How super PACs rule Alabama’s Senate race

Mike Durant is supported by “California liberals,” is not an Alabama resident, and favors disarming the public. That is the message packed into multiple mailers arriving to mailboxes sent by the Alabama RINO PAC.

Katie Britt is a lobbyist who supports a gasoline tax. The Club for Growth Action PAC claims that to be true in TV and radio spots.

U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks is a career politician distrustful of former President Donald Trump, according to Alabama Futures – a super PAC that is blasting the claim on TVs from Huntsville to Mobile.

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By now, you are sick of the outrageous campaigning. Those flashy, sensational, and often misleading ads are dominating the messaging in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race less than two weeks ahead of the May 24 primary.

But here is what to expect: Since negative campaigning works, Alabamians can anticipate more of the same after the primary is over. In the Senate race, a runoff is almost inevitable. It is set for June 21.

So far, more than $22 million in outsider spending - mostly coming from super PACs -- has funneled into the Alabama Senate contest. Of the GOP Senate primary contests scheduled for May 17 and May 24, only Pennsylvania’s race has seen more outsider money funneled into it thanks to a staggering $19.2 million invested to oppose Dr. Mehmet Oz’s candidacy.

“For decades, I’ve heard from people, ‘campaigns are so negative,’” said Jonathan Gray, a GOP political strategist based in Mobile who has run over 100 campaigns since the 1990s. He is not involved in the U.S. Senate race.

“But would you rather have no negative campaigning and elect a fraud to office?” he said. “The whole point of negative campaigning is to expose each other and shine a light on who I think the other candidate is.”

Much of the activity comes from super PACs – technically known as independent expenditure committees that legally must remain unaffiliated with the candidates. Super PACs are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money, and are a creation resulting from the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. That 5-4 decision allowed corporations and other outside entities to spend an unlimited amount of money on elections.

And sometimes in ways that hides where the money ultimately is coming from.

The flood of ads backed by wealthy donors and organizations, is having an impact. A recent Alabama Daily News/Gray TV poll shows Durant, the race’s frontrunner a month ago, falling to third place after weeks of brutal ads portraying the U.S. Army veteran associated with anti-Trump Republicans and aligned with the Lincoln Project.

The race is tight, and none of the frontrunners are pulling away: Britt is at 32%, Brooks at 22.5%, and Durant at 21.4%. A runoff between the first and second-place finishers takes place next month.

“This is the first high profile federal race we’ve seen, to my knowledge, where you have these independent expenditure groups come in to spend a lot of money running attack ads against candidates,” said Jess Brown, a retired political science professor at Athens State University and a longtime observer of Alabama politics.

“We have three candidates who don’t have the large chunk of the electorate committed to them,” Brown said. “At the same time, you have these independent expenditure PACs running a lot of ads. If you had an electorate firmly wedded to these candidates, the ads would not matter.”

Brown said the number of undecided voters fuels the high number of “negative ads by these less-than-adequately transparent groups.”

“They are having an effect,” he said.

Funding a narrative

Outside groups, mostly super PACs, have spent $21 million to either support or oppose Durant, Britt, or Brooks. Of the three, Brooks has the most fundraising opposing his campaign – $3.9 million, or about 18.7% of the majority of super PAC money raised during ahead of the primary.

In Alabama’s Senate race, the super PAC activity is providing the necessary money to fuel three campaign narratives:

