The Center for Public Integrity

Outside groups and national party committees spent $1.65 million on the special congressional elections in New York and Nevada, according to an analysis by iWatch News. Just under half the total poured into the races in the final week.

In both races, the Democratic Party nominees have led in terms of direct campaign contributions. In Nevada, Kate Marshall (about $748,000 reported) has out-raised Republican Mark Amodei (about $659,000), while in New York David Weprin (about $684,000) has more than doubled the campaign cash of his opponent Bob Turner (about $323,000).

But in a possible harbinger of campaigns to come, the two Republican candidates received a huge boost from spending by outside groups, partially making up for what the candidates could not raise in direct contributions. Both Republicans won.

Eleven outside groups and party committees combined to spend over $1.65 million on ads, mailings, websites, phone calls and other get-out-the-vote efforts designed to influence the two special elections, according to an iWatch News analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Of those, only two — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the House Majority PAC — favored the Democratic candidates.

Party and non-party groups favoring the Republicans outspent their pro-Democratic counterparts $978,000 to $676,900, helping to partially offset the hard-money fundraising gap enjoyed by the Democrats.

Both parties’ national committees focused their independent expenditures on defending their home turf—the Republicans in Nevada and the Democrats in New York. And while Republican-allied groups spent almost $95,000 in support of the Republican candidate in New York, Democratic-leaning groups sat out the race in Nevada.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is a powerful congressional chairman who has been a vocal critic of Obama administration policies he views as anti-business. But his fierce advocacy for the business community, specific deals under federal purview, as well as federally-funded projects and congressional earmarks, has also netted him millions and raised the specter for conflict of interest, according to the New York Times.

The story details a congressman who has unabashedly maintained and increased scores of business interests as his profile in Washington has grown. Issa has ties to telecommunications companies and banks, among other interests.

The story notes that a congressional ethics committee probe was considered and then dismissed amid a lack of evidence that Issa had direct conflicts in his congressional role.

Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hired staff that had deep ties to industry, including conservative billionaire activists David and Charles Koch and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, iWatch News reported in February.

iWatch News also profiled Issa, including his big PAC contributors and revolving door from his staff, after the November election sealed his chairmanship.

Issa’s committee also investigated whether a Democratic candidate in Chicago had received political favors from regulators; an inspector’s general report later cleared the bank.

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina has long been the third-ranking Democrat in the House and a reliably liberal loyalist who will largely hold the line on the party’s sacred cows of Social Security and popular federal health programs.

In a recent interview with The State, a South Carolina newspaper, Clyburn said he would be open to a Super Committee plan that cut federal payments to doctors and hospitals, but not beneficiaries. He also called for ending the Bush-era tax cuts and eliminating corporate tax loopholes.

When the Democrats lost their majority position in the last election, House Democrats created a new leadership position for Clyburn – assistant Democratic leader. The role gave him a place during the debt ceiling talks and Clyburn said he frequently talked with President Obama. He also served on Vice President Joseph Biden’s debt reduction working group.

His rhetoric sharpened as the debt ceiling negotiations continued. Clyburn said the Republican plan, shepherded by House Speaker John Boehner, was less than serious. He is now in the position of being an active participant in that plan’s key ingredient for future fiscal reform – the Super Committee.

“Speaker Boehner does not even pretend that this is a serious attempt to solve the problem—he sold this bill to his Conference by telling them that it wasn’t bipartisan.  And with divided government, a plan that isn’t bipartisan is no plan at all, it’s just a game,” he said.

Elected to the House in 1992, Clyburn began his career as a civil rights activist, organizing sit-ins in the 1960s. He has been an active leader in the Congressional Black Caucus and has frequently tried to encourage leadership to take on issues pressing for African Americans.

Chris Van Hollen is the liberal counterpoint to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, whose fiscal blueprint calls for broad whacks at entitlement programs.

Van Hollen, as the ranking Democrat on the budget committee, says Republicans would “increase tax breaks for millionaires and special interests and pays for these new tax cuts on the backs of working Americans” while Democrats would keep “our commitments to America’s seniors and most vulnerable instead of dismantling Medicare and Medicaid.”

And, for good measure, the Republican plan “amounts to a yellow-brick road for the already prosperous and a dead end for the rest of the country,” he says.

