Photograph by Greg Johnston

Cayman Islands

Social welfare nonprofits, which can keep their donors secret, are a lot like Russian nesting dolls: Open one, and you’ll find a smaller version inside.

That’s what courts in California discovered last year when they tried to figure out who paid for TV ads attacking Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax increase plan. The courts forced an out-of-state nonprofit to reveal its donors only to find out that the ad money came from … another out-of-state nonprofit. That’s where the trail ended.

Prompted by a revelation last week that the Internal Revenue Service improperly targeted Republican-leaning nonprofit applicants, Congress is plunging  into the thicket of tax rules governing those entities. Hearings continue next week.

Campaign-finance watchdogs such as the Sunlight Foundation, Democracy 21, Common Cause and the Campaign Legal Center are imploring lawmakers to look broadly at whether politically active nonprofits are misuing their tax-exempt status. A Bloomberg story today highlights two groups — one Democratic and one Republican — that appear to be gaming the system by buying campaign-style ads and doing most of their work in election years.

There’s yet another way social welfare nonprofits participate in politics: They move dark money, Cayman Islands style. Sometimes a nonprofit gives money to a political committee that can more freely spend on politics, in effect keeping the real donors hidden. Bill Allison, editorial director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, has called that phenomenon a “campaign-finance haven.”

Those tactics can bump up against stricter state campaign-finance laws, as was the case in California with the Americans for Responsible Leadership.

Two days before the November 2012 election, a California Supreme Court judge ordered the nonprofit based in Phoenix to reveal who gave it the $11 million that it in turn contributed to a business group opposing Brown’s California tax initiative.

Americans for Responsible Leadership reported that it received its money from the Center to Protect Patient Rights — another nonprofit with secret donors.

An October 2012 Bloomberg News investigation of the Center to Protect Patient Rights, also based in Phoenix, revealed that it raised $62 million for the 2010 elections and parceled out most of its money to other nonprofits.

The center’s donors remain a secret.

Original post is Nonprofits: Cayman Islands of Political Money by Political Capital.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

Former first lady Laura Bush speaks at the Global Women’s Cancer Summit in Washington on Feb. 4, 2013.

Laura Bush generally steered clear of controversial issues during her eight years as first lady, and that’s a posture she wants to continue.

Although she has voiced support in the past for legalizing same-sex marriage, she didn’t authorize and doesn’t want to be part of a $1 million advertising campaign on the issue that featured her.

Bush appeared in television and print ads paid for by Respect for Marriage, a coalition of faith, civil rights and gay rights groups advocating for same-sex marriage. She was joined in the spots by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a lesbian daughter, and former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, as well as President Barack Obama.

Respect for Marriage cobbled public statements from the four into the campaign that began yesterday. Bush’s remarks were lifted from a 2010 appearance on CNN’s Larry King show, where she said, “When couples are committed to each other and love each other then they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has.”

But Bush, a spokeswoman told the Dallas Morning News, “did not approve” of her inclusion, and would like to be removed.

Respect for Marriage is respecting her wishes.

“We appreciate Mrs. Bush’s previous comments but are sorry she didn’t want to be included in an ad,” the group said in a statement today. “The ad launched a public education campaign that will now move to new and different voices that reflect the depth and breadth of our support.”

The coalition will swap the ad — called “Leadership” — for a Bush-free spot called “Stowell.”

The new TV ad features former Marine Cpl. Craig Stowell, who identifies himself as a Republican, sitting with his wife, Berta. “As Americans, we believe in freedom,” he says. “That’s what I fought for as a Marine.”

He goes on to say that his brother is gay: “He was the best man at my wedding. And I want to be the best man at his.”

Original post is Laura Bush Opts Out of Gay Marriage Ad Campaign by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg

Same-sex couples emerge from the Manhattan City Clerk’s office with their marriage licenses in New York.

Gay-marriage backers today began a $1 million national television and print advertising campaign that features big-name Republicans and Democrats exhibiting a rare bit of simpatico.

President Barack Obama, former First Lady Laura Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell all voice support for the issue in clips assembled for a 30-second TV spot. The ad will run on cable and during Sunday network TV shows, according to the group behind the campaign, the  Respect for Marriage Coalition.

“Freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney is shown saying in the ad, his remarks lifted from his June 2009 appearance at the National Press Club in Washington.

A moment later, Obama joins him in making the case.

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” the president says, in an excerpt from his inaugural address last month.

The ad campaign comes on the heels of state-level victories extending marriage rights to same-sex couples — and as several more states and the U.S. Supreme Court are about to take up the issue.

A consortium of 80 groups including civil rights, faith and gay rights leaders is paying for the advertising. The goal of the campaign, which also includes a social-media tag — #time4marriage — is to keep building momentum, according to Respect for Marriage’s news release.

In November, gay marriage scored its first wins at the ballot box. Maine, Maryland and Washington passed laws allowing same-sex couples to wed, while voters in Minnesota rejected a measure that would have banned the unions.

State legislatures in Illinois and Rhode Island are weighing marriage proposals this year. And the Supreme Court next month will hear arguments on California’s ballot measure banning same-sex marriage and on a federal law defining marriage as solely an opposite-sex union.

Original post is Gay Marriage TV Ad: Odd Bedfellows by Political Capital.

Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

Congressmen walk down the steps of the House of Representatives at the Capitol as rank and file members adjourned for several days, in Washington, on Dec. 6, 2012.

More than a month after Election Day, the political TV ads keep coming.

A group of business leaders urging Congress to avert a $600 billion mix of tax increases and program cuts set to begin in January is taking its message to national TV.

The Fix the Debt campaign, backed with more than $43 million in contributions and dozens of chief executive officer members, will debut a commercial during today’s political shows, spokesman Jon Romano said.

Viewers of Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday are among those who will see the minute-long ad, which features pep talks from an Army reservist, a businesswoman with a baby on her lap, a CPA,  a teacher and a farmer.

“It’s not a Republican-Democrat thing,” says Shelley Williams, a physician. “If we want this fixed, I mean, it sounds kind of corny, but we all need to do it together.”

The TV ad — the first the campaign has aired — will complement existing print, Metro and online buys, Romano said. Fix the Debt is spending about $3 million on the ads, he said.

Fix the Debt is an offshoot of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and  was co-founded by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, who led the president’s 2010 debt-reduction commission and favor tax increases an spending cuts as a solution.

Other fiscal-cliff-themed TV ads are already in rotation.

The AARP is spending at least $10 million on a print and TV campaign. And MoveOn.org and Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies have aired ads on TV and radio that target specific members of Congress.

Original post is Debt Group Airing Sunday Show Ads by Political Capital.

Photograph by David Guralnick/The Detroit News/AP Photo

Volunteer Nsombe Iamodou works the phone bank at the campaign headquarters of President Barack Obama in Detroit the day before the election, on Nov. 5, 2012.

President Barack Obama’s bid for votes in Detroit could have gone bankrupt  in the Nov. 6 election. He still would have beaten Republican Mitt Romney in Michigan.

In fact, the president would have won Michigan excluding all of Wayne County, which includes Detroit, and next-door Oakland County, which has voted Democratic in five straight presidential elections after decades of Republican dominance.

Obama won Michigan, which has 16 electoral votes, by margins of 449,313 votes and 9.5 percentage points, according to an official tally of votes released yesterday by the state elections board. Obama won Wayne by 382,032 votes and 47 points, and carried Oakland, where Romney grew up, by 52,488 votes and eight points.

While Obama’s Michigan vote share fell to 54.2 percent on Nov. 6 from 57.4 percent in 2008, the president still won the state handily. Obama’s showing in Michigan in 2008 was the best by a Democrat presidential candidate in 44 years. His drop-offs from four years ago were especially modest in major population centers.

In Wayne, Obama fell by just 1.1 points, to 73 percent from 74.1 percent in 2008, his smallest drop in the state. In Macomb County north of Detroit, Obama fell by just 1.9 points, to 51.5 percent from 53.4 percent. In Genesee County, which envelops Flint, Obama also fell by just 1.9 points, to 63.6 percent from 65.5 percent.