Durant’s campaign is bolstered by over $4 million from Alabama Patriots PAC, which in turn receives $2.1 million from America’s Project. Based in Virginia, America’s Project is chaired by Jacob Harriman, a Marine Corps veteran who operates the organization, “More Perfect Union.” That group, according to a Fox Business report, has a goal to elect moderate senators. Harriman has since denied MPU is a political group.
Britt’s campaign is back by a host of super PACs with a variety of names: Alabama Christian Conservatives ($2.3 million) and Alabama Conservatives Fund ($1.8 million) are two of the largest. A couple of super PACs have been set up to oppose Britt’s opponents, including Alabama Futures, which has spent $3.6 million to oppose Brooks, according to Open Secrets. That super PAC’s biggest donors include backers of Britt’s former boss, U.S. Senator Richard Shelby: $3 million comes from Great Southern Wood Preserving Inc., headed up by Alabama’s businessman, Jimmy Rane; $2 million from Francisco Collazo, CEO of Colsa in Huntsville; and $1 million from Warren Stephens, a financial services executive in Arkansas.
Brooks’ campaign is primarily backed by Club for Growth Action, which has spent over $1.7 million to support the congressman, and $2.6 million to oppose Britt. The anti-tax and issue-based Washington, D.C. organization has involved itself in Alabama primary contests before and has been chastised by Republicans like former Congressman Bradley Byrne and current Congressman Jerry Carl, for doing so. The group has also come under fire for its opposition to Trump in 2016, but it has backed the former president as well. Notably, Club for Growth endorsed Josh Mandel in the Ohio Senate contest, drawing the ire of Trump who backed eventual winner, J.D. Vance.

Blame game

Durant mailer — A mailer critical of U.S. Senate candidate Mike Durant is paid for by a group called Alabama RINO PAC. (John Sharp/[email protected]).

Each campaign is reacting to the narratives paid for by the super PACs.

Durant’s campaign blames Britt, saying she and her allies have spent millions “to lie about Mike Durant because they know he’s a political outsider like President Trump.”

The campaign also said that questions about Durant’s residency are unfounded. Durant’s homestead exemption is in Huntsville, they say, where he lives. One campaign flyer, paid by Alabama RINO PAC, alleges Durant’s home is in Colorado, and the Britt campaign continues to link Durant to New Hampshire.

“Mike has lived in Alabama for more than two decades after serving our country honorably around the globe while in the Army,” a campaign spokesman said in an email response to AL.com. “Anything said to the contrary is a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that Katie Boyd Britt has spent her life in politics and is too weak to fight Joe Biden and the liberals who are opening our borders and destroying our economy.”

The Britt campaign continues to criticize Durant’s lack of voting during recent GOP primaries. The last time Durant voted during a Republican presidential primary came in 2008, when the late Arizona Senator John McCain was on the ballot.

“After he made that decision, a lot has to come to light that has caused his Trojan Horse campaign to collapse like a house of cards; it’s clear that he was hiding because he has a lot to hide,” said Britt campaign spokesman Sean Ross. “Katie is proud that 85% of her campaign funds have come from Alabama, while her opponents rely on their out-of-state special interests to prop their candidacies up.”

Brooks said the super PAC support for Britt aligns her with the Republican establishment in Washington, D.C., namely Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who became a political boogeyman during the 2017 special U.S. Senate primary contest in Alabama that Brooks was a part of but was won by Roy Moore.

Brooks said the groups supportive of Britt are rolling out attack ads and mass mailers going after himself and Durant. He said the ads are “dishonest and deceitful” and he’s hopeful the public “will do the homework necessary to understand there are not requirements” for truth-telling in federal election law.

Brooks also blames the “huge sums of money” from the super PACs and the reliance on “poll-tested messaging” from derailing pre-primary debates. Durant, late last month, declined to debate. Britt, who agreed to a three-person debate, opted not to debate Brooks only.

“It’s much safer to overwhelm opposition with special interest group money and poll-tested advertising rather than have to defend your beliefs in a spur-of-the-moment, give-and-take that you have in debates,” Brooks said.

Citizens United looms large

The influential super PAC activity is the direct result of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC. The high court’s decision allows super PACs to raise an unlimited amount of money and utilize the resources for campaign advertising if they are not formally “coordinating” with a candidate or political party.

Critics have said the activity empowers the wealthiest donors and expands so-called “dark money” through shadowy nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors.

“Citizens United opened the floodgates of outside spending based on the promise of transparency,” said Stuart McPhail, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But the Supreme Court turned a blind eye in Citizens United when it failed to see how easily the corporate structure could be used to play shell games.”

