The ad wars in the 8th Congressional District continued this weekend with the announcement that Americans United for Change plans to spend “five figures” on a television ad campaign targeting four members of the House who voted for Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. The ad buy targets Rep. Chip More…
The election post-mortems keep rolling in. Politico’s Byron Tau’s report on the remarkable shift in voting patterns among America’s oldest voters goes a long way to explain why last week’s contest became such a rout for Republicans. Voters over 65, he writes, favored Republicans by a 21-point margin after More…
Two of the largest conservative-leaning outside spending groups — American Crossroads and the 60 Plus Association — are stepping up their spending with new ad buys today, underscoring once again the shifting landscape – which I’ve written a story about today — in which outside groups are making more independent More…
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, many groups, from independent political action committees to the Republican National Committee, decided to test the waters and file cases against the Federal Elections Commission arguing that they, too, should enjoy the ability to solicit unlimited donations for spending on More…
Which 501(c)(4) groups are pushing it when it comes to making election activities their “primary mission”? Groups wishing to maintain their tax-exempt status (and the donor anonymity that accompanies it) have to make sure a majority of their activities don’t qualify as such, but a New York Times analysis reveals that More…
Karl Rove gets all the attention, but Politico argues that the guy who’s really pulling the strings behind the Republican-boosting outside spending effort is a little-known Republican operative named Carl Forti:
Forti has played a critical role in shaping the ad campaigns of two of the biggest-spending outside groups
One important fact about the 60 Plus Association’s move into the health care debate is that from 1995 through really the end of the Bush administration, its big cause was support for Social Security privatization. It did a lot of blocking and tackling when President Bush pushed for privatization More…
Greg Sargent points out that the 60 Plus Association, the industry-funded conservative group which tries to wedge seniors against the Democrats, hired the makers of the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad to craft a new video blasting senators over health care.
One tidbit about 60 Plus, which has a curious More…
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