Republican Superpacs Collected large piles of free money from Rich Donors. Thanks for the Free Cash!
The Continuing Super PAC Disaster
The schadenfreude rolls off the screen in this Julie Bykowicz story. Revolution PAC, ostensibly formed to help out Ron Paul's campaign, spent $1 million of its $1.2 million kitty on payouts to staff and advertisers. The chief of Winning Our Future, the Adelson-backed Super PAC working for Newt Gingrich, made $480,000 for her troubles.
This gets at a controversy that has burned on the right since election day: How did we spend so much money, and lose? RedState.com's Erick Erickson has been filing story after story on the gap, each time blaming the relationships and economic arrangements that enrich consultants. This of a piece with my story from today, about the skinny jeans'd liberal nerds who ran the data and turnout operations that won the election. They could rely on a few data banks to get them started. Not the GOP. They had Voter Gravity, a new and moldable database, but the Super PACs' campaigns didn't make use of that.
See, my rich friends, you think you are in charge. But go ask your Super PAC friends where the data is. Tell them you want the data. More importantly, ask them how they did the layers for the data. Did they layer consumer information on top of voter data or the opposite? Surprisingly, you can get completely different results putting voter data on top of consumer data, instead of adding consumer data to a known, quantifiable pool of voters. The latter is more accurate, saves time, and is what the Obama team did that the GOP largely did not do. It is what the Democrats did with their Catalist program.
The Super PACs weren't much less sophisticated in 2010, but there was no comparable outrage, because they won. They lost this time. The
scouring and schadenfreude will continue for months, likely with some reported, crowdsourced info about the scammiest operations.
Post-Campaign Super-PAC Cash Still Flowing to Consultants
More than five months after Newt Gingrich dropped out of the Republican presidential primary, the founder of the super-political action committee backing him was still drawing a check.
In fact, almost half of the $480,000 Rebecca Burkett paid herself as founder of Winning Our Future came after the former House speaker quit
the race.
“It was absolutely full-time work and beyond -- up to 17 hours of work a day,” Burkett said in an interview. “You never knew what kinds of calls you would get, and you had to be ready to respond to anything.”
While the 2012 election is over, the financial windfall for political consultants and fundraisers spawned by the millions of dollars donated to super-PACs continues -- and often with little oversight.
Entrepreneurs who set up super-PACs wrote their own paychecks. The new groups sometimes moved as much money into the pockets of employees as they did into races. And some showed evidence of self-dealing.
One example: Revolution PAC raised $1.2 million by pitching itself as a booster for Texas Representative Ron Paul’s run for president. Under the direction of Gary Franchi, the group spent $1 million, 83 percent of its cash, on administrative expenses, including about $153,000 for himself and his companies. A $1,766 monthly fee for “office rent” went to a Franchi company whose address is a mailbox at a Northbrook, Illinois, UPS Store. Franchi said in an interview there is a physical location for the companies, declining to give its address “for privacy reasons.”
‘Fuzzy’ Spending
“Political spending is a fuzzy kind of magical thing,” said Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that follows campaign finances. “It’s usually not obviously fraudulent. But you have some cases where a group is spending money to raise money to spend money. It’s a churn, and sometimes there’s no ‘there’ there.”
A super-PAC is an organization that can take unlimited sums of money to advocate for a candidate; it can’t coordinate its activities with the
campaign it supports. The groups have exploded since a pair of 2010 federal court decisions helped pave the way for them. The 782 registered super-PACs spent about $537.6 million through Oct. 17 -- a more than 10-fold increase from the 2010 elections, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
About $88.6 million of that went into operating expenses such as salaries, rent, consultants, fundraisers and travel, FEC data provided to Bloomberg News show. On average, super-PACs spent 16 percent of their money on operations.
Overhead Only
The groups are defined by the FEC as “independent expenditure” committees, yet 167 of them spent everything they raised on overhead and nothing on ads or mailings advocating for candidates, the data show.
Two more reports, including one due this week, will tally the rest of this election’s super-PAC spending.
