Kenneth P. Vogel, POLITICO
July 24, 2011
Conservative groups are outspending liberals in media campaigns over debt ceiling...
ARTICLE — While the battle over raising the debt ceiling plays out in Washington, conservative groups are outspending liberal ones in the effort to frame the issue through a sharply-edged media campaign that some Democrats worry could put them at a serious disadvantage headed into the 2012 elections.
“The thing that liberals never understand is that the person who defines the game, wins the game and these moves right now are the game-defining moves,” said Erica Payne, president of a donor-advisory group called the Agenda Project.
While it’s impossible to precisely measure ongoing ad buys, anecdotal information, combined with interviews of operatives, media buyers and trackers, suggest that avowedly conservative groups and candidates are spending between five and 10 times more than their liberal counterparts on TV and radio advertising related to the debate over debt ceiling negotiations.
The conservative ads vary in their targets and presentation, but the common argument running through them is that reckless spending by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats has done little to boost the flagging economy and that, left to their own devices, they would simply raise taxes and the debt ceiling, rather than address underlying fiscal issues.
The goals seem both to shape the broad contours of the debt ceiling and deficit debate and to boost Republicans at the ballot box in 2012, since most of the ad buys are in markets expected to be congressional or presidential battlegrounds.
Lapping the field in debt-related ad spending is Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (or Crossroads GPS, for short), the non-profit group conceived last year by Karl Rove, which is spending a total of $20 million in July and August on hard-hitting ads attacking Democrats on the debt, urging viewers to “take away Obama’s blank check,” and hitting a range of congressional Democrats it considers vulnerable for supporting “skyrocketing” and “crushing debt” and “reckless spending.”
“I don’t think anybody’s surprised that groups like ours are being outspent,” said Craig Varoga, president of Patriot Majority USA, among the few Democrat-allied non-profits to weigh in with issue advertising during the debt ceiling fight. “We’ve got to pick our battles where we think we can have the greatest effect fighting back on the issues that matter to us.”
His group in the past few days has launched about $225,000 worth of ads in three states with contested 2012 Senate elections, either attacking a Republican plan to limit entitlement spending (in Missouri and Montana) or, in the case of an ad that launched Saturday afternoon in Nebraska, praising the fiscal stewardship of conservative Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, who the ad says has been “fighting to tear up Washington’s credit card, while protecting senior citizens.”
Those ads – in addition to recent offerings from the Democratic National Committee and a super PAC called Priorities USA Action (which, like Patriot Majority, positions itself as a counterweight to Crossroads) – are meant to respond directly to specific Crossroads ads.
But their total ad spending, and those of allied unions and advocacy groups, is dwarfed by Crossroads alone.
And that doesn’t even factor in a $1.2-million spending-themed buy from the conservative group Concerned Women for America’s political arm, which started airing ads Thursday targeting four Democratic Senators, or debt-ceiling-specific television and radio ads airing last week from tea party groups Let Freedom Ring and American Grassroots Coalition.
Meanwhile, two well-financed GOP presidential candidates are running ads pledging to oppose an increase in the debt ceiling. Texas Rep. Ron Paul is spending $400,000 on spots in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada that call the debt ceiling debate “a defining moment” and promise “no deals” or compromises, while Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann is up with an ad in Iowa vowing “I will not vote to increase the debt ceiling. It goes completely contrary to commonsense and how I grew up in Iowa.”
And representatives from Americans for Prosperity and the 60 Plus Association – conservative groups that spent heavily on ads in the run-up to last year’s elections and have aired some spending-related ads this year – told POLITICO they’re considering new ad campaigns pegged around the debt ceiling debate.
Analysts, as well as operatives and fundraisers on both sides of the aisle point to a host of factors to explain the disparity, including a Republican major donor base energized by GOP electoral successes in 2010, as well as what they see as fiscal recklessness from Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.
They also point out that – unlike the advertising war over the Democratic healthcare overhaul in 2009 and 2010 – which prompted major expenditures from pharmaceutical interests supporting aspects of the proposal and insurance companies opposing it, there are no major industries being singled out in the debt ceiling debate, so most of the money that has flowed into hard-hitting ads has been ideologically motivated.
While the advocacy groups AARP and the Coalition to Protect America’s Health Care (comprising hospital associations and medical colleges) have been spending millions of dollars on television ads opposing Republican proposals to reduce Medicare and Social Security, their ads generally haven’t singled out the Republican Party or its members, nor have they praised Democrats. In fact, at times, they’ve seemed to echo Republican themes about wasteful spending.
