The political advertising business has never been known for its transparency, but even by the standards of an industry that has spent decades perfecting the art of the fine print, the current moment is something to behold.
The New York Times published an analysis this week estimating that roughly $1 billion in so-called dark money — political spending in which the donors' identities are not disclosed — flowed into American campaign advertising during the current election cycle. The estimate, the paper noted, is probably conservative.
Dark money, for those who have somehow avoided the term, refers to funds channeled through nonprofit organizations, super PACs and other vehicles that allow contributors to influence elections without attaching their names to the effort. The money pays for the same things any campaign dollar pays for: television commercials, digital advertising, polling, data, staff. The difference is that voters cannot easily learn who is writing the checks.
(One might say the donors prefer to remain behind the curtain, though in this case the curtain appears to be made of cash.)
The Times identified several paths by which such funds enter the system. Nonprofits that run issue-oriented commercials are not required to disclose their contributors, even when those commercials happen to promote or disparage specific candidates. Super PACs must disclose their donors, but not the donors to those donors — a distinction that creates what might be called a useful fog. And super PACs formed within three weeks of an election need not report their contributors until after the votes are counted, by which point the information is of largely academic interest.
Open Secrets, the nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign finance, has documented how nonprofits pass money back and forth among themselves to create the appearance of larger budgets, thereby skirting rules about how much of their spending must go to genuinely nonpolitical activity.
One source quoted by the Times compared the situation to a drug den, which seems perhaps a bit heated. The machinery of campaign finance has always had its shadowy corners. The difference now is mostly one of scale — and of the sophistication with which those corners have been engineered.
Original story published in MediaPost: "Fifty Shades Of Dark Money"