Consultants and fundraisers racked up at least $21 million, based on the disbursements clearly labeled as “consulting,” “commission,” “fundraising fees” or “donor development,” the data show. The FEC has few requirements defining how a super-PAC identifies expenses.
The super-PACs that generated the most fundraising often paid consultants and employees six-figure salaries -- regardless of how the election turned out for the candidates they supported.
Thirteenth Paycheck
On Oct. 8, 159 days after Gingrich ended his presidential run, Burkett received her 13th paycheck, for $20,000, from Winning Our Future for her work as its executive director and chief fundraiser.
The super-PAC hadn’t raised any money since the end of March. Still, Burkett, who lives outside of Atlanta, said her work didn’t end with the
candidate’s departure.
“We continued to take calls from lots of people who were upset that he got out, we continued to monitor the presidential race,” Burkett said in an interview. “There was lots to do.”
Burkett was paid partly on commission, a common arrangement for a fundraiser. She hit the jackpot after landing Las Vegas casino
billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whom she’d met raising money for another Gingrich-related group, as a super-PAC donor. About 84 percent of the $23.9 million Winning Our Future raised came from Adelson and his wife, Miriam.
Burkett approved the payments to herself, she said, with input from a board of directors; she declined to name any of the board members. Winning Our Future’s website doesn’t list a board, and the FEC doesn’t require super-PACs to maintain one.
Ron Reese, a spokesman for Adelson, declined to comment in an e-mail.
Presidential PACS
The three largest super-PACs, Restore Our Future, American Crossroads and Priorities USA Action, spent proportionally less on operating expenses than the average of all super-PACs -- a point they may use to market themselves to future donors, said David Larcker, a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
“There’s an issue of scale at play here,” Larcker said. “To some extent, there are the same start-up costs for everyone. But you would expect the bigger groups to be able to get better deals than the smaller ones.”
Restore Our Future, which backed Romney, spent $7.8 million of the $131.6 million it raised on administrative costs.
“Restore Our Future had sophisticated and generous donors who expected us to be efficient and effective with their contributions,” said Charles Spies, the super-PAC’s treasurer. “We felt a duty to them to keep our overhead as low as possible and deploy their resources into direct election activity.”
Romney Backers
Restore was co-founded by Carl Forti, who was an aide to Romney during his 2008 presidential run. Restore paid about $45,000 to Forti’s Black Rock Group. The Alexandria, Virginia- based group also collected $132,427 in consulting fees from American Crossroads, a super-PAC formed with guidance from Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. Forti served as a political strategist to Crossroads, which backed Republican candidates.
Priorities USA Action, which supported Obama, put $7.6 million into salaries and other administrative expenses as it raised more than $63 million.
Paul Begala, a Priorities strategist and former aide to President Bill Clinton, was paid about $400,000 since May 2011 as a communications consultant. He also was reimbursed for about $20,000 in travel.
Obama Consultant
“I dropped my other political consulting work and focused all my political time on Priorities,” Begala said in an e-mail. “I’m glad I did. With a
comparatively small budget and low overhead, we made a crucial difference in the presidential election.”
The presidential candidacy of Paul inspired the formation of several super-PACs, and some of them invested little in politics while spending large sums on overhead.
Revolution PAC raised more than $1.2 million and spent just $172,000 on independent expenditures to help him. Steering the group’s $1 million in administrative spending was Franchi, Revolution’s founder.
Franchi paid himself $38,000 in management fees and fundraising commissions. The super-PAC gave more than $60,000 to One
Touch Media and about $53,000 to Restore the Republic --also owned by Franchi, according to Illinois corporate filings.
Revolution PAC was $63,375 in debt as of the end of September. In August, Washington-based campaign finance attorney Dan Backer took over the group’s FEC paperwork.
Franchi Out
Backer said in an interview that Franchi is no longer involved. “Like many grassroots people, Gary was very enthusiastic about the cause but didn’t have the background to run a business or large organization,” Backer said.
“With super-PACs, a lot of people were getting paid what is probably not the optimal rate. We’re looking at how we can become more effective in that area,” he added.
