Political Groups Are Big Spenders

Political parties, political action committees and independent groups spent more than $60 million in September on advertising to influence the presidential race.

The unprecedented level of spending comes in a campaign in which every fundraising record has been broken.

“What this seems to indicate is the parties and independent groups are much more active and spending substantially more money than in the 2000 presidential cycle,” said Anthony Corrado, a campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine.

Although advertising campaigns by independent groups such as the Media Fund and Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth (formerly Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) have dominated headlines, the Democratic National Committee and political action committees spent far more money last month.

The DNC spent $24.4 million on ads on behalf of presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry in September, and $27 million on such ads in August. The two-month total puts DNC spending this year ahead of what it spent on all television advertising on behalf of the 2000 nominee Al Gore.

The DNC ads were produced by a walled-off unit within party headquarters that was banned by law from coordinating with the Kerry campaign.

Liberal independent groups, by comparison, spent about $2.4 million on behalf of Kerry during the same period.

Republican 527s, political groups named after a section of the tax code that governs them, poured about $11 million into advertising on behalf of President Bush in September, making total spending on behalf of both candidates almost even.

Most of the conservative 527 money came from the Progress for America Voter Fund and the Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth, two organizations that didn’t begin raising money in earnest until this summer. Bush was the beneficiary of about $842,000 from political action committees, mostly from the National Rifle Assn.

The Republican National Committee didn’t spend a dollar on independent expenditure advertising. Instead, the RNC took advantage of what it said was a provision in the federal law that allowed them to coordinate its advertising with Bush’s campaign -- as long as the ads also mentioned members of Congress.

The cost of those ads -- estimated by TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG at $25.2 million in September -- is split evenly between the campaign and the party. “By running an ad that expresses support for both the president and members of Congress, you achieve a dual purpose with one ad,” RNC spokeswoman Christine Iverson said.

Although the RNC has set up the apparatus for an independent expenditure campaign similar to the Democrats’, it has not used it.

The Republican strategy apparently took the DNC by surprise. Last week, it too began running $4 million worth of ads that mentioned both Bush and Republicans in Congress, paid for jointly by the party and the Kerry campaign.

Campaign watchdogs aren’t convinced the ads are entirely legal. Under the law, the political parties are allowed to spend $16 million in coordinated expenditures with the campaigns. Anything else is supposed to be spent independently.

“Everyone does all this stuff because they assume the FEC will let them do whatever they want,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan Washington group that monitors money in politics. “It’s not clear this is legal, by any means.”

Bush and Kerry began relying more heavily on outside support after federal rules forced them to stop raising private money. Once officially nominated by their parties, each candidate was limited to a $75-million public grant and support from outside groups.

And the parties aren’t the only ones pitching in.

Kerry’s campaign got a $9-million advertising boost in September from a host of mostly union-related political action committees. Among them were PACs associated with the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the American Nurses Assn., the Human Rights Campaign, the League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn and the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn.

Figures on how much the Bush and Kerry campaigns spent in September will not be available until later this month.