Marissa Grayson, associate professor and a pre-law advisor at Samford University’s Department of Political Sciences, said while super PACs are required to disclose their spending, organizations and donors have found ways around that by forming limited liability corporations, and creating a situation where “tracing the money from the LLC to an individual” becomes a difficulty.

The statement of organization, which must be filed with the FEC whenever a super PAC is formed, often reveals little about the intent of the group. Often, a treasurer’s name is given, but that person sometimes far removed from the campaign issues at hand.

Organizational statements also reveal little about a super PACs homebase or its affiliation. Two super PACs formed during the Alabama Senate contest -- the Alabama RINO, and Alabama Christian Conservatives – are registered under the same address that is a single-family home in Austin, Texas. According to Open Secrets, Alabama RINO opposes Durant’s campaign, while Alabama Christian Conservatives is pro-Britt.

A closer look at the address links the home to the Burton Strategy Group whose senior adviser, Jeff Burton, once served as a deputy executive director for the National Republican Congressional Committee and was a top aide to former Republican U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor of North Carolina.

“There aren’t a lot of legal restrictions on what super PACs can do, but they do need to identify themselves and their donors accurately,” said Andrew Mayersohn, a researcher at Open Secrets. “However, the only contact that they need to list is a treasurer, who often is a professional campaign compliance specialist who may not even really be involved in running the PAC.”

Untangling connections

To get at who is aligned to whom in a campaign requires peeling back layers contained within federal campaign finance forms and untangling connected interests. Voters are far removed from a process that is often left up to journalists, campaign teams, and consultants.

Transparency, in effect, is nonexistent.

But Gray, the GOP strategist in Mobile, said the complaints over Citizens United and about dark money operations, is nothing new. He said concerns over dark money were pronounced in Alabama before the 2010 Supreme Court ruling, namely with PAC-to-PAC transfers that were outlawed by the Legislature in 2010, and upheld by the state courts following the Citizens United ruling.

Gray said that 20 years ago, before websites like Open Secrets emerged and categorized super PAC spending, reporters and campaign teams had to dig through paper records to draw connections with contributions, only to often run into a web of PAC-to-PAC maneuvering.

“The money would move six to seven times before it got to its final destination,” Gray said. “You could (contribute) $100,000 over four different PACs and you could put that money wherever you wanted it. There was a mixing of those PACs, and it was impossible to unwind those transactions.”

Phillip Rawls, a former longtime Alabama journalist with The Associated Press, said the systems are designed to “protect large donors from being responsible for their speech.”

“In the days of PAC-to-PAC transfers, (a donor) would give $25,000 to PAC A, then PAC A would give $30,000 to PAC B, and then PAC B would give $20,000 to PAC C, and they would use the money to fund TV ads in a race,” Rawls said. “Reporters had no way of knowing that (the donor’s) money helped pay for the ads unless each of the PACs had a small balance at the time of the donation.”

Rawls said that before Citizens United, the name of the PAC often had nothing to do with the candidate or issues it was supporting.

“For instance, a PAC with ‘children’ in the name could really be a conduit for donors to get money to candidates who agreed with them on the size of punitive damage awards by juries,” he said. “A PAC with ‘good government’ in the title could be a conduit for donors to get money to candidates who opposed raising taxes.”

David Mowery, a political strategist based in Montgomery, said that candidates have been harping about “dark money” and campaign finance shenanigans since the days of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

“Watergate is the reason we have limits on donations and the like,” he said. “Whereas in yeas past, most of that money was raised and spent at the ‘committee’ level in D.C., since Citizens United, the playing field for super PACs has expanded because nearly anyone with money to burn can get in the game as long as they don’t coordinate with the candidate or campaign, and even that line can be very fuzzy.”

The Britt campaign, for instance, says they have not sent out any mailers attacking Durant. However, campaign spokesman Ross said Durant is “just mad” that his efforts to “trick Alabamians has failed” and then refers to the message plastered on the mailers by the super PACs.

“People are quickly learning that he is … backed by anti-Trump Big Tech liberals in California, advocated for gun control and has no record indicating that he is a conservative or ever supported President Trump,” he said