Washington -- With the 2012 election over and post-election financial reports filed, it can finally be declared that the most expensive U.S. Senate contest in the country was...well... maybe in Ohio.
But maybe not.
The Center for Responsive Politics puts Virginia’s race, pitting Democrat Tim Kaine against Republican George Allen, as the nation’s most expensive when all money is counted. That lagged only the election for the White House. Altogether, a whopping $88 million was spent on the Senate race in which two former Virginia governors ran, according to the nonpartisan center’s figures.
That, however, goes against the popular narrative that Ohio Democratic Senate incumbent Sherrod Brown faced an unprecedented number of attack ads, financed by an equally unprecedented sum of money. Many of the ads were not even run by Brown’s opponent, Republican state Treasurer Josh Mandel.
Rather, Brown was targeted with a multi-million-dollar onslaught of ads sponsored by outside groups, many linked to Republicans and business interests such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. They said Brown’s positions were too liberal and hurt Ohio, while Brown countered that he stood up for the middle class and against oil companies and Wall Street
The Center for Responsive Politics, a respected research group, has total outside spending against Brown or for Mandel -- one and the same thing, political operatives say -- at $24.1 million. That trails the $31 million in outside money spent to oppose Kaine or help his opponent, according to the center’s figures.
Outside groups including labor unions spent heavily to knock Mandel, too -- at least $16.98 million -- but did not match the anti-Brown effort. Add to these sums the $24 million Brown’s own campaign spent on operations, including advertising, and the $18.7 million that Mandel’s campaign spent on its own, and the tab comes to $84.15 million for the Ohio race. It trails Virginia’s total by $4 million.
The figures are wrong, says the Brown camp.
Justin Barasky, who was Brown’s campaign communications director, counted $31 million in television and radio ads alone from the outside groups that were legally independent of Mandel but, like Mandel, were trying to oust Brown. Barasky provided a group-by-group breakdown of the spending. Millions more were spent by groups like National Right to Life, the National Federation of Independent Businesses and others on literature, billboards, yard signs, polling and staff to work against Brown’s reelection, Barasky said.
“I think without a doubt we were” the biggest in terms of money spent against a Senate candidate, said Barasky, who now works for the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. If it could all be tracked and its value assessed, Barasky said late last week, the money spent by outside groups against Brown would add up to around $40 million, not $24 million.
Barasky could be right. The problem is that no one knows, because some of the expenditures cannot be tracked or counted, especially by people not plugged in day by day during the campaign. The Center for Responsive Politics and another respected watchdog that tries to follow the money, the Sunlight Foundation, acknowledge this. Sunlight has a lower figure for the outside spending, too.
“Our total was the most accurate we could get” within the current regulatory climate, explained Robert Maguire, a researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics. The problem, he and others said, is caused by loopholes in election laws.
Federal campaign finance laws require that money be accounted for and disclosed in public reports if it is raised or spent by candidates, political parties and certain political action committees. But outside interest groups, corporations and nonprofit organizations can bypass some of these rules, sometimes organizing as tax-exempt social welfare groups regulated by the IRS rather than the Federal Election Commission.
Under certain circumstances, these groups are accountable under FEC reporting requirements. But there are enough exceptions to frustrate government watchdogs and others who believe the public ought to know who is in the shadows trying to help or defeat a candidate. Brown wants Congress to demand more disclosure of these groups, clarify tax-exempt rules and require a shareholder vote when corporate money goes to shape elections.
By why are Barasky’s figures for the money spent against Brown so much higher than the watchdogs’?
Barasky got many of his figures from a source that few watchdog groups have access to: campaign consultants who dealt with every TV and radio station in Ohio and tracked every ad, whether for or against Brown or Mandel. Political media buyers deal with the stations so often that they can get real-time intelligence on who is launching or airing a commercial and the cost.
Under Federal Communications Commission rules, stations must disclose this information for political ads -- even if an ad sponsor is exempt from the separate FEC disclosure rules -- but few people have the resources to track each ad buy closely. TV stations in the nation’s largest television markets including Cleveland must make the information available online, but that excludes Ohio’s midsize and small markets, which have until 2014 to comply. Getting information at this level can be “a daunting task,” Barasky said.
Yet for all those millions spent to shape these elections, regardless of their rank, here is what happened: Brown won. So did Kaine in Virginia. And in another big-money state, Wisconsin, Democrat Tammy Baldwin won, too, despite the deeper finances of her opponent, Tommy Thompson. Both sides in that race had more than $22 million in outside spending for and against them, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. If accurate, that would mean total outside spending in the Baldwin-Thompson race (excluding the sums the candidates controlled) exceeded that of the Brown-Mandel race.
What, then, is the big deal?
Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group trying to remove the influence of big money in politics, said the problem can’t be measured by who won or lost. The problem, he said, is that there is “a small group of overwhelmingly wealthy individuals who play a disproportionate role in elections.” Money in politics gives donors access to the lawmakers who shape policy and write bills. If it didn’t, watchdogs say, lobbyists and their clients wouldn’t contribute so heavily.
This also creates “an arms race in individual elections that forces candidates to spend extraordinary amounts of time raising money,” Wertheimer said.
Brown agreed, saying the money has “a corrosive and insidious effect on democracy.”
Throughout 2012, groups opposing Brown including Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said their goal was merely to elect more lawmakers who might favor fewer burdensome regulations, lower taxes and a better climate for job creation. Brown countered that they were protecting wealthy and corporate interests.
Yet despite these differences, the Ohio Democrat might actually give them hope. Against an avalanche of outside money, Brown beat Mandel, a candidate with limited experience, by 6 percentage points -- half the margin of Brown’s previous election victory.
In discussing his race’s outcome and the amounts spent against him and other Democrats, he said, “It didn’t work this time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work in the future when you spend that much money.”