STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A member of The Squad is likely to return to Congress for another term. Democrat Ilhan Omar of Minnesota won her primary this week. Two other members of the progressive group lost their primaries this year - Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. And here is one difference between those primaries - the progressives who lost faced outside spending in their race from a Super PAC, a political action committee linked to a pro Israel organization. Sarah Bryner is following all of this. She is with OpenSecrets, a group that advocates for greater transparency when it comes to money in politics. Good morning.
SARAH BRYNER: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK, the basics first - what is the power of a super PAC when it plays in congressional campaigns like these?
BRYNER: The power is significant. One thing that a super PAC cannot do is buy the election outcome. If that was the case, we'd be talking about President Mike Bloomberg right now. But they can put candidates on their toes by setting the narrative. So if they want to focus the conversation around a topic like Gaza, around which the member might be vulnerable, they can do so by running extensive and targeted ads on that topic. And that kind of message-setting power is meaningful and didn't used to exist in a time when parties and candidates themselves had - held more power.
INSKEEP: And do I understand the current state of the law correctly when I say that a super PAC has an easier time raising money with fewer limitations when they reach out to wealthy individuals?
BRYNER: You do. It's a lot easier to raise $1 million from one person than it is to raise $1 million from 100,000 people, so long as you have a connection to that one particular millionaire.
INSKEEP: Yeah. Now, you said a very valid thing there when you pointed out people vote as they vote. You're not buying the election, but you might be buying the news cycle or buying the conversation or setting the agenda for the conversation. And then you said a very interesting thing. A group like AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - could buy ads that puts people on the defensive on an issue like Gaza if they disagree with their approach to the Israeli war against Hamas. But in a couple of these primaries that doesn't seem to be exactly what AIPAC did. Gaza might be their concern, but they bought ads about something else. Is that normal?
BRYNER: No, that is not normal. And I will also say that what they did in the Bush race in Missouri - the Cori Bush race - is that they ran ads through a super PAC called the United Democracy Project. Most Americans, even if they've heard of AIPAC - the American Israeli Affairs Committee...
INSKEEP: Public Affairs Committee. Right, right.
BRYNER: Public Affairs Committee - haven't heard of the United Democracy PAC. So you don't know what the meaning or the sort of motivations behind that super PAC are if you don't know who they are.
INSKEEP: Oh, now this is really interesting. I'm just thinking about the practicalities here. Usually, at the end of an advertisem*nt, we have to find out who pays for it. And if we found out that this ad that's not about Israel issues is paid for by AIPAC, we might go, huh. But we actually get this tag line that says this other generic thing?
BRYNER: Exactly. Exactly. And that's one of the critical problems with the way super PACs function is that they might disclose who their donors are, but they don't disclose it in the ad, and the typical viewer of that ad has no idea. And so you don't know who is paying to try to buy your opinion and your vote.
INSKEEP: Given that people don't buy votes here, they spend a lot of money and they buy the agenda, or they buy the ads, I do wonder if you think you can connect super PAC spending to winning or losing elections. I mean, we can look here and say, AIPAC spent in a couple of races and didn't spend in a third race. We might think AIPAC bought the result, but we might just as well think that AIPAC was smart about where they thought they could make a minor difference and where they thought they couldn't make a difference.
BRYNER: I think that that's correct. It's really difficult to say that super PACs are the defining characteristic in an election outcome because there's so many other factors at play. The members could have been vulnerable on that issue. Their voters might not have agreed with them on that issue. But that being said, primaries are low turnout elections, and by affecting who turns out, which you can do via advertisem*nts, you can, you know, push more people to the polls or keep more people away. So it can make a difference particularly in these, like I said, low-turnout and oftentimes low-information races.
INSKEEP: A couple of these races had millions of dollars spent. When you pull out and look overall, how big a year - busy a year has this been for super PACs?
BRYNER: It's been very busy. We actually just passed the billion-dollar-spent mark.
INSKEEP: Wow.
BRYNER: So that obviously includes all races across the country, including the presidential contest, and I expect it to increase significantly, but it's not going anywhere. People thought, oh, maybe people will back away from super PACs over time, they'll take control back to the parties or whatever. That's not happening.
INSKEEP: We've just got a few seconds left, but I want to note - if you were following politics 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it wasn't this way, right? Not nearly as much money.
BRYNER: Absolutely not. There were a lot of factors as to that, but super PACs, the effects of Citizens United have ultimately completely opened the floodgates to spending on politics.
INSKEEP: Sarah Bryner is Director of Research and Strategy at OpenSecrets. Thanks so much.
BRYNER: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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