And Senator Marco Rubio’s chance of winning his party’s nomination may hinge on the support of an “independent” group financed by a billionaire who has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s past campaigns, paid his salary teaching at a university and employed his wife.
With striking speed, the 2016 contenders are exploiting loopholes and regulatory gray areas to transform the way presidential campaigns are organized and paid for.
.. Major costs of each candidate’s White House bid, from television advertising to opposition research to policy development, are now being shifted to legally independent organizations that can accept unlimited contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions.
.. Traditionally, a candidate who waited too long to hire a campaign staff risked losing all the best talent to rival candidates. Hire too early, and the campaign’s payroll costs quickly balloon, burning through contributions that are capped at $2,700 per donor.
How to Push Back Against Billionaire Donors
Super PACs, for those blessedly unaware, are the instruments through which rich people give candidates unlimited amounts of money. The Obama campaign established one in 2012 but because, in theory, super PACs are independent from the candidates they support, President Obama did not appear at its events. Hillary is showing no such restraint.
.. As an official presidential candidate, she can’t ask for such vast sums directly. An underling will have to do that. But even that makes her pure compared to Jeb Bush, who has resisted formally announcing his candidacy in part because it liberates him to make the ask himself.
.. It’s become commonplace for political reporters to discuss not merely the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, but the “Adelson primary” and the “Koch primary.” And for good reason: Winning the support of these men—who will likely give their favored candidate tens of millions of dollars—may be as important as winning certain primary states.
.. Presidential candidates know that in exchange for pursuing immense political power, they must forfeit much of their privacy. Mega-donors, who are also seeking immense political power via their donations, should have to make the same trade. Journalists should not only investigate their interactions with politicians, they should ferret out information about what they believe and how they conduct their affairs.
Unscripted Hillary Clinton Still Feels Scripted
On the basis of what little we’ve seen thus far, Hillary Clinton’s opening gambit is to persuade voters that a candidate of wealth and privilege, who has received fat checks for speaking to Goldman Sachs and will have a projected $2.5 billion campaign war chest, is as simple and down-home and as jus’ folks as the Iowa farmers in Grant Wood’s American Gothic.
Would You Let the I.R.S. Prepare Your Taxes?
But Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious. In the last five years, according to disclosure documents, Intuit spent nearly $13 million on federal lobbying. That is about the same amount that companies many times its size have spent on lobbying. Apple, which has an annual income about 40 times that of Intuit, also spent about $13 million on lobbying in the same period. While documents show that Intuit lobbies on several issues, including immigration, cybersecurity and intellectual property law, the company’s largest lobbying contracts all involve the issue of tax administration.
.. In 2006, using an independent expenditure group known as the Alliance for California’s Tomorrow, Intuit sank $1 million into the race for California state comptroller in support of Tony Strickland, a Republican who opposed ReadyReturn. Mr. Strickland lost to John Chiang, a Democrat, but Intuit’s money was nevertheless effective.
“It was a huge signal to politicians everywhere how much Intuit cares about this,” Mr. Bankman said. “People in other states who had been interested in it started saying, ‘We just don’t want to pick a fight with Intuit.’ ”