Republican, Super Pac | featured news

A little more than a year ago, Frank VanderSloot contributed $1million to a "super PAC" supporting Mitt Romney. Now, the Idaho-based health products executive is a sought-after donor at the Republican National Convention as he makes the rounds of independent groups backing the GOP ticket.

David Koch, a billionaire bankrolling anti-Obama ads, is a Mitt Romney delegate to the Republican National Convention... Koch and his brother, Charles, are the major forces behind the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which is currently funding a $27 million ad blitz against Obama.

...And that will all come on top of the barrage of negative ads from Republican groups. Despite the conventional wisdom that Obama would attack Romney to distract from the poor state of the economy, the Post finds that 100 percent of the ad spending from GOP-aligned groups Americans for Prosperity, the American Energy Alliance, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have been negative. 58 percent of Romney’s spending has been on negative ads, compared to only 44 percent of Obama’s. If anyone can win this election on the strength of a barrage of misleading negative ads, it won’t be Obama, it will be his opponent.

An independent group backing Republican Mitt Romney is spending nearly $4 million on ads in nine battleground states. An organization that tracks TV spending by political campaigns says the Romney-aligned Restore Our Future has bought television ad time in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and New Hampshire.

A pro-Romney super PAC received $400,000 from a West Palm Beach, Fla., company that has been listed as inactive in state since March 2011.

Crossroads GPS, a conservative nonprofit group that is one of the most prominent critics of President Obama, raised nearly $77 million in its first 19 months from a small cadre of secret donors, including two dozen who wrote checks of $1 million and more.

Time may be up for Newt Gingrich; but his biggest backer is not going away. Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who with his wife donated $16.5 million dollars to a Newt-linked Super PAC – and later said he might be willing to up that to $100 million – has made it plain he’ll eagerly switch his allegiance to whichever Republican faces Barack Obama in the fall.

Super PACs have poured nearly $4 million into advertising in Ohio ahead of Super Tuesday, accounting for most of the spending in what has become an overwhelmingly negative contest.

Leaders of some of the new groups are taking advantage of the mammoth donations and the lack of oversight to write themselves big paychecks or hire their own companies. The Red White and Blue Fund, a "super PAC" backing the presidential bid of Republican Rick Santorum, paid more than half a million dollars last month to a newly formed direct mail firm.

An unmistakable dynamic is playing out in the money game among Republican presidential candidates: New "super" political action committees are growing more powerful than the campaigns they support....