Franchi said he was “actually impressed” with what his super-PAC accomplished. He left the group to focus on his other companies, which provide social media services, he said.
PayPal founder Peter Thiel was the super-PAC’s top monetary backer, contributing $85,000. Thiel also gave $2.6 million to a different pro-Paul super-PAC, Endorse Liberty, late last year. Thiel declined to comment through spokesman Jeremiah Hall.
“It’s really a donor-beware situation,” said Biersack, who was employed by the FEC for more than 30 years. “It’s up to donors to ask for a business plan and to understand what they’re investing in.”
Ways to reassure donors: Develop a clearly defined mission, hire capable staff and install an active board of directors, said Fred Malek, a Republican fundraiser who works with the Congressional Leadership Fund super-PAC, which raised about $10 million for 2012 and spent less than $500,000 on administrative costs.
“A super-PAC can do what they want with the money if they can raise it,” Malek said in an interview. “But there is with many of them a lack of accountability. Donors need to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones.”
A Primer for Rich Donors Who Got Taken to the Cleaners by Republican Consultants
When consultants told rich donors who were funding them that they were not making money off the Super PAC’s that the rich idiots . . . er . . . donors funded, they were being honest. They probably were not.
But ad heavy Super PACs outsourced the ad buys, the mail, the data collection, etc. to other groups that got commissions and you can be
sure that a lot of these supposedly noble consultants working for free were making a killing off of commissions, referral fees, etc. through
their relationships with the commissioned vendors doing the actual work. Read this old post of mine for a sampling of how these consultants can make money without actually making money.
Just as important as making money for these guys was control over the data. In fact, in singular importance this campaign season has been the buzz word “data.” But what the hell is that data and why is it so important?
Well, for starters, let me fill you in on one piece of technology that flew under the radar this season. It is called Gravity and it is probably the only major piece of campaign technology to come out of 2012 with a proven track record. About the only major donor on the right to have come into contact with it was Joe Ricketts. And Ricketts only came into contact with it because he was smart enough to direct Ending Spending, his group, to work with existing, small groups on the ground. About the only major group to use it was FreedomWorks, which, unlike a lot of other big groups on the right, decided not to go proprietary, but to go for winning at all costs. [See update in the next paragraph
regarding Heritage Action for America]
It was the existing small groups like American Majority Action and the Madison Project using Gravity primarily and those groups were instrumental in its creation. With the exception of FreedomWorks, virtually everybody else went out to build their own thing. In fact, several of the very well known consultants as seen on TV and others you never see did their best to kill Gravity, stop it from being built, and convince donors who came into contact with it to defund the groups or pressure those groups to move away from Gravity. [UPDATE: I'm told Heritage Action for America joined FreedomWorks as two of the only major groups to use Gravity.]
Gravity, in fact, explains a lot about how the donors got so screwed in much the same way the RNC screwed itself with Voter Vault.
To understand Gravity, you rich donors need a basic primer. You may think you know this stuff, but I bet you really don’t. Let me break it
down for you.
Of the 100% of Americans who exist, about 66% are eligible to vote. These are all rough estimates.
40% are actually registered to vote.
25% of the total American population will probably, actually go vote.
Therefore, a candidate needs 13% of the population to win.
But, and this is a big but, of the 25% of the population that can and does vote, 9% will vote straight Democrat usually and 8% will vote
straight Republican.
That leaves 8% left.
2% of that 8% of people will be single issue voters. Of that 2%, most of the single issue voters will tilt slightly to the GOP on issues
of guns or abortion, but there are also single issue pro-choice voters, single issue anti-gun voters, single issue gay rights voters, etc.
That all leaves 6% of the population. In other words, to win an election, a candidate must really get 4% of the population to support him because that is the majority of the undecided 6%. A Republican must get a bit more, but then can draw from single issue voters a bit more than Democrats.
Those percentages are the foundation of the data. But the data is more complicated than that.
To win a campaign, a campaign must win a state or a lesser division of a state.
Each state is broken down into congressional districts. Each congressional district covers parts or all of counties or, in Louisiana, parishes. Each county is further divided in precincts. Each precinct is divided into census tracts.
A campaign can determine a pretty solid estimate of how many votes it needs to win by going down to the precinct of each county in America.
Every precinct has a “dead dog” race that defines who the yellow dog Democrats are and who the pure Republicans are. These are the voters for either side who will vote for the dead dog over someone in the other party. A great example of this would be Angela E. Speir in Georgia.
Ms. Speir ran for the Georgia Public Service Commission as a Republican in 2002, when Democrats still controlled Georgia. She spent roughly $7,000.00 for this statewide office and won. For a long time, her race was the dead dog race. If someone wanted to see what a generic Republican and a generic Democrat would get in a particular precinct, her race was the one to establish that number given it was a statewide race in which she had no name ID and spent less than $10,000.00.
Find that number in each precinct for each party and that is the base number each side needs in a district.
Now, take a comparable race to the one you are running. Let’s say the 2008 Presidential race for the 2012 Presidential race.
First, population will have to be adjusted based on population growth or decline in registered voters in a precinct. Then start with the dead dog election numbers as a base of support and see how many votes Barack Obama and John McCain got in the precinct compared to that dead dog election. The variance from the dead dog election gets the margin of persuadable voters for 2012.
If, for example, the dead dog election established that 5,000 voters will always vote Democrat no matter what and Barack Obama got 8,000 votes in the precinct, then there are probably 3,000 persuadable voters in 2012.
Factor in new voters in the precinct whose voting history is not known, newly registered voters, etc. and suddenly you have a number.
That number is the number of persuadable voters in the district beyond the base of the party you are working with. Those are the people
volunteers must reach out to.
But how to reach out to them?
Well, one great way to start is consumer information. Does the person subscribe to Field & Streams? If so, probably an outdoorsman. Check NRA memberships. If both line up, you probably have a persuadable who leans GOP. The same works on the other side.
Take the voter data, lay consumer data and direct voter contact information on top, and suddenly the job of winning a campaign becomes very manageable. There is a defined, quantifiable list of voters to reach out to, keep up with, and track toward Election Day. More importantly, you will know what issues will resonate best with that persuadable voter.
That, my rich friends, is the data.
And every damn thing you fund should be targeted at collecting that data.
That is what Gravity did and does. That is why so many rich Republican consultants tried and are trying still to kill it. Why?
Because the folks behind Gravity chose not to control the data.
All the consultants want to control the data. That is where they make the money. If they control the data, they are in charge. Again, go read this from January of 2009.
See, my rich friends, you think you are in charge. But go ask your Super PAC friends where the data is. Tell them you want the data. More importantly, ask them how they did the layers for the data. Did they layer consumer information on top of voter data or the opposite?
Surprisingly, you can get completely different results putting voter data on top of consumer data, instead of adding consumer data to a
known, quantifiable pool of voters. The latter is more accurate, saves time, and is what the Obama team did that the GOP largely did not do.
It is what the Democrats did with their Catalist program.
Instead, you rich donors funded a bunch of Super PACs that spent a lot of money on ads, making killer commissions for the ad guys, did a lot of mail that made killer commissions for the mail guys, and did a lot of technology smoke and mirror baloney that made you feel like you were reaching persuadable, when really you were peeing money down a rat hole.
You got played.
Now I’ve just explained how to do real voter outreach to you. Now I’ve explained what the real data is and why it is so valuable. There are groups out there like Gravity doing this with smart donors and giving it to Tea Party groups so everyone can use the data, instead of setting up some consultant to be the king maker and power broker.
So rich guy, you want to win or you want to be the gate keeper?
Right now, you are a gate keeper and you aren’t even keeping your money. Time to do better. Time to understand what the data is and that you want it collected, but not hordes if you want to win.
I don’t make a penny off Gravity, have no business relationship to anyone affiliated with Gravity, but I know the guys involved and I know they did it right, I know it worked well, and I know many of the very same consultants you rich guys funded tried to kill Gravity because it would end the consultants’ monopoly on the real data.
