Power of Parties

Big Money From Super PACs Is Eroding the Power of Parties

By Nate Cohn

Six months ago, I would have told you that April 15, the date when campaigns report their first-quarter fund-raising tallies, could be one of the most interesting early milestones of the Republican primary season.

I think I even told my boss, admittedly with hyperbole, that the Q1 report of a year preceding a presidential election was the most important fund-raising report in American politics.

In 2007, it was when we learned that Barack Obama could match the supposedly inevitable Hillary Rodham Clinton in fund-raising, and that John McCain wasn’t a real front-runner for the Republican nomination (although he managed to claw back to win it), despite his second-place G.O.P. showing in 2000.

But this year, April 15 has come and gone without much news at all.

Rather than exploratory committees and campaigns, top Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker have started super PACs and other groups allowing them to solicit unlimited contributions. None will have to file disclosure forms with the Federal Election Commission until July.

The uneventful passing of April 15 is only the most subtle indication of the way super PACs are transforming the presidential nominating process. They have given candidates the ability to raise colossal sums from small but wealthy bases of support. Along with Internet fund-raising, super PACs are helping to form an alternative campaign finance model that is eroding party control over the primary process. Which types of candidates will benefit remains to be seen.

The primary season is just underway, but the early super PAC tallies appear to be an order of magnitude beyond what we saw the last time, when Mitt Romney’s super PAC “Restore Our Future” raised $12 million in the first half of 2011.

Some speculate that Jeb Bush could raise $100 million in the first quarter and $500 million by June. Anything near those sums would smash Mr. Romney’s performance.

Ted Cruz more than doubled Mr. Romney’s tally in three weeks. A network of super PACs aligned with Mr. Cruz said it raised $31 million in the weeks after he announced his candidacy, which is more than Mr. Obama did in the entire first quarter of 2007.

There is no precedent for the fund-raising success of Mr. Cruz, a candidate with virtually no support from party elites. My colleague Nicholas Confessore wrote that “the size of the contributions is likely to force backers of other candidates to rethink their budgets for the primary season,” and one can only wonder what the effect might be in another four years. Will the incumbent president raise $4 billion? How much is the presidency really worth? At this point, perhaps we shouldn’t rule out anything.

Money doesn’t buy presidential nominations. At least it hasn’t yet. A candidate who raises the most money, as Phil Gramm did in 1996, can fall flat. A competitive fund-raising effort doesn’t even guarantee competitiveness, as Ron Paul or Rudy Giuliani can attest.

Typically, broad support from party elites is a much better predictor of which candidate will win the nomination. Elites not only help raise money, but they also shape public opinion by promoting or playing down candidates on television or to reporters, or offering public endorsements. They form the staff of an effective campaign.

Money alone isn’t enough to hand victory to a candidate like Mr. Cruz, whom many party elites view as unelectable and unpresidential. They would rally against him if he ever seemed as if he could win. The Republican primary electorate — which is more moderate than it looks — would probably follow the elites’ lead in such circumstances, though this is as much a judgment about the preferences of Republican primary voters as it is about the power of elites.

But even if money can’t buy the presidency, fund-raising is a big part of the reason that elite support is important. Lack of resources resulting from insufficient elite support has hurt many campaigns, even those of mainstream candidates like Gary Hart in 1984 or Mr. McCain in 2000.

There’s no way to rerun the 1984 Democratic or 2000 Republican primaries to figure out how they might have gone differently under 2016 conditions. Perhaps Walter Mondale or George W. Bush would have benefited so much from unlimited contributions that their super PACs would have buried all challengers. Maybe 2004 and 2008 would have been better opportunities for candidates like Mr. McCain or Mr. Hart after the rise of Internet fund-raising but before super PACs allowed their establishment-backed rivals to raise millions more.

Either way, there’s no question that the new combination of unlimited super PAC contributions and online fund-raising has eroded the control of party elites over the last two decades. It’s especially the case in today’s factionalized G.O.P., where even the party elite is fractured along regional, religious and ideological lines. Each faction has a star candidate in this year’s race — not just Mr. Cruz, but also Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee. Despite their big flaws, they have natural bases of support and considerable political talent. They also have real paths to win Iowa or New Hampshire.

Fifteen years ago, candidates such as these would have had virtually no shot of winning the nomination. It took broad support from party donors to build a large war chest — there was no way around it. Today, all it takes is Internet star power or the right wealthy benefactors. These candidates still don’t have a great shot at winning, but they can’t be completely ruled out anymore.

Nor can we rule out the possibility that the right elite-backed candidate, like Jeb Bush, will steamroll the field.