The Center for Public Integrity

In a close race, Rick Santorum was declared winner in both Alabama and Mississippi primaries last night. He picked up at least 35 delegates, AP reports.

Despite the turnout, Pro-Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future” dominated spending among the main groups aiding the former Massachusetts’ governor’s primary rivals: Santorum’s “Red, White and Blue Fund” and Newt Gingrich’s “Winning Our Future.” As the chart shows, Restore Our Future accounts for 69 percent of independent expenditures by these super PACs in Alabama and 64 percent in Mississippi. 

This post originally appeared on the Consider the Source Tumblr page, a collaboration between iWatch News and the Center for Reponsive Politics.

Scandal-plagued Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus is fighting for his political life in Tuesday’s primary, but not everyone has given up on him — the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee can still count on his friends in the credit union industry.

CUNA, the Credit Union National Association, spent nearly $28,000 on last-minute radio ads supporting the Republican congressman, one of the most influential lawmakers in Washington when it comes to regulating the financial services sector.

Bachus hit the headlines last month when he was featured on “60 Minutes” and in a book for allegedly using inside information to make trades on stock options, prompting an investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Making matters worse, Bachus has been on the receiving end of more than $200,000 in attack ads from an upstart super PAC called the “Campaign for Primary Accountability,” a Texas-based group that has been critical of incumbents in several districts across the country.

CUNA spokesman Patrick Keefe told iWatch News that over the years, Bachus has shown that he understands and supports credit unions.

“This particular contest is getting closer, and, as we support Rep. Bachus, we thought our involvement could be helpful to his chances,” Keefe said.

Super PACs are the perceived demons of the 2012 campaign, with the law allowing them to raise and spend unlimited amounts of dough. But a shadowy sideshow that's gone largely unnoticed is the set of nonprofits affiliated with them, which often provide money to the cash cows — and they don't have to publicly disclose their donors (as super PACs must).

"The undisclosed money is far more troubling for the system," says campaign finance lawyer Kenneth Gross.

FreedomWorks for America is a case in point. The group, which has attacked GOP pols it finds insufficiently conservative, is located three blocks north of the Capitol. At the same address, sharing the same suite and even some staff, is the headquarters of the similarly named FreedomWorks Inc., a nonprofit (or 501[c][4] group).

In 2011 the super PAC received almost half of its $2.7 million from the nonprofit, a legal transfer that skirts disclosure requirements. Whose cash is it? We aren't allowed to know. Matt Kibbe, who oversees the activities of both groups, says that "to adhere to what the law stipulates" there is a "firewall" between the two.

But even by the loose standards of money in politics these days, the arrangement seems rather cozy.

Other groups are doing it, too. The pro-President Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, has received $215,234 from its sister non-profit, Priorities USA. Karl Rove's American Crossroads super PAC and its nonprofit sibling, Crossroads GPS, are also expected to be big ad buyers in the general election.

Is it all too cozy? Last month, the Internal Revenue Service launched an investigation into the election advocacy of (c)(4) groups that, as nonpolitical entities, enjoy a comfortable tax status.  

For the big-spending U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the 2012 election season began early with a flurry of hard-hitting ads in six states that included attacks on two vulnerable Democratic senators — a harbinger of the $50 million-plus drive it plans to mount this election year.

To help Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress, the Chamber dropped about $2 million on “issue advocacy” ads late last year — in Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.

In February, the pro-business behemoth poured another $10 million into ads aimed mostly at weakening Democrats and bolstering GOP members in eight Senate and 12 House contests. Just one ad was supportive of a Democrat’s positions.

This hefty and early ad spending underscores the huge political stakes in the coming congressional elections for many of the Chamber’s most generous corporate supporters — including energy, insurance, health care and Wall Street firms.

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, for one, has been targeted by the Chamber with almost $2.5 million worth of slick spots saying he “voted to block American energy production and increase energy taxes.”

Some of the ads have been criticized by independent fact-checking groups and one drew barbs because it showed a sinister-looking Brown sporting a beard in what appears to be a doctored photo.

The Chamber’s key issues — attacking “government-run” health care, federal curbs on domestic energy production and “job-killing regulations” — have been standard lobbying themes during the Obama years.

“We hope and plan to have the most aggressive issue advocacy campaign,” ever run by the Chamber, Bruce Josten the group’s top lobbyist told iWatch News.

Springtime ad spree

The Chamber’s issue ads don’t urge votes for specific candidates, but do discuss where candidates stand on several of the Chamber’s leading “free enterprise” issues.

A viral video tying the Chevy Volt’s erroneously reported flammability to the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry was produced and paid for by a conservative radio host and filmmaker.

The parody video was viewed more than 367,000 times on YouTube as of Monday afternoon. It shows a man driving the plug-in hybrid car and delivering a mock testimonial: “Yeah I’ve heard they’re catching fire in some cases, but I’ve found that the fire really helps me get to my destination faster for fear of my life,” he says.

The actor’s image was lifted from a real Chevy Volt commercial, with new dialogue dubbed in.

The Volt garnered some bad publicity after the cars were involved in a series of fires after test crashes. But the National Highway Safety Traffic Safety Administration said “it does not believe that Volts or similar vehicles pose a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered autos.”

The video ties President Barack Obama’s decision to bail out the U.S. auto industry to the vehicle’s bad publicity. It credits ObamaVolt2012.com as its sponsor. That site in turn links to bailoutcost.com, a website that tracks the cost of the General Motors bailout.

Identities of the creators and funders of the ad are obscured. Both websites are registered to proxies.

Tweets recently surfaced crediting Ben Howe, a conservative radio host and contributor to conservative political websites, for making the video. The video was first posted to YouTube three weeks ago. Last week, Howe posted the ad to Vimeo from his personal account.

In contrast with many other campaign finance reformers, Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig believes fixing the U.S. election system will require more than just overturning the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission Supreme Court ruling, which removed many restrictions on independent political spending.

Reversing this flood of political cash would be enough to satisfy most reformers, but not Lessig, who spoke last week at the Center for Public Integrity offices in D.C. Overturning the ruling “terrifies” him, he said, because “it imagines somehow that on January 20, 2010 – the day before Citizens United was decided – our democracy was fine and Citizens United broke it. But of course, the democracy was already broken.”

Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center on Ethics at Harvard, is concerned that if the decision is quickly repealed, it will take the wind out of an effort he’s leading to achieve a more comprehensive overhaul of the election system. Then activists “will have gotten nothing out of this moment when there’s an extraordinary anger and frustration that could be channeled in the direction of real reform,” he said.

The drug lobby's trade association was a multimillion-dollar donor to nonprofit groups that were actively working to elect federal candidates during the 2010 election, an iWatch News analysis of documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service reveals.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as PhRMA, doled out $9.4 million to 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit groups, some of which paid for ads that influenced races in the 2010 midterm election, records show.

In 2010, PhRMA gave about $20 million in “grants and other assistance” to more than 200 nonprofit organizations, including five politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofits, both liberal and conservative, which together received nearly half of the funds.