Will Dooling's News Articles

Global corporations like Dow Chemical, Adidas, and McDonald's are paying upwards of $100 million USD to sponsor the 2012 London games and associate themselves with the Olympic brand -- but with their brands already well-established, what do corporations get in exchange for these expensive sponsorship deals?

The battle to decide the Republican candidate for Wisconsin's open U.S. Senate seat is heating up. The Super PAC for the national organization Club for Growth, which supports Mark Neumann in the four-way primary, recently spent $700,000 airing an ad attacking Neumann's top challengers: multi-millionaire hedge fund manager Eric Hovde and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson. Both have a significant lead over Neumann (the ad ignores the fourth primary candidate, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald).

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has spent as much as 10 million dollars in Wisconsin in recent months influencing the potential recall of Governor Scott Walker, whose administration has been backed by AFP. Walker's election in 2010 was funded in part by AFP's chairman, David Koch, for example through the Koch Industries PAC and a one million dollar donation to the Republican Governors Association (RGA). AFP has claimed its multi-bus, multi-city tour across the state the week before election day and millions in ads and other expenditures have nothing to do with the election.

One of the many questions being raised about AFP is what, if anything, its massive investment in retaining the status quo is buying.

The Washington, DC-based special interest group -- co-founded and -funded by Mr. Koch, a New York City-based oil billionaire -- has gone all-out in the final week of the recall, spending on ads, rallies, buses, canvassers, and phone banks. The group, a non-profit, keeps repeating its claims to the press that it is simply informing Wisconsin residents about economic issues, not engaging in election activities reserved for politicians, parties, and PACs -- all of which report both their donors/donation amounts and all their campaign expenses to the public for accountability, unlike AFP.

Recent campaign filings show Governor Scott Walker raising over $30 million to defend himself against recall versus $3.9 million raised by his challenger Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Barrett is being outspent 12:1, but even these numbers do not account for the full amount of spending in the race. Since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case, an array of outside groups are playing a major role in elections and Wisconsin is no exception.

Wisconsin's historic recall battle may be seen as a test of grassroots gumption (30,000 volunteers collected close to one million recall signatures) against big outside money in a post-Citizen's United world. With less than a week before the election, spending numbers regarding these outside interest groups are changing by the hour. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC) is working hard to track the money and illuminate exactly how high the spending outside of the candidates will go. Right now, WDC pegs total spending in the race at $62 million, including at least $21.4 million in disclosed spending by outside groups in addition to an estimated $7.5 million in undisclosed spending on so-called "issue ads" designed to influence the election.

Here is a brief look at the five biggest outside interest groups spending in Wisconsin's 2012 recall.