Van Hollen might have been in line to be the budget chairman rather than Ryan, but that opportunity slipped away after House Democrats suffered devastating losses in November 2010—while Van Hollen chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Defeated Chairman John Spratt endorsed Van Hollen to succeed him.  

The Maryland congressman, whose district includes much of the affluent Washington, D.C., suburb of Montgomery County, was elected to Congress in 2002. He served a dozen years in the Maryland legislature before that.

He had a notably restrained reaction to the Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating.

"The most important thing we can do to restore confidence and improve the fiscal situation is to get the economy moving and put people back to work. That immediate focus should be coupled with a long term plan to reduce the deficit,” he said.

Now in his ninth term, Rep. Xavier Becerra is confident enough to have cast a couple of high-profile “no” votes lately.

The most recent was on Aug. 1 when the California Democrat refused to support the bill that raised the debt ceiling, saying it failed to address “the main drivers of our deficits: the Bush tax cuts, and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it does nothing to fix the biggest deficit holding our economy back: the jobs deficit.”

He was also a member of the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission, created by President Obama in 2010. Becerra voted against the commission’s recommendations, firmly from the left.

A major question for the Super Congress is the degree to which Democrats will yield on entitlement cuts. Becerra serves as the ranking member on the Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee. After his no vote on the debt ceiling bill, he announced, “We owe it to those who built this country to protect Medicare and Social Security from being blindsided by future indiscriminate cuts.”

He is much younger than other Ways and Means committee members with more seniority, positioning him for potential chairmanship in the future. Apart from his powerful committee and commission appointments, he serves in the House leadership as vice chair of the Democratic Caucus.

Becerra’s California district includes the heart of Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium. According to the 2010 Almanac of American Politics, the 2000 census ranked Becerra’s district “first in the nation with its noncitizens (41 percent) and last in the nation in homes where English is spoken (21 percent). In 2007, 52 percent of its residents were foreign-born.” In 2008, 80 percent of his district voted for Obama.

Before returning to public service, Sen. Patrick Toomey spent four years as the president of the ultra-conservative Club for Growth, giving him serious pro-business, anti-tax credentials that will make him a formidable force on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

Toomey grew up in a working class family in East Providence, R.I., the third of six children. In the early 1990s, he moved to Allentown, Pa., where he started a restaurant chain called Rookie’s with his two brothers.

In 1998, Toomey won the open seat in Pennsylvania's 15th Congressional District. During his House career, Toomey positioned himself as an expert in budget and banking matters. His commitment to limited government and pro-economic growth policies earned him plaudits from Citizens Against Government Waste, Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union. Toomey voluntarily retired in 2004 after three terms in the House, where he racked up one of the most conservative voting records.

In 2005, Toomey took the helm of the Club for Growth. The group condemned the federal government interventions after the 2008 market crash, including the $700 billion bank bailout. “Instead of launching the largest government bailout since the Great Depression,” said Toomey, “the government should be implementing policies to stimulate the economy. These include, at a minimum, cutting the tax on capital gains [and] cutting corporate taxes.”

During his time at its head, the Club was known for running conservative challengers to moderate Republicans in Congress in an attempt to force them to move right — or be replaced.

With experience in the both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is better placed than most to make and market a deficit deal.

As popular with his constituents as his fellow members of Congress, Portman was first elected to the House in a 1993 special election with over 70 percent of the vote. He would repeat that feat in six consecutive elections until he left Congress in 2005 to join the cabinet of President George W. Bush as U.S. trade representative. A year later, he took over the Office of Management and Budget. When Portman stepped down in 2007, then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that he was “one of the best members I have ever served with.” He ran for the Senate seat left vacant by Republican George Voinovich and won by a 57 to 39 percent margin, giving him plenty of political capital to wager.

Coming from an entrepreneurial Cincinnati family, Portman is a traditional pro-business Republican who is not afraid of compromising to make a deal. “We’ve now got to pull back, all of us, from our purity test and come up with how we get something done here that deals with the underlying fiscal problem,” he told the Washington Post in July. During his 12 years in the House, that attitude helped Portman author and pass landmark reforms to the Internal Revenue Service and 401(k) and IRA plans. He counts the passage of the balanced budget agreement and the welfare reform bill as his proudest moments from that period.