The president took 63 percent in Ingham County, which includes the state capital of Lansing and Michigan State University in East Lansing, and 67 percent in Washtenaw County, which takes in the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Some Republican officials said in the waning days of the campaign that Michigan was politically competitive, partly because of Romney’s ties to the state where he was born and raised and his father served as governor. Restore Our Future, the main pro-Romney super-political action committee, supplied 1,627 Michigan ads in the 14-day period ended Nov. 6, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG. Seven other anti-Obama groups, including the nonprofit organizations Americans for Prosperity and American Future Fund, paid for a combined 974 spots. Obama’s campaign ran 425 spots in Michigan from Nov. 1-6, CMAG data show.

As it turned out, the Michigan race wasn’t close. The president’s 9.5 point win exceeded Romney’s margin of victory in Georgia and Arizona. Democrats have won six consecutive presidential elections in Michigan, matching the number of times that the state voted Democratic in the 34 elections between 1856 and 1988.

Original post is Michigan: Obama Would Have Won Without Detroit by Political Capital.

Photograph by Frank Polich/Getty Images

Jim Messina, center, campaign manager for the re-election of President Barack Obama, talks with reporters during a tour of the re-election headquarters in Chicago.

President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, said one of the campaign’s biggest missteps by Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign was a controversial ad suggesting that Chrysler Group LLC is moving Jeep productions to China.

“They were spending the last 14 days of the election in the Midwest on the defense,” Messina said at a breakfast sponsored by Politico. “Day after day, they had to answer for that ad,” he said, because “it fundamentally wasn’t true.”

The “smartest thing” Romney’s campaign did was “they were amazing fundraisers,” said Messina, who spoke in his first televised interview after the election. He said they got more checks for the maximum amount than any other campaign in history.

Messina also took a swipe at polling companies, in particular the Gallup Poll, which he said “has been wrong repeatedly in the past” six presidential elections.

In particular, many pollsters failed to properly weight their voting samples to reflect the young and minority voters, often reached exclusively on cell phones.

“They did not think our coalition was going to vote, they thought the electorate was going to look more like 2004 than 2008,” he said.

Messina said the Republican candidate who may have had the best shot of beating Obama may have been John Huntsman, the former Utah governor who became U.S. ambassador to China. “We were honest about our concerns about Huntsman,” said Messina. “I think Huntsman would have been a very tough general election candidate.”

The Obama campaign ran the largest grassroots operation in history, and Messina said much of their success owed to harnessing social media including Facebook and social media tools that allowed supporters to encourage their friends to vote. He also said the campaign was able to identify potential volunteers, voters and donors based on their voting and donation history.

Original post is Messina: Romney’s Chrysler Ad One of Campaign’s Biggest Missteps by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images

From left, Rep. Robert Wittman, Rep. Jeff Landry, Rep. Charles Boustany, and Rep. John Fleming arrive for the news conference on American Energy Initiative legislation to expand U.S. energy production.

Two Louisiana Republican congressmen seeking the same district in a Dec. 8 runoff election are using testimonials in their latest television ads.

Jeff Landry, a freshman, is up with a spot highlighting endorsements from four House colleagues.

Landry “has the passion and energy to get the job done,” says Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, which favors shrinking government, taxes and spending.

Landry’s spot also includes complimentary words from Jeff Duncan and Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina and Tom Graves of Georgia, who were first elected to Congress in 2010.

An ad for Landry’s opponent, Charles W. Boustany Jr., refers to him three times as a “conservative,” including twice by the ad’s narrator.

“It’s great to have someone like Charles with a medical background in our Congress,” an unidentified woman says of Boustany, who was a heart surgeon prior to his election to the House in 2004.

Boustany’s ads have referred to him as “Doctor” rather than “Congressman,” an acknowledgement of the low approval ratings for Congress.

Landry’s ad first ran Nov. 15 in Lafayette. Boustany’s spot first aired Nov. 16 in the same market, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG, an ad tracker.

Boustany and Landry were the top vote-getters in a first-round balloting on Nov. 6. Boustany won 45 percent of the vote, less than the majority needed for outright victory, and Landry took 30 percent in a contest that included three other candidates.

Boustany and Landry are seeking the same southern Louisiana district, the 3rd, after changes in redistricting last year.

Original post is Boustany, Landry Tout Support in Louisiana Ads Before Runoff by Political Capital.

A collage of nighttime network television commercials largely dominated by campaign ads. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

After 1 million negative ads, it’s easy to conclude that the 2012 presidential campaign was negative.