The schadenfreude rolls off the screen in this Julie Bykowicz story. Revolution PAC, ostensibly formed to help out Ron Paul's campaign, spent $1 million of its $1.2 million kitty on payouts to staff and advertisers. The chief of Winning Our Future, the Adelson-backed Super PAC working for Newt Gingrich, made $480,000 for her troubles.
This gets at a controversy that has burned on the right since election day: How did we spend so much money, and lose? RedState.com's Erick Erickson has been filing story after story on the gap, each time blaming the relationships and economic arrangements that enrich consultants. This of a piece with my story from today, about the skinny jeans'd liberal nerds who ran the data and turnout operations that won the election. They could rely on a few data banks to get them started. Not the GOP. They had Voter Gravity, a new and moldable database, but the Super PACs' campaigns didn't make use of that.
See, my rich friends, you think you are in charge. But go ask your Super PAC friends where the data is. Tell them you want the data. More importantly, ask them how they did the layers for the data. Did they layer consumer information on top of voter data or the opposite? Surprisingly, you can get completely different results putting voter data on top of consumer data, instead of adding consumer data to a known, quantifiable pool of voters. The latter is more accurate, saves time, and is what the Obama team did that the GOP largely did not do. It is what the Democrats did with their Catalist program.
The Super PACs weren't much less sophisticated in 2010, but there was no comparable outrage, because they won. They lost this time. The
scouring and schadenfreude will continue for months, likely with some reported, crowdsourced info about the scammiest operations.
Post-Campaign Super-PAC Cash Still Flowing to Consultants
More than five months after Newt Gingrich dropped out of the Republican presidential primary, the founder of the super-political action committee backing him was still drawing a check.
In fact, almost half of the $480,000 Rebecca Burkett paid herself as founder of Winning Our Future came after the former House speaker quit
the race.
“It was absolutely full-time work and beyond -- up to 17 hours of work a day,” Burkett said in an interview. “You never knew what kinds of calls you would get, and you had to be ready to respond to anything.”
While the 2012 election is over, the financial windfall for political consultants and fundraisers spawned by the millions of dollars donated to super-PACs continues -- and often with little oversight.
Entrepreneurs who set up super-PACs wrote their own paychecks. The new groups sometimes moved as much money into the pockets of employees as they did into races. And some showed evidence of self-dealing.
One example: Revolution PAC raised $1.2 million by pitching itself as a booster for Texas Representative Ron Paul’s run for president. Under the direction of Gary Franchi, the group spent $1 million, 83 percent of its cash, on administrative expenses, including about $153,000 for himself and his companies. A $1,766 monthly fee for “office rent” went to a Franchi company whose address is a mailbox at a Northbrook, Illinois, UPS Store. Franchi said in an interview there is a physical location for the companies, declining to give its address “for privacy reasons.”
‘Fuzzy’ Spending
“Political spending is a fuzzy kind of magical thing,” said Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that follows campaign finances. “It’s usually not obviously fraudulent. But you have some cases where a group is spending money to raise money to spend money. It’s a churn, and sometimes there’s no ‘there’ there.”
A super-PAC is an organization that can take unlimited sums of money to advocate for a candidate; it can’t coordinate its activities with the
campaign it supports. The groups have exploded since a pair of 2010 federal court decisions helped pave the way for them. The 782 registered super-PACs spent about $537.6 million through Oct. 17 -- a more than 10-fold increase from the 2010 elections, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
About $88.6 million of that went into operating expenses such as salaries, rent, consultants, fundraisers and travel, FEC data provided to Bloomberg News show. On average, super-PACs spent 16 percent of their money on operations.
Overhead Only
The groups are defined by the FEC as “independent expenditure” committees, yet 167 of them spent everything they raised on overhead and nothing on ads or mailings advocating for candidates, the data show.
Two more reports, including one due this week, will tally the rest of this election’s super-PAC spending.
