Who Funded The $2bn US Presidential Elections?

In 2010, a US Supreme Court ruling equated money with free speech for corporations. Two years later, that speech has gotten louder by 200%. The USD 2 billion US Presidential election saw an exponential increase in funding by corporations and unions. Payaswini Upadhyay finds out whose cash spoke the loudest!

Mark Rom, Associate Professor, Georgetown Public Policy Institute
"Let me talk about the presidential election. Both candidate Romney and Obama raised and spent about USD 1 billion which comes from four main sources - contributions directly to the campaign to the candidates, contributions to the national committees of the parties Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee, funds that were given to PACs (Political Action Committee) or Super PACs that are spent on behalf of the candidates and then there is this sort of mysterious fourth category which are non-profit organizations. Individuals can give money to them for educational purposes, but those educational purposes were largely to elect or to defeat either Romney or Obama." Blair Bowie, Democracy Advocate, U.S. Public Interest Research Group
"What we have really seen is an explosion in outside spending in 2012 presidential election. Over USD 1 billion of outside spending has been spent this cycle and that is really the result of the Supreme Court decision in 2010 called Citizens United which opened the doors for corporations to spend unlimited amount of money on the election. That led to the creation of entities called Super PACs which are committees that are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of funds from any source, so individuals, corporations, unions, non-profits, you name it. They can take unlimited money from those groups, aggregate that and then spend that on independent expenditure or outside spending." Mark Rom, Associate Professor, Georgetown Public Policy Institute
"The Super PACs are legal organizations that have the sole purpose of collecting money from individuals, labor unions, corporations or non-profits that are registered as corporations and then distributing them to the candidates. So they are allowed to raise essentially unlimited money to do so. They are only able to give regulated amounts directly to the candidates or to the parties, but then they can spend money on their own behalf in support of those candidates or in support of those candidate’s clauses. Essentially that allows them to spend an unlimited amount of money in largely unregulated ways." Blair Bowie, Democracy Advocate, U.S. Public Interest Research Group
"What we have seen is that Super PACs’ fund raising has really been driven by a small set of hugely wealthy donors that account for the vast majority of the money that we are seeing in Super PACs across the board. The vast majority of money in Super PACs comes from individuals and about 96 percent of Super PAC funds raised from individuals come from about 1,900 donors giving USD 10,000 or more and about 60 percent of the funds in Super PACs come from just 96 donors giving a million dollars or more. So we are seeing there are a small handful of people able to have a huge impact on election spending because of Super PACs."
 
Mark Rom, Associate Professor, Georgetown Public Policy Institute
"A large amount of money, we do not know exactly how much, because the organizations that have raised and spent the money are not yet required to distribute any details, but money that is given to what are called social welfare organizations, non-profit organizations that in theory have the role of informing and educating the public about matters of public importance. What this means is that individuals, because they do not have to disclose their donations, can do so in secretly and in unlimited amounts to these non-profit organizations that then have advertised extensively on behalf of the Republican candidates and the democratic candidates. These are not campaign committees. So they are not obliged to follow campaign election laws." Blair Bowie, Democracy Advocate, U.S. Public Interest Research Group
" Dark money non-profits exist on the register with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They are not required to report any of their donors and they are separate entities, but what you have seen in this year’s election is that there are associated Super PACs and non-profits. For example, American Crossroads is a Super PAC and Crossroads GPS is a dark money non-profit. Both of those were founded by Karl Rove and really the reason we think for having two of these different ones is to facilitate donors- individuals or corporations- who want to keep their identities secret, can give to the dark money non-profit whereas individuals or corporations that want the public to know they are making these contributions, can give it to Super PACs."