The New York Times takes a good look today at Democratic super PACs and their continuing fundraising troubles, tracking down various donors and cash-wranglers to find out where the problems lie. The answers are pretty interesting: There’s run-of-the-mill policy disagreement and radio silence from George “Not Much Difference Between Romney and Obama” Soros, but many donors seem to have been swayed in one fashion or another by the ongoing Republican presidential primary.
Anecdotally, there’s a bloc of Democratic pollyannas who aren’t giving because they don’t think Obama can lose. Bill Maher, one of the lonely souls to write a $1 million check to the President’s super PAC, says he made his donation after talking to rich Hollywood types at the Grammy’s who were convinced Barack is bulletproof. Why might they think that? Economic pickup might be part of it, but six months of Republican primary knife fights seem the likeliest culprit.
That’s not all: According to the Times, Newt Gingrich’s brief but intense bombardment of Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital in January has spooked Wall Streeters worried that any money they give to Obama-backing super PACs will eventually go to similar ads. Their suspicion is probably right, but count it as another reason for Democrats to resent Gingrich after he unleashed the Bain beast before they’d have liked.
Here’s the really headspinning reason though:
[M]any big liberal donors are simply uneasy about the unlimited money now sloshing around in the campaign, according to interviews with donors and consultants.
“Some of the major donors on the left see it as a bit unseemly,” said Steve Phillips, the chairman of PowerPAC.org, which ran advertisements backing Mr. Obama in the 2008 primaries and organized voter mobilization, raising more than $10 million, much of it from a half-dozen big donors.
You can interpret that comment in one of two ways: Either these donors watched as Sheldon Adleson et al. drastically influenced the Republican primary with super PAC dollars and had a crisis of conscience, deciding that funneling large amounts of their cash to elections was “unseemly.” Or two years of Democrats’ outrage at Republicans over Citizens United, which allowed unlimited corporate giving (individuals have long had outlets for their blank checks), has backfired a bit, making their own donors feel icky about the process.
A poll this week found that 69% of Americans want super PACs banned. Maybe that’s a messaging coup for the left. But if they’ve skeeved out their megadonors without getting any closer to passing new campaign finance rules–they’d need a Democratic Congress at minimum and possibly a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United–it’s something of a Pyrrhic victory. Meanwhile, as the Times reports, they’re dealing with a major handicap for the fall.