Consultants and fundraisers racked up at least $21 million, based on the disbursements clearly labeled as “consulting,” “commission,” “fundraising fees” or “donor development,” the data show. The FEC has few requirements defining how a super-PAC identifies expenses.
The super-PACs that generated the most fundraising often paid consultants and employees six-figure salaries -- regardless of how the election turned out for the candidates they supported.
Thirteenth Paycheck
On Oct. 8, 159 days after Gingrich ended his presidential run, Burkett received her 13th paycheck, for $20,000, from Winning Our Future for her work as its executive director and chief fundraiser.
The super-PAC hadn’t raised any money since the end of March. Still, Burkett, who lives outside of Atlanta, said her work didn’t end with the
candidate’s departure.
“We continued to take calls from lots of people who were upset that he got out, we continued to monitor the presidential race,” Burkett said in an interview. “There was lots to do.”
Burkett was paid partly on commission, a common arrangement for a fundraiser. She hit the jackpot after landing Las Vegas casino
billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whom she’d met raising money for another Gingrich-related group, as a super-PAC donor. About 84 percent of the $23.9 million Winning Our Future raised came from Adelson and his wife, Miriam.
Burkett approved the payments to herself, she said, with input from a board of directors; she declined to name any of the board members. Winning Our Future’s website doesn’t list a board, and the FEC doesn’t require super-PACs to maintain one.
Ron Reese, a spokesman for Adelson, declined to comment in an e-mail.
Presidential PACS
The three largest super-PACs, Restore Our Future, American Crossroads and Priorities USA Action, spent proportionally less on operating expenses than the average of all super-PACs -- a point they may use to market themselves to future donors, said David Larcker, a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
“There’s an issue of scale at play here,” Larcker said. “To some extent, there are the same start-up costs for everyone. But you would expect the bigger groups to be able to get better deals than the smaller ones.”
Restore Our Future, which backed Romney, spent $7.8 million of the $131.6 million it raised on administrative costs.
“Restore Our Future had sophisticated and generous donors who expected us to be efficient and effective with their contributions,” said Charles Spies, the super-PAC’s treasurer. “We felt a duty to them to keep our overhead as low as possible and deploy their resources into direct election activity.”
Romney Backers
Restore was co-founded by Carl Forti, who was an aide to Romney during his 2008 presidential run. Restore paid about $45,000 to Forti’s Black Rock Group. The Alexandria, Virginia- based group also collected $132,427 in consulting fees from American Crossroads, a super-PAC formed with guidance from Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. Forti served as a political strategist to Crossroads, which backed Republican candidates.
Priorities USA Action, which supported Obama, put $7.6 million into salaries and other administrative expenses as it raised more than $63 million.
Paul Begala, a Priorities strategist and former aide to President Bill Clinton, was paid about $400,000 since May 2011 as a communications consultant. He also was reimbursed for about $20,000 in travel.
Obama Consultant
“I dropped my other political consulting work and focused all my political time on Priorities,” Begala said in an e-mail. “I’m glad I did. With a
comparatively small budget and low overhead, we made a crucial difference in the presidential election.”
The presidential candidacy of Paul inspired the formation of several super-PACs, and some of them invested little in politics while spending large sums on overhead.
Revolution PAC raised more than $1.2 million and spent just $172,000 on independent expenditures to help him. Steering the group’s $1 million in administrative spending was Franchi, Revolution’s founder.
Franchi paid himself $38,000 in management fees and fundraising commissions. The super-PAC gave more than $60,000 to One
Touch Media and about $53,000 to Restore the Republic --also owned by Franchi, according to Illinois corporate filings.
Revolution PAC was $63,375 in debt as of the end of September. In August, Washington-based campaign finance attorney Dan Backer took over the group’s FEC paperwork.
Franchi Out
Backer said in an interview that Franchi is no longer involved. “Like many grassroots people, Gary was very enthusiastic about the cause but didn’t have the background to run a business or large organization,” Backer said.
“With super-PACs, a lot of people were getting paid what is probably not the optimal rate. We’re looking at how we can become more effective in that area,” he added.
