With less than a week to go before the end of voting, the airwaves are flooded with political ads. Most of the money in battleground districts comes from independent expenditures.
Forget about money that's raised and spent by candidates. This election cycle is seeing outsized influence from outside money. Nowhere is this more evident than the 1st Congressional District in Eastern Virginia and the Richmond suburbs, where the vast majority of spending against Republican incumbent Rob Wittman and in favor of Democratic challenger Shannon Taylor is coming from independent expenditures.
"The trend in VA01 is the opposite of what I'm seeing in most races," says Jennifer Victor at George Mason University.
"You look at this list of the largest folks that are contributing to her election, and the top four are not her campaign. It's House Majority PAC, and Your Community PAC and House Majority Forward. So, she's benefiting a lot from Democratic-aligned outside groups.”
Independent expenditure-only committees can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.
"One of the catches with the Super PACs is they're not supposed to directly coordinate with a campaign," says Alex Keena at Virginia Commonwealth University. "But those rules are somewhat skirted and unenforced. And so, likely what's happening is that the party is coordinating a lot of this spending to help challengers like Taylor gain an advantage.”
All those TV commercials and digital ads will come to an end next week when voting stops Tuesday night at 7 pm.
