Campaigns and super PACs aren’t supposed to work together, but social media is blurring the lines.
Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Nick Corasaniti, your host on Tuesdays for our coverage of all things media and messaging, writing to you from Las Vegas, where the leading Democratic presidential candidates are set to debate tomorrow night. |
 | | VoteVets, a super PAC, is airing an ad in Nevada featuring Bob Nard, a Vietnam veteran who is supporting Pete Buttigieg. |
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To most supporters of Pete Buttigieg, the tweet probably seemed innocuous: A senior adviser to Mr. Buttigieg, Michael Halle, simply noted that the candidate’s military record would be an asset in Nevada. |
But critics say Mr. Halle’s tweet also served as a Bat Signal to VoteVets, the super PAC supporting Mr. Buttigieg’s candidacy, with an unmistakable directive: Run ads in Nevada on this issue. |
“Pete’s military experience and closing message from Iowa work everywhere especially in Nevada where it’s critical they see this on the air through the caucus,” Mr. Halle wrote on Feb. 5. |
The Federal Election Commission prohibits political campaigns from coordinating activities with outside groups — the super PACs, political nonprofits and dark-money groups that can collect unlimited contributions. But campaigns have been exploiting a loophole for years by using public digital communications, largely on social media platforms, to get around the regulations. |
The argument is that if a campaign says or posts something in public, for everyone to see, and a super PAC just happens to also see it and take action, then it’s fair game. Whether or not VoteVets acted on Mr. Halle’s message, it certainly carried out his wishes: The group cut an ad highlighting Mr. Buttigieg’s military service within about a week of the tweet and has spent roughly $300,000 to keep it on the air in Nevada over the past week. |
But a campaign finance watchdog group filed a complaint on Tuesday, alleging that Mr. Halle’s tweet ran afoul of federal regulations. Though the F.E.C. allows super PACs to use “publicly available” information to create ads, the complaint said the agency did not allow ads to be created and distributed at the “request or suggestion” of a candidate or his agent. |
“It was the Buttigieg campaign’s obvious and detailed request for super PAC support here that crossed the legal line,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, the watchdog group that filed the complaint. |
VoteVets has said it does not coordinate advertising with the Buttigieg campaign, and the Buttigieg campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. But Chris Meagher, a campaign spokesman, issued a statement on the same day Mr. Halle sent his tweet that acknowledged that the campaign welcomed VoteVets advertising on the issue. |
“Pete is the only candidate who isn’t a millionaire or billionaire,” Mr. Meagher said at the time. “And if the largest progressive veterans group wants to help spread the word about his service, we welcome it.” |
Mr. Fischer said the Buttigieg campaign had erased plausible deniability. “They also effectively acknowledged that the request and suggestion was directly tied to VoteVets,” Mr. Fischer said. “I think that’s what sets this apart.” |
The dust-up is yet another example of the written-on-the-fly rules that govern digital campaigning, particularly when it comes to the actions of outside groups. |
Most of this kind of public coordination has involved the expensive task of television advertising. Campaigns have increasingly been dumping extensive footage of campaign rallies or old biographical videos on their YouTube pages. Super PACs or other groups can then download the footage, cut their own ads and use their own money to put them on the air, saving campaigns millions of dollars. |
This has occasionally led to some humorous viewing. In 2014, the campaign of Senator Mitch McConnell dropped nearly two and a half minutes of footage of the senator signing papers, sitting on a couch with his wife, and giving awkward smirks at the camera (which spawned a meme known as #McConnelling). |
In 2016, the presidential campaign of Senator Ted Cruz posted nearly 15 hours of footage to YouTube, including outtakes and off-camera coaching from the candidate to his mother. Viewed in a vacuum, it appeared to be largely worthless bloopers. To a super PAC, it was endless footage. |
Some campaigns have taken public coordination with their super PACs to the extremes. Carly Fiorina, a Republican candidate for president in 2016, relied on her super PAC to stage events, provide signage and staff the sign-up table, on top of advertising. |
Under F.E.C. rules, Ms. Fiorina’s super PAC could not call the campaign headquarters for a future schedule. So Ms. Fiorina’s campaign created a public Google calendar, which it updated weeks into the future, showing the events she had planned. |
Even the super PAC’s name, Carly for America, was itself an evasion of an F.E.C. regulation that prohibits super PACs from using a candidate’s name as part of their own. But the group claimed “Carly” was merely an acronym for Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You. |
The F.E.C. hasn’t shown an eagerness to enforce many campaign finance laws for the past decade, and it has lacked a quorum of commissioners since September. The Campaign Legal Center’s complaint is unlikely to be resolved for at least two to three years, Mr. Fischer said. |
So, with less than five days to go before caucus day, the $290,000 in additional ad reservations that VoteVets has in Nevada is likely to remain unchanged. |
We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
Also, for any of our readers who have a super PAC: My culinary experience and closing appetite from Iowa work everywhere, especially in Nevada, where it’s critical I eat at Tacos El Gordo repeatedly through the caucus. |
Ad of the week: A viral video worth millions |
We often consider something an ad only if it has money behind it. But sometimes a campaign-generated video can carry the weight of a political ad with no money behind it at all. |
Michael R. Bloomberg has already spent more money on a presidential campaign than anyone else in history, plowing $338.7 million into traditional media, according to Advertising Analytics, a tracking firm. (Former President Barack Obama spent $338.3 million in the 2012 campaign, the firm said.) And yet, this week his team found particular success with a video it posted for free online. |
The video, which catalogs vitriolic messages sent by some of Bernie Sanders’s online supporters, has been viewed more than four million times on Twitter and generated a news cycle’s worth of earned media coverage about the growing spat between the two candidates. |
The message: The Democratic candidates for president are rarely aggressive in their social media attacks on one another. Their supporters, however, can be a different story, and a subset of Mr. Sanders’s online supporters has become notoriously known as “Bernie Bros.” |
Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign decided to attack them head-on in its first wholly negative assault on a Democratic rival for president. It ran a rapidly accelerating highlight reel of some of the threats and abusive comments doled out by a selection of Sanders supporters, and framed the Vermont senator as responsible for their actions. After a clip showing Mr. Sanders calling for “civil discourse” at Liberty University in 2015, the ad goes black, with just text on the screen, flipping from “Really?” to “Really.” |
(Mr. Sanders has said that “anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement.”) |
The takeaway: Though the online trolls supporting Mr. Sanders have been making waves for years, Mr. Bloomberg’s video was posted to Twitter in the wake of reports that leaders of a powerful Nevada labor union were inundated with online abuse and harassment after they chose not to endorse a candidate in the caucuses there. |
Other candidates, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, soon weighed in, saying Mr. Sanders had to do more to rein in his online army. Mr. Sanders shot back at Mr. Bloomberg, saying at a rally in Nevada that Mr. Bloomberg was no different than President Trump when it came to using their personal fortunes to advance a “corrupt political system.” But the topic of “Bernie Bros” was trending online and spiking in Google searches. |
Swipe right for low-dollar donations |
Covering digital campaigning for years now, we’ve seen our fair share of creative fund-raising pitches. |
Mr. Winter, who is a candidate for Montana’s lone congressional seat, sent out an email with pictures from a supposed Tinder profile, featuring the candidate clutching two dogs and appearing shirtless. His interests included “health care” and “talking policy,” and he favored “big mountains” over “big corporations.” |
The email, sent out on Valentine’s Day, quickly garnered some viral attention. |
The campaign played coy on Tuesday, however, over how many supporters swiped right to donate. Mr. Winter’s team would not say how much he had raised, but did note that the campaign saw a 300 percent spike in donations after the email was sent out. |
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