Franchi said he was “actually impressed” with what his super-PAC accomplished. He left the group to focus on his other companies, which provide social media services, he said.
PayPal founder Peter Thiel was the super-PAC’s top monetary backer, contributing $85,000. Thiel also gave $2.6 million to a different pro-Paul super-PAC, Endorse Liberty, late last year. Thiel declined to comment through spokesman Jeremiah Hall.
“It’s really a donor-beware situation,” said Biersack, who was employed by the FEC for more than 30 years. “It’s up to donors to ask for a business plan and to understand what they’re investing in.”
Ways to reassure donors: Develop a clearly defined mission, hire capable staff and install an active board of directors, said Fred Malek, a Republican fundraiser who works with the Congressional Leadership Fund super-PAC, which raised about $10 million for 2012 and spent less than $500,000 on administrative costs.
“A super-PAC can do what they want with the money if they can raise it,” Malek said in an interview. “But there is with many of them a lack of accountability. Donors need to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones.”
A Primer for Rich Donors Who Got Taken to the Cleaners by Republican Consultants
When consultants told rich donors who were funding them that they were not making money off the Super PAC’s that the rich idiots . . . er . . . donors funded, they were being honest. They probably were not.
But ad heavy Super PACs outsourced the ad buys, the mail, the data collection, etc. to other groups that got commissions and you can be
sure that a lot of these supposedly noble consultants working for free were making a killing off of commissions, referral fees, etc. through
their relationships with the commissioned vendors doing the actual work. Read this old post of mine for a sampling of how these consultants can make money without actually making money.
Just as important as making money for these guys was control over the data. In fact, in singular importance this campaign season has been the buzz word “data.” But what the hell is that data and why is it so important?
Well, for starters, let me fill you in on one piece of technology that flew under the radar this season. It is called Gravity and it is probably the only major piece of campaign technology to come out of 2012 with a proven track record. About the only major donor on the right to have come into contact with it was Joe Ricketts. And Ricketts only came into contact with it because he was smart enough to direct Ending Spending, his group, to work with existing, small groups on the ground. About the only major group to use it was FreedomWorks, which, unlike a lot of other big groups on the right, decided not to go proprietary, but to go for winning at all costs. [See update in the next paragraph
regarding Heritage Action for America]
It was the existing small groups like American Majority Action and the Madison Project using Gravity primarily and those groups were instrumental in its creation. With the exception of FreedomWorks, virtually everybody else went out to build their own thing. In fact, several of the very well known consultants as seen on TV and others you never see did their best to kill Gravity, stop it from being built, and convince donors who came into contact with it to defund the groups or pressure those groups to move away from Gravity. [UPDATE: I'm told Heritage Action for America joined FreedomWorks as two of the only major groups to use Gravity.]
Gravity, in fact, explains a lot about how the donors got so screwed in much the same way the RNC screwed itself with Voter Vault.
To understand Gravity, you rich donors need a basic primer. You may think you know this stuff, but I bet you really don’t. Let me break it
down for you.
Of the 100% of Americans who exist, about 66% are eligible to vote. These are all rough estimates.
40% are actually registered to vote.
25% of the total American population will probably, actually go vote.
Therefore, a candidate needs 13% of the population to win.
But, and this is a big but, of the 25% of the population that can and does vote, 9% will vote straight Democrat usually and 8% will vote
straight Republican.
That leaves 8% left.
2% of that 8% of people will be single issue voters. Of that 2%, most of the single issue voters will tilt slightly to the GOP on issues
of guns or abortion, but there are also single issue pro-choice voters, single issue anti-gun voters, single issue gay rights voters, etc.
That all leaves 6% of the population. In other words, to win an election, a candidate must really get 4% of the population to support him because that is the majority of the undecided 6%. A Republican must get a bit more, but then can draw from single issue voters a bit more than Democrats.
Those percentages are the foundation of the data. But the data is more complicated than that.
To win a campaign, a campaign must win a state or a lesser division of a state.
Each state is broken down into congressional districts. Each congressional district covers parts or all of counties or, in Louisiana, parishes. Each county is further divided in precincts. Each precinct is divided into census tracts.
