Conservative groups dominate ad buys in Roanoke market
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are spending large sums of money on television ads to influence voters in the battleground state of Virginia. So are Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican George Allen, the two candidates running for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat.
But the candidates and political parties are just partly responsible for the tidal wave of ads flooding the airwaves in this big election season. Outside political and interest groups have bought $37 million worth of television advertising time in state’s top four media markets, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project. About half of the money has been spent by groups that don’t have to disclose their donors to the public.
In the Roanoke-Lynchburg television market, conservative groups are dominating the airwaves. According to VPAP, 85 percent of the ad spending by outside groups has come from conservative interests, which have poured nearly $5.6 million into the regional market.
More than half of that total has come from conservative super PAC American Crossroads and a spinoff group, Crossroads GPS. Both have ties to Republican strategist Karl Rove, a key adviser to former President George W. Bush. Crossroads GPS, which does not have to disclose its donors, has committed $2.4 million to the Roanoke market and American Crossroads has added about $950,000.
The other big spender is the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which has spent more than $1 million in the region.
By contrast, liberal groups have barely made a dent in the regionn. Majority PAC, a committee working to protect a Democratic majority in the Senate, has spent $309,015 in the region. The group has run ads promoting Kaine’s record and attacking Allen’s.
Kaine, who has been critical of the influence of secret-money groups, has been the target of attack ads produced by Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity.
The torrent of spending is partly due to Virginia’s status as a key swing state in the presidential election, and the fact that the U.S. Senate race is one of the most competitive in the country. But the floodgates really were opened by a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that lifted restrictions on contributions by corporations, unions and interest groups in federal elections.
Unlike the candidates, the outside groups can accept unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and unions. Registered super PACs must disclose their donors. Individual expenditure groups that are registered as “social welfare” organizations do not have to disclose their donors.
Third-party groups spent only about $2.3 million in Virginia in 2008, when Obama won the White House and Democrats gained a majority of the state’s congressional seats, according to an analysis by CNN. But, after the Supreme Court ruling, independent expenditure groups played a major role in the 2010 congressional elections in Virginia, as Republicans reclaimed a majority of the state’s House of Representatives seats.
Here’s a list that VPAP compiled of the outside groups that have bought advertising time in the Roanoke-Lynchburg market:
| Crossroads GPS | Keeps donors a secret | $2,473,069 | |
| Americans for Prosperity | Keeps donors a secret | $1,031,021 | |
| American Crossroads | Discloses donors | $950,022 | |
| Restore Our Future | Discloses donors | $482,412 | |
| Majority PAC | Discloses donors | $309,015 | |
| US Chamber of Commerce | Keeps donors a secret | $238,040 | |
| American Future Fund | Keeps donors a secret | $198,081 | |
| 60 Plus Association Inc | Keeps donors a secret | $124,644 | |
| American Energy Alliance | Keeps donors a secret | $91,819 | |
| Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) | Keeps donors a secret | $81,391 | |
| EarthJustice | Keeps donors a secret | $39,696 | |
| League of Conservation Voters | Discloses donors | $39,400 | |
| Priorities USA Action | Discloses donors | $22,770 | |
| Evangelical Environmental Network | Keeps donors a secret | $2,162 |
VPAP has much more on the media buys by super PACs and other independent expenditure groups here.
– Michael Sluss
September 5, 2012 - 4:36 PM
Buying an election is becoming a conservative/Republican tradition….When you are bereft of ideas and compassion, what else is left? Very sad. Very scary!
BB
The amount of cash coming from secret donors is disgusting and bad for our system. No mater who benefits from it. But you can bet those big secret donors will make sure the candidate, if he wins, knows who they were.
My son’s first election is this November. I’m having a hard time convincing him that his vote matters.
So, if you were a millionaire, and felt strongly that Candidate X would be better for your community, it would be wrong for you to spend money supporting him? That doesn’t make sense.
tass, we all have a ‘right’ to vote. That is not the same as saying we are all ‘obligated’ to vote…
That’s how I look at it anyway.
#4 We should at least know who’s buying the election.
#6 So you can envy their hard-earned money, right?
#7 MMM doesn’t care who’s buying the election, just as long a they have a lot of “hard-earned” money.
If they have hard-earned money, why do you care who they support with it or how they spend it?
Personally, I do not go around wondering how people that make $500,000 or more per year choose to spend their money. It doesn’t keep me up at night, gdad.
It shouldn’t bother you so much either, should it now??
People fought and died for the right to vote and have a government of their choosing. Even being on the losing end of an election, you are still in the game and you had your say. To paraphrase an old mom refrain, Vote, there are starving people in China who cannot!
“for the RIGHT to vote”, Sandi. The right to.
#9 Ah, I see, you’re now in charge of determining what should and shouldn’t bother me, MMM. Personally, I don’t think you should be so bent out of shape over what the rent is at Kent Square, but, hey, that’s you.
Thought you didn’t like that nanny thing.
#9 BTW, MMM, I’m sure based on your comment that it doesn’t bother you how much that infamous boogeyman George Soros spends his money or whether he’s trying to buy elections, right? But plenty of folks on the right sure do seem to lose a lot sleep over it. No different than my comments about the corporate fatcats who trying to buy it for Rmoney.
So it seems that gdad admits that he is a Romney/fatcat conspiracy theorist much like the Soros conspiracy theorists that are out there.
Nice to know
gdad, you are just like the Obama ads; Apparently we are supposed to be more worried about how Romney and his supporters spend their money rather than how Obama spends our(the taxpayers) money. You libtards are something else.
#15 If you’re going to use an insult, Jeffrey, why don’t you try something original?
Now, tell me all about how neither Romney nor the people trying to buy the election won’t spend your money. You think these guys are spending a billion of their own dollars out of the goodness of their hearts?
Vote, there are starving people in China who can’t. Starving people in China, really?
Boy, how times have changed. A recent National Public Radio (not typically a big right wing supporter) report highlighted a new problem faced by the billion or so occupants of the People’s Republic of China: obesity. Apparently, the United States has been exporting more than just capitalism and David Hasselhoff; the years of austerity under Chairman Mao have been replaced by a culture of abundance, from automobiles to iPods to greasy hamburgers and fried chicken (there are currently more than 3,000 KFC franchises in the Middle Kingdom).
Fast food isn’t the only problem, according to Paul French, the author of “Fat China“:
“More, more, more of everything — larger portions, with more ingredients, more salt, more sugar, more oil, more fats. Breakfast and lunch and dinner and supper and grazing with snacks during the day. And drinking fizzy drinks rather than tea.”
According to the NPR story, twenty-five percent of Chinese adults are now overweight and the current economic success of the world’s largest nation virtually guarantees that this trend will continue.
Nothing like keeping up with what is going on internationally.
“Nothing like keeping up with what is going on internationally.” Yeah Kathie, it is right up there with reading comprehension!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paraphrase
“1: a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form”
So Kathie, we’ve exported our obesity to China?
@Kristen – that’s about the only thing we have exported to China with the cheating this president has enabled them to get away with.
Really, Kathie. Think this one through much?
https://www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html
And here’s the table where we see that we exported a record amount of goods to China in 2001. Up 13% over 2010, which was up 32% over 2009.
And you do realize that Obama has challenged China’s auto industry protectionism. Since he has no authority to change policy in China on his own, what would you suggest he do to keep them from getting “away with” them? Invade maybe?
If you’re talking about the balance of trade, that’s a different story, but again, it’s hardly Obama’s fault that Americans have developed an addiction to cheap disposable plastic garbage such as Mallwart stocks.
@Kristen – why did this administation wait until September 2012 to work on the unfair trade of illegally subsidizing their auto industry.
Seems like he would have done that as part of bailing GM out.
Oops…2001 = 2011. Sorry.
Kathie, you want to address the volumn of exports to China under Obama? And do you realize that the rest of the world considers our policy of subsidizing our farmers to be illegal and protectionist?
Kathie, maybe those right wing sources don’t have you as informed as you think. President Obama has been working on the China issues since 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/politics/obamas-evolution-to-a-tougher-line-on-china.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www
It may have escaped your notice but there was an international economic crisis and an obstructionist Congress for the President to deal with as well.
@Kristen – Eureka! Something we can agree on. I, too, think we should stop farm subsidies as well as corporate subsidies and probably a hundred other subsidies.
I am sick of sending money from the states to Washington to put through all of their twisted gyrations to only send less than half of it back to education and then another huge piece of that gobbled up by state and local administrations before reaching the kids in the classroom.
Stop spending, yes!