Hybrid PACs generating few greenbacks
There's a certain irony that Ready for Hillary is probably the nation's most renowned hybrid political action committee, since this curious kind of political group likely wouldn't exist but for a Supreme Court decision sparked by a roundly anti-Hillary Clinton movie.
Late Saturday night, the group, which is dedicated to supporting a Hillary Clinton presidential run, reported raising $8.9 million during 2014 — among the biggest hauls for any political group that publicly discloses its funders.
That includes about three-quarters of a million dollars raised during the year’s final five weeks.
But Ready for Hillary is an anomaly: Hybrid PACs, legalized in 2011, haven’t really caught on in American politics.
While it may be premature to deem hybrid PACs utter failures like the New Coke or Edsel, they’re turning out to be a specialty product heading into Election 2016.
Related: Lone Star lobbyist launches hybrid super PAC
The result is surprising because hybrid PACs can offer one stop shopping to eager political donors. Like the more popular super PACs, they can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to advocate for and against candidates, while at the same time they can operate a traditional political action committee, collecting limited amounts of money to give to politicians’ campaigns. All they need to do to keep it legal is maintain separate bank accounts for the different pools of money.
However most political donors, it appears, are happy to keep those activities separate.
Perhaps the one person who's benefited from hybrid PACs more than any other is Dan Backer, a conservative attorney and the driving force behind Carey v. Federal Election Commission, the 2011 federal court case that led to the creation of hybrid PACs.
Backer himself works as treasurer for 13 of the 86 existing hybrid PACs — better than one in seven, according to FEC records.
Three years ago, he declared that any super PAC — like Ready for Hillary — that didn’t morph into a hybrid PAC was “run by idiots.”
Related: Pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC created
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Primary Source. Primary Source keeps you up-to-date on developments in the post-Citizens United world of money in politics. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
