But that figure may change by the end of September, when Kasich’s first campaign finance reports are scheduled to go to the Federal Election Commission. But the risk for candidates is that these groups are heavily dependent on a few billionaires to sustain their presidential operations.
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Acting as shadow campaigns, the political committees backing the major presidential candidates supported them with tens of millions of dollars in chartered planes, luxury hotel suites, opposition research, high-priced lawyers and more, spending reports showed Friday. But on Friday, the actual reports will reveal which of the nation’s mega-donors have chosen to back their campaigns, a particularly important indicator of strength in the fractured Republican field. Bernie Sanders has bluntly said, “I will not have a super PAC”. Carly Fiorina’s? She is now being paid by Bush’s campaign as an adviser. This amount surpasses his competitors by far; Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC “Priorities USA Action”, raised approximately $15.6 million.
The Louisiana governor’s sole million-dollar check comes from Gary Chouest, who owns a company that specializes in shipping. In total, the group Conservative Solutions pulled in about $16 million, including a $3 million gift from Oracle founder Larry Ellison. But a filing obtained by CNN shows that he’s only in for $5 million so far. Perlmutter gave $2 million.
That the groups raised a lot of money wasn’t a surprise.
The chairman of an Arkansas poultry producing business, Mountaire Corp., Cameron has ties to the Koch Brothers’ political network.
Ted Cruz’s coterie of supportive super PACs are crawling with cash-but it’s not doing him much good at the moment. The Ricketts family owns the Chicago Cubs.
Bush’s super PAC, though, has been showing some signs of struggle.
“There are now literally 100 people financing the bulk of our presidential elections”, said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen, which advocates for consumers before Congress, the executive branch and the courts.
The super PAC supporting Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, for instance, reported the donation of the use of a chartered jet valued at $70,000 from billionaire supermarket owner John Catsimatidis.
Billionaire George Soros, director Stephen Spielberg and Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg all pitched in $1 million each. Cruz, Fiorina, Bush, Rubio, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are expected to attend a meeting this weekend in California in hopes of attracting Koch money. About two-thirds came from Kelcy Warren and Darwin Deason. Just over half came from two donors long expected to be the super PACs’ top financiers: New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Mercer, who gave $11 million, and Houston investor Toby Neugebauer, who donated $10 million.
Jeb Bush is pitching himself as a clean-government reformer who rejects transactional politics. More than a dozen of his $1 million donors hail from one of the states Bush has called home: Texas and Florida.
While there are no complete ingenues among the rosters of top donors to the super PACs, which filed their disclosure reports for the first half of the year this week, there are a few who previously haven’t given sums anything like those they are notching this year.
The proliferation of the committees also is transforming how presidential campaigns will be run. In Cincinnati and southwest Ohio, he raised $19,285.
Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said the expansive use of super PACs in the presidential race has “largely rendered the $2,700 candidate contribution limit meaningless”.
All of that $250,000, save $500, came from a New Jersey limited liability corporation. This is a stark departure from past campaigns, and has made most of the candidates deeply reliant on a handful of ultra-wealthy donors.
Helen Schwab, wife of multi-billionaire Charles Schwab, gave $1.5m.
But Ohio donors have forked over more in campaign donations than those in the early – and far less populous – voting states of Nevada, which gave $714,632 as of June 30, Iowa, $205,601, and New Hampshire, $303,873.
A super PAC aiming to help Texas Sen.
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The same is true of Ted Cruz’s super PAC, which has had considerable success in filling coffers, but which has also raised most of its money from a donor list whose members can be literally counted on one hand.
