Warren Benefits from PAC Spending Spree in Super Tuesday States after Vowing Not to ‘Take A Dime’ from PACs
Senator Elizabeth Warren now has the biggest Super PAC advertising presence in the Super Tuesday states, after publicly condemning PAC support for months on the campaign trail.
Persist PAC, which formed ahead of the Nevada caucuses, announced Thursday night that it was pumping $9 million in television and digital ads across three major Super Tuesday states — California, Texas, and Massachusetts. With the new outlay, the group has now committed over $14 million to supporting Warren’s campaign, making it one of the largest PACs in the race.
“Our goal is to show voters that Elizabeth Warren has been fighting for the middle class her whole life,” Persist PAC spokesperson Joshua Karp said in an email disclosing the ad buy. He told Politico “no sir” when asked to disclose the group’s donors. The PAC does not have to disclose its donors until March 20 because of its recent formation, meaning the source of the money will not be made public until over half of the primary’s delegates have been allocated.
The Warren campaign then called for Persist PAC to disclose its donors on Friday, which Karp refused.
New: The Warren campaign calls for Persist PAC — and all other super PACs — to disclose their donors
"Warren believes persist pac and all other superpacs should disclose their donors before Super Tuesday," says Warren spox @KristenOrthman
Names not required legally until 3/20
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) February 28, 2020
Warren has been outspoken for months about resisting PAC money, and ran an ad in Iowa highlighting how she is “not cozying up to super PACs.”
Here is an ad Elizabeth Warren spent $679,000 running more than 2,000 times in Iowa in which she said:
"I'm not cozying up to super PACs"
Now she has the biggest one in the 2020 Democratic field.https://t.co/kbpxbqbbZK pic.twitter.com/uneDmOGJ5B
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) February 28, 2020
On the day of the New Hampshire primary earlier this month, Warren tweeted that she “won’t take a dime of PAC money in this campaign.”
But the Massachusetts Senator changed her tune in Nevada after Persist PAC began supporting her, saying that the lack of opposition to PACs from the rest of the Democratic field required that she accept the support.
“The first day I got in this race, over a year ago, I said ‘I hope every presidential candidate who comes in will agree — no Super PACs for any of us,” Warren explained to reporters. “I renewed that call dozens of times, and I couldn’t get a single Democrat to go along with me . . . It can’t be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”
