Dark money groups that don’t have to disclose their donors
spent hundreds of millions in this election cycle. And now we’ve got a better
idea of the extent of their spending in one crucial swing state advertising
market.
As the final hours of the campaign ticked away, we
challenged ProPublica readers to help us “free
the files” in Las Vegas, which aired more
political ads this election cycle than any other market in the country. The
results indicate a leading conservative dark-money group and its affiliated
super PAC spent more than $9 million on television advertising in Las Vegas during
the election— one in every five ad dollars spent in the market.
The two groups — Crossroads
GPS, a “social-welfare nonprofit” started by Karl Rove in 2010, and American
Crossroads, a super PAC that is closely aligned with it — bought far
more ads than other independent groups in Las Vegas. Together, they spent
nearly as much as President Obama and Mitt Romney’s campaigns combined.
The statistics come from a ProPublica analysis of more than
800 ad contracts from the Las Vegas market obtained as part of our Free
the Files project. While not comprehensive, the data includes most of the
contracts for political ads broadcast on Las Vegas’s ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX
affiliates in the last months of the campaign. The Vegas ad buys, which
encompass spending on everything from the presidential campaigns down to House
of Representatives races and even the Clark County District Court election,
totaled more than $47 million.
While it was known that Crossroads GPS and American
Crossroads were spending big in the election — they were expected to fork
out at
least $300 million in total — the Free the Files data on Las Vegas sheds
light on the extent to which the two groups were able to dominate the air wars
in key battleground advertising markets.
All told, six groups that do not disclose their donors —
American
Action Network, American
Future Fund, Americans
for Prosperity, the Center
for Individual Freedom, Crossroads GPS and the Republican Jewish Coalition — accounted
for at least 21 percent of the spending we tracked in Las Vegas. All of them
support conservative candidates. Crossroads GPS alone spent more than $6 million.
(A liberal dark money group, Patriot
Majority USA, also bought airtime, but many of the ad contracts failed to
distinguish its ad buys from those of Patriot
Majority PAC, a super PAC that is affiliated with the group, making it hard
to track the groups’ spending.)
Five super PACs accounted for another 13 percent of the
spending. They included Restore
Our Future, the Romney-supporting super PAC;
Priorities USA Action, which supported Obama; House
Majority PAC and Senate
Majority PAC, which supported Democratic candidates for Congress; and
American Crossroads.
Whether all the spending swayed the races in Nevada is an
open question. Both liberal and conservative groups spent heavily, and the
election results were mixed: Obama won Nevada with 52 percent of the vote, but
Dean Heller, a Republican, came out on top in the Senate race. Joe Heck, a
Republican, snagged one of the state’s two competitive House seats, but Steven Horsford, a Democrat, took the other.
The $47 million spent in Las Vegas represents a tiny
fraction of the estimated
$6 billion spent in races around the country this election cycle. But it’s
a detailed look at the epicenter of ad buys this election. KSNV, the city’s NBC
affiliate, broadcasted more political ads than any other station in the
country, according to Kantar Media; KTNV, the ABC affiliate, broadcasted the
fifth most.
Several factors combined to make Vegas the country’s
political-advertising capital, said Elizabeth Wilner,
who works in Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. Nevada is one of an
ever-smaller slate of battleground states, and Las Vegas is by far its biggest
market.
Airtime is also relatively cheap in Vegas; campaigns can buy
more ads for the same amount of money than they could in Denver or Miami.
But the Free the Files data also underscores the central
role played by groups that didn’t exist in the last presidential election,
including Crossroads GPS and American Crossroads. Lisa Howfield,
KSNV’s general manager, said her station’s political advertising revenue was up
242 percent compared with 2008.