A campaign can determine a pretty solid estimate of how many votes it needs to win by going down to the precinct of each county in America.
Every precinct has a “dead dog” race that defines who the yellow dog Democrats are and who the pure Republicans are. These are the voters for either side who will vote for the dead dog over someone in the other party. A great example of this would be Angela E. Speir in Georgia.
Ms. Speir ran for the Georgia Public Service Commission as a Republican in 2002, when Democrats still controlled Georgia. She spent roughly $7,000.00 for this statewide office and won. For a long time, her race was the dead dog race. If someone wanted to see what a generic Republican and a generic Democrat would get in a particular precinct, her race was the one to establish that number given it was a statewide race in which she had no name ID and spent less than $10,000.00.
Find that number in each precinct for each party and that is the base number each side needs in a district.
Now, take a comparable race to the one you are running. Let’s say the 2008 Presidential race for the 2012 Presidential race.
First, population will have to be adjusted based on population growth or decline in registered voters in a precinct. Then start with the dead dog election numbers as a base of support and see how many votes Barack Obama and John McCain got in the precinct compared to that dead dog election. The variance from the dead dog election gets the margin of persuadable voters for 2012.
If, for example, the dead dog election established that 5,000 voters will always vote Democrat no matter what and Barack Obama got 8,000 votes in the precinct, then there are probably 3,000 persuadable voters in 2012.
Factor in new voters in the precinct whose voting history is not known, newly registered voters, etc. and suddenly you have a number.
That number is the number of persuadable voters in the district beyond the base of the party you are working with. Those are the people
volunteers must reach out to.
But how to reach out to them?
Well, one great way to start is consumer information. Does the person subscribe to Field & Streams? If so, probably an outdoorsman. Check NRA memberships. If both line up, you probably have a persuadable who leans GOP. The same works on the other side.
Take the voter data, lay consumer data and direct voter contact information on top, and suddenly the job of winning a campaign becomes very manageable. There is a defined, quantifiable list of voters to reach out to, keep up with, and track toward Election Day. More importantly, you will know what issues will resonate best with that persuadable voter.
That, my rich friends, is the data.
And every damn thing you fund should be targeted at collecting that data.
That is what Gravity did and does. That is why so many rich Republican consultants tried and are trying still to kill it. Why?
Because the folks behind Gravity chose not to control the data.
All the consultants want to control the data. That is where they make the money. If they control the data, they are in charge. Again, go read this from January of 2009.
See, my rich friends, you think you are in charge. But go ask your Super PAC friends where the data is. Tell them you want the data. More importantly, ask them how they did the layers for the data. Did they layer consumer information on top of voter data or the opposite?
Surprisingly, you can get completely different results putting voter data on top of consumer data, instead of adding consumer data to a
known, quantifiable pool of voters. The latter is more accurate, saves time, and is what the Obama team did that the GOP largely did not do.
It is what the Democrats did with their Catalist program.
Instead, you rich donors funded a bunch of Super PACs that spent a lot of money on ads, making killer commissions for the ad guys, did a lot of mail that made killer commissions for the mail guys, and did a lot of technology smoke and mirror baloney that made you feel like you were reaching persuadable, when really you were peeing money down a rat hole.
You got played.
Now I’ve just explained how to do real voter outreach to you. Now I’ve explained what the real data is and why it is so valuable. There are groups out there like Gravity doing this with smart donors and giving it to Tea Party groups so everyone can use the data, instead of setting up some consultant to be the king maker and power broker.
So rich guy, you want to win or you want to be the gate keeper?
Right now, you are a gate keeper and you aren’t even keeping your money. Time to do better. Time to understand what the data is and that you want it collected, but not hordes if you want to win.
I don’t make a penny off Gravity, have no business relationship to anyone affiliated with Gravity, but I know the guys involved and I know they did it right, I know it worked well, and I know many of the very same consultants you rich guys funded tried to kill Gravity because it would end the consultants’ monopoly on the real data.