And it was, according to Americans surveyed in a Pew poll out today.

The Pew Research Center found 68 percent of voters saying the campaign between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney was more negative than usual, compared with 54 percent who felt the same way when Obama faced John McCain four years ago.

Fifty-one percent said there was less discussion of the issues than usual, compared with 57 percent in 2008 who said there was a greater focus on issues.

The reason they might feel that way. According to Kantar Media’s CMAG, 87 percent of the 1,233,522 presidential campaign ads on broadcast TV and national cable in 2012 were negative.

Original post is 2012 Campaign Negative as Seemed by Political Capital.

Obama beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 55-44 percent in Manchester, 56-42 percent in Nashua and 65-34 percent in Concord, according to a Political Capital analysis of vote returns from the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office.

Those are essentially the same vote breakdowns from four years ago, when Obama beat Republican presidential nominee John McCain in New Hampshire and nationwide. Romney actually ran slightly behind McCain’s 2008 performance in all three municipalities, even as he did better than McCain statewide. Obama’s vote share in New Hampshire fell to 52 percent from 54.4 percent in 2008, while Romney won 46.4 percent compared with 44.7 percent for McCain in 2008.

While Romney outran McCain in most New Hampshire jurisdictions, he did so by margins too modest to keep Democrats from carrying the state for the third consecutive election. Democrats last accomplished a New Hampshire three-peat in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won the state for the third time in a row.

New Hampshire was among nine states where Obama and Romney spent most of their time and campaign resources. During the general election campaign, television ads from the candidates and their allies ran 46,654 times on stations that reached New Hampshire voters, according to Kantar Media’s CMAG.

Obama carried both of New Hampshire’s congressional districts, helping Democrats Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane Kuster unseat Republican incumbents.

Obama beat Romney by 50-48.4 percent in the 1^st District, which includes Manchester, Dover and Derry. Shea-Porter beat freshman Rep. Frank Guinta by 49.8 percent to 46 percent. Guinta unseated Shea-Porter in the 2010 election.

The president outpaced Romney by 53.9-44.3 percent in the 2^nd District, includes Nashua and Concord. Kuster beat incumbent Charlie Bass, who was seeking an eighth term, by 50.2 percent to 45.3 percent. Bass beat Kuster in 2010.

Original post is Obama’s New Hampshire Win: Cities by Political Capital.

Photograph by Obama campaign via AP Images

In this image taken from video is a TV ad by the Obama For America campaign in which President Barack Obama speaks to voters in Spanish. The ad titled "Buen Ejemplo," or "A Good Example" went on air in the U.S. on Oct. 9, 2012.

President Barack Obama’s re-election committee was responsible for more than four of every 10 of the 1.2 million presidential campaign ads for the general election, twice as many as those aired by Republican challenger Mitt Romney, a final count of broadcast advertising shows.

Not including those spots broadcast nationally, residents of only 14 of the 50 states saw any commercials about the presidential campaign, led by the 195,000 ads in Ohio and 180,000 in Florida from April 10 to Nov. 6, according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks political ad

And 87 percent of those spots were negative, the analysis shows.

“As for negative ads, this is not surprising,” said David Primo, a political science professor at the University of Rochester in New York. “A crucial part of a campaign is drawing a contrast with your opponent, and this is often defined as negative.”

Obama’s campaign aired more than 550,000 spots on broadcast and national cable channels from April 10 to Nov. 6.  The cost of those ads was an estimated $325 million, about 37 percent of the almost $875 million that CMAG estimated was spent on all those campaign ads. Candidates receive the lowest possible rate for TV commercials, unlike political parties and outside groups.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, aired more than 216,000 spots at an estimated cost of almost $142 million.

“The Obama ad war carpet bombing may have helped Obama get his message across more effectively,” said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University in Ames.

Both candidates received help from outside groups, most notably aligned super-political action committees. The pro-Obama Priorities USA Action almost played the pro-Romney Restore Our Future to a draw; Priorities ran almost 64,000 ads and Restore ran almost 70,000. Romney also received help from American Crossroads, the pro-Romney super-PAC founded with the help of Karl Rove. The group ran more than 81,000 ads, all of them attacking Obama.

Original post is Final 2012 Ad Count: 1.2 Million by Political Capital.