Most of this year's presidential candidates are now backed by one or more dedicated so-called Super PACs, the political action committees that have proliferated since a 2010 Supreme Court ruling allowed independent groups to raise unlimited amounts to promote candidates. But the line between presidential candidates and the Super PACs has become increasingly blurry.
Unlike the broad-based independent groups backing multiple candidates that flooded last year's congressional elections with negative advertising, the new groups are each dedicated to the election of a single candidate.
The groups are typically founded by the candidates' former aides, financed by the candidates' top donors and implicitly blessed by the candidates themselves, setting off a fundraising arms race that is changing the way presidential campaigns are financed and executed.
Restore Our Future, a pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC, is run by three veterans of Romney's 2008 campaign team and has raised more than $12 million during the first half of the year - more than any actual Republican candidate except Romney himself. A pair of aides to President Barack Obama started Priorities USA, the leading Democratic Super PAC, just two months after they left their jobs at the White House in February. And two weeks ago, a onetime consultant to Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota took over Citizens for a Working America, a previously existing Super PAC, with plans to focus its mission solely on electing Bachmann president.
"There's not a big difference between these candidate-specific Super PACs and candidate campaign committees," said Paul S. Ryan, associate legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. "I think it's a joke. What they are doing is abiding by the very meager restrictions on coordinations on expenditures and solicitations."
But instead of using money raised in the $2,500 increments that federal law imposes on candidates, the Super PACs can accept donations of unlimited amounts.
And according to a study published last week by the Center for Responsive Politics, more than 80 percent of the money raised by all Republican-leaning Super PACs this year has come from just 35 donors.
Democratic-leaning Super PACs relied on an even smaller group, with more than 80 percent of contributions coming from just 23 donors.
"What took thousands of individual donations to make significant political advertisements in 2008 can now just take one phone call," said Spencer MacColl, the study's author.