Meanwhile, individual wealthy Democratic donors have been slower than their Republican counterparts to engage in the wide-open political spending created by a January 2010 Supreme Court decision called Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that allowed corporations and unions to pay for campaign ads.
Another oft-cited possible factor is an Internal Revenue Service provision mandating that a type of non-profit group – those registered under section 501(c)4 of the tax code – spend more than half of their money on non-election-related expenses.
Such groups became popular as a vehicle for conservative advertising after the Citizens United decision and many of the groups playing – or planning to play – in the debt-ceiling ad war are so-called 501(c)4’s, including Patriot Majority on the left, and the conservative Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, 60 Plus, Americans for Prosperity and, most notably, Crossroads GPS.
“None of us really know what the denominator is [in Crossroads’s spending binge], but it’s probably a combination of a target-rich environment – more Democratic Senators are vulnerable this year – and they’ve got to spend the money anyway,” said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media’s non-partisan Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad spending.
Pointing to an ad that Crossroads paid $5 million to air in presidential battleground states starting late last month, which criticized Obama on the debt, unemployment and for pushing through the $787 billion stimulus, Goldstein said: “I’ve always thought it made a lot of sense to go early, when you can get out message in an uncluttered environment. Now this is phenomenally early, but I consider that Crossroads ad the first shot of the presidential election ad air war.”
Crossroads’s issue ads are unrelated to the election, said its spokesman Jonathan Collegio.
“What you’re seeing is a genuine, once-a-decade opportunity to reform entitlements and shape economic policy in a conservative free-market direction, and many center-right groups are seizing the moment,” he said.
Perhaps reinforcing the idea that the debt debate is more about ideology than partisan politics, the shots from the right aren’t all aimed at Democrats.
The hard-line fiscally conservative Club for Growth this month went up with ads warning GOP Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and Orrin Hatch of Utah – both of whom are facing the prospect of primary challenges from the right – not to vote to increase the debt ceiling.
Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, said her group’s new $1.2 million buy – its biggest ever – is intended to mobilize conservative activists.
“This issue is so important to conservatives that it’s time for us to step up,” she said. Her group’s ad knocks Congress and the White House for racking up “a mountain of debt” and “leaving our kids a lesser America than we had” – all under the cheeky guise of a spoof pharmaceutical spot for “a new miracle drug, made in Washington, DC: Spenditol.”
Nance said it “will be helpful in the next few days as Congress tries to work through the issues on the debt ceiling, but also in the overall debate on the debt,” and she conceded “it will be good for people to have all the information in 2012. I think this energizes the base.”
Some Democrats concede that their advertising disadvantage may stem from the lack of a single, easy-to-communicate message coming from Obama and their party’s congressional leadership.
“How are you going to write an ad explaining how to fairly balance the budget deficit with revenue and spending cuts in 30 seconds?” said one labor operative active in the debate. “It’s easier to write an ad saying don’t add more debt to our children and grandchildren.”
Others, though, point to recent polls appearing to show popular support for Democratic efforts to raise the debt ceiling – and disapproval for the way Republicans are handling the debate – to argue that the left doesn’t need huge ad buys to bolster its case.
“The spending disadvantage is not a concern in that the facts are so clearly on our side in this particular debate,” said Jeremy Funk, spokesman for Americans United for Change. The group teamed with the Service Employees International Union to go on the air last Thursday with $30,000 worth of ads attacking four moderate Republican House members for “recklessly risking default” in the debt ceiling fight.
“The Republicans in Congress are driving us toward the edge of the cliff …They’re willing to risk it all to protect the tax breaks of millionaires, oil companies and CEOs who fly around in corporate jets,” the ads’ narrator gravely intones, as a car caroms around hair-pin cliff-side turns before flying off the edge of the cliff.
Funk said that if congressional Republicans and the White House fail to reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling by the Aug. 2 deadline, liberal donors will spring to action to fund ads blaming the GOP.
Don’t be so sure, said Payne, whose group Agenda Project made quite a splash in May with a web-only ad accusing Republicans of wanting to privatize Medicare.
“There’s no possibility I could have raised 10 percent of what Karl Rove got for debt ceiling ads for that ad,” she said. “What I have found in 20 years in politics is wealthy liberals just don’t play in economic issues. As soon as you start working on economic issues, the percentage of money that you have to spend on paid media goes down substantially.”