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      The Little Red Boxes Making a Mockery of Campaign Finance Laws

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      Facing a threat from his left flank, Representative Kurt Schrader of Oregon wanted to send an urgent message to allies ahead of his upcoming primary: It was time to go on the attack.The challenge: Campaign finance rules bar candidates from directly coordinating with the very outside groups that Mr. Schrader, a top moderate in Congress, needed to alert. So instead, he used a little red box.On April 29, Mr. Schrader issued a not-quite-private directive inside a red-bordered box on an obscure corner of his website, sketching out a three-pronged takedown of what he called his “toxic” challenger, Jamie McLeod-Skinner — helpfully including a link to a two-page, opposition-research document about her tenure as a city manager.The message was received.On May 3, a super PAC that has received all its money from a secret-money group with ties to the pharmaceutical industry began running television ads that did little more than copy, paste and reorder the precise three lines of attack Mr. Schrader had outlined.Kurt Schrader for CongressAn ad attacking Jamie McLeod-Skinner reflects language used on her opponent Kurt Schrader’s campaign website.Center ForwardFrom Oregon to Texas, North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates nationwide are using such red boxes to pioneer new frontiers in soliciting and directing money from friendly super PACs financed by multimillionaires, billionaires and special-interest groups.Campaign watchdogs complain that the practice further blurs the lines meant to keep big-money interests from influencing people running for office, effectively evading the strict donation limits imposed on federal candidates. And while the tactic is not new to 2022, it is becoming so widespread that a New York Times survey of candidate websites found at least 19 Democrats deploying some version of a red box in four of the states holding contested congressional primaries on Tuesday.The practice is both brazen and breathtakingly simple. To work around the prohibition on directly coordinating with super PACs, candidates are posting their instructions to them inside the red boxes on public pages that super PACs continuously monitor.The boxes highlight the aspects of candidates’ biographies that they want amplified and the skeletons in their opponents’ closets that they want exposed. Then, they add instructions that can be extremely detailed: Steering advertising spending to particular cities or counties, asking for different types of advertising and even slicing who should be targeted by age, gender and ethnicity.“Liberals, voters under 50 and women — across only San Antonio, Guadalupe and Atascosa counties,” reads the targeting guidance from Jessica Cisneros, a Democratic challenger in South Texas.Understand the Pennsylvania Primary ElectionThe crucial swing state will hold its primary on May 17, with key races for a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship.Hard-Liners Gain: Republican voters appear to be rallying behind far-right candidates in two pivotal races, worrying both parties about what that could mean in November.G.O.P. Senate Race: Kathy Barnette, a conservative commentator, is making a surprise late surge against big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.Democratic Senate Race: Representative Conor Lamb had all the makings of a front-runner, but John Fetterman, the state’s shorts-wearing lieutenant governor, is resonating with voters.Abortion Battleground: Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where abortion access hangs in the balance with midterm elections this year.Electability Concerns: Starting with Pennsylvania, the coming weeks will offer a window into the mood of Democratic voters who are deeply worried about a challenging midterm campaign environment.“Black voters ages 45+ in Durham and white women ages 45+ in Orange” was the recent directive from Valerie Foushee, a Democratic House candidate in North Carolina locked in a competitive primary for an open seat.Red-boxing spans the ideological spectrum of the Democratic Party, from Blue Dog Democrats like Mr. Schrader to progressives like his challenger and Ms. Cisneros, who has the backing of the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats as she tries to unseat Representative Henry Cuellar.It is not clear why Democratic candidates have so thoroughly embraced the red box tactic in primaries while Republicans have not. Republicans work hand in glove with their super PACs, too, but in different ways.In 2014, some Republican groups tried using anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data through coded tweets. More recently, J.D. Vance outsourced some of his Ohio Senate campaign’s most basic operations. His allied super PAC, funded by $15 million from the Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, posted troves of internal and polling data on an unpublicized Medium page that campaign officials used to guide decisions.The Vance super PAC was so central to the campaign that when Mr. Vance walked onstage at a rally with Donald J. Trump, the cameraman filming him from behind worked for the super PAC, not the Vance campaign.Adav Noti, the legal director of the watchdog group the Campaign Legal Center, said that red boxes were erasing the very barriers that were erected to make politicians feel less indebted to their biggest financial benefactors. Federal candidates can legally raise only $2,900 for a primary per donor; super PACs can receive donations of $1 million — or even more.“It’s a joke,” he said. “The coordination of super PACs and candidates is the primary mechanism for corruption of federal campaigns in 2022.”In Democratic primaries, the biggest money is often aligned with the more moderate wing of the party, and sometimes with very specific interest groups.In her race in North Carolina, Ms. Foushee, a state legislator, has been aided by more than $3 million in spending from two of the bigger new players in Democratic House races. One is a super PAC funded by an arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group (a separate pro-Israel group has spent nearly $300,000 more). And the other is a super PAC financed chiefly by the 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.Ms. Foushee is running against, among others, Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who promotes herself as the first Muslim woman elected in North Carolina, and who has been critical of U.S. military aid to Israel “being used to oppress the Palestinian people.”The super PAC that Mr. Bankman-Fried is bankrolling, Protect Our Future, has spent more than $11 million in another open Oregon House race — an astounding sum to lift a political newcomer, Carrick Flynn. At least one of the many ads run in the race echoes the language in Mr. Flynn’s red box.Red boxes are typically hidden in plain sight in “Media Center” or “Media Resources” sections of campaign websites that operatives know how to find, and often use thinly veiled terms to convey their instructions: Saying voters need to “hear” something is a request for radio ads, “see” means television, “read” means direct mail, and “see while on the go” usually means digital ads.Ms. Allam used “on the go” in an April 20 red box update to request online ads telling voters — “especially women, Democrats under 50 and progressives” — that she would “be an unapologetic progressive.”The Working Families Party used those exact words — along with other verbatim phrases — in a Facebook ad that began running on May 5. Facebook records show that 95 percent of the ad’s impressions were with women and people under 54.End runs around campaign limits are themselves nothing new: For years, candidates have posted flattering pictures and videos of themselves for super PACs to download and use. But the explosion of red boxes and their unabashed specificity is the latest example of how America’s system of financing political campaigns — and the restrictions put in place to curb the power of the wealthy in the wake of Watergate a half-century ago — is teetering toward collapse.“This page only exists because of our broken campaign finance system,” reads a web page that Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a leading candidate in Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary, posted this year to make suggestions to super PACs. (Like some others, he did not surround his instructions in a red box.)Mr. Fetterman was not above providing guidance: His site asked only for positive ads and included some biographical bullet points. Sure enough, a super PAC ran a positive ad employing some of those arguments — like the fact that he had refused to live in a state mansion to save taxpayers money.Conor Lamb for U.S. SenatePennsylvania ProgressMr. Fetterman’s leading rival, Representative Conor Lamb, used his own red box earlier this year to outline the attacks he hoped his supportive super PAC would broadcast against Mr. Fetterman. In short order, a television ad appeared warning Democrats that Mr. Fetterman had once been called a “Silver Spoon Socialist” and that “Republicans think they could crush” him. It also echoed verbatim the recommended talking points about Mