling our earlier projected goal,” Steven Law, the president of Crossroads, told iWatch News . “Everyone is going to stretch as far as they can here because we all feel this is the most important election we have ever been involved with.”
To help achieve its new goal, the two groups have been talking to some prominent GOP figures, notably Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. The former Republican National Committee chairman has agreed to lend his Midas like rolodex to the Crossroads efforts.
“Gov. Barbour’s involvement with us gives us the capacity to focus on the presidential race, the Senate and the House at the same time,” Law said.
Barbour, who leaves his Mississippi post in January, chaired the Republican Governors Association last year when it raised a record $117 million for the fall elections.
American Crossroads , a 527 which has to disclose its donors publicly, and Crossroads GPS , a 501 (c)(4) which can keep donors’ names secret, were created early last year by Rove, the political guru to ex-President George W. Bush, and Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee Chairman.
The groups were formed soon after the Supreme Court issued its historic ruling in January 2010 in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. That decision gave a green light to corporations, unions and individuals to spend unlimited sums on television ads and other electoral tools that directly advocate for or against a candidate.
Last year, the two groups together said they raised $71 million, of which $28 million went to the public arm American Crossroads.
One early estimate puts the projected final bill for the 2012 campaign at upwards of $6 billion, a fundraising record indicative of the new normal in campaign finance, a landscape forever changed by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling in January of last year.
Not content with that victory, conservative opponents of campaign finance law are gearing up for a new challenge; breaking down federal and state laws against direct contributions to candidates by corporations. It would take the anonymous donations funneled into outside groups like those run by the Kochs and Karl Rove and allow them to flow directly to individual candidates, removing what is the final, nearly transparent barrier between Corporate America and democracy.
The 2012 election is shaping up to be the most expensive ever, by a lot. Between congressional contests and the Presidential campaign, the 2008 race came in at about $5 billion. This go-round is on track to exceed $6 billion, thanks in large part to recent court decisions that relaxed limits on corporate and union spending. All that money sloshing around—much of it hard to trace to the giver—infuriates government accountability groups. But it absolutely delights the man most responsible for making it happen: James Bopp Jr.
Never heard of him? The 63-year-old proprietor of a small law firm in Terre Haute, Ind., Bopp is far from a household name. In Washington, though, he is revered by campaign fundraisers for his three-decade-long crusade to eliminate restrictions on political contributions, which Bopp, a conservative Republican, sees as a violation of free speech. It was Bopp who filed the initial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission lawsuit that ultimately led the Supreme Court to rule, in 2010, that corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts to support or oppose candidates as long as they didn’t give the money to the candidates themselves.
………..
His latest mission: challenging state and federal laws that bar corporations from donating directly to candidates. The way Bopp sees it, if companies can spend money to elect or defeat candidates, why shouldn’t they be allowed to donate directly to the politicians? “The only justification for contribution limits is the size of the contribution, not the contributor,” he says. The point of the First Amendment is “to ensure robust participation by citizens,” he adds. “If you want people of average means to participate, you have to protect groups,” including corporations owned by stockholders.
How come we always hear about the “rich” repubs, but Obama has a billion dollar campaign fund? If the rich are always being supported by repubs, why are so many rich people giving money to Obama?
Without a mass movement to really scare the hell out of the politicians and Supreme Court members who are in collusion and deep in the corruption of many times their salaries directly tied to their votes, we will never get any sort of reform like public financing and balanced media time.
They won’t kill their pet golden geese. They will never vote themselves down to regular citizen status when they have the insiders game of collusion and graft going so well.
Only a massive growth of an Occupy Wall street movement and public tribunals of politicians trying to defend their biggest open and secret contributors will alert us to how completely rotten and useless these betrayers are. How despising of basic democracy that serves the people that vote in good faith regardless of their position in the wealth universe.
corporations over individuals
Wall Street over Main Street
Tax cuts for the rich, tax hikes for the poor
This is what is wrong with America these days. No democracy can survive such an assault on its foundations for very long. This needs to be rolled back. A modern democracy needs a strong middle class and strong democratic institutions that represent all people.
Speech my be free in this country but the platforms used to reach the masses are not. How are we to allow the people to be heard when they are being drown but these organizations of immense wealth? Since we can not limited the content of speech, we shall control the money. Re distribute the wealth of these groups equally among candidates or publically fund these campaigns.
I am happily sending in my check to the president’s campaign, especially after watching the Republican debates.
I’ve voted Republican before, but as far as I’m concerned they’ve lost the middle. They need to return to their free market principles (which means no market-distorting tax incentives — the exact thing they’re arguing against in the debt-ceiling debate.)
Eliminating loopholes is not raising taxes, it’s collecting them.