2012 Presidential Election, Super Pac | featured news

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.

Amid a growing perception that Mitt Romney will be the party’s nominee, the biggest of the Republican “super PACs” is set to begin its first major anti-Obama advertising campaign.

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.

The super PAC behind President Obama is on the air in Michigan today with an ad slamming Mitt Romney and his opposition to the auto industry ...

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....

A "Super PAC" supporting Mitt Romney spent much more money than it collected last month.

At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

Super PACs, outside groups that can raise and spend unlimited corporate money to help elect or defeat candidates, have spent heavily to influence the presidential race. This chart shows the amounts raised in 2011 by some of the most active candidate-aligned super PACs and the cash they had remaining in the bank at the end of the year.

The super PAC supporting Jon Huntsman’s aborted presidential bid raised $2.7 million – $1.9 million of which came from his father. The group, Our Destiny PAC, was seen as an example of how a single donor could use the new breed of political group to float a cash-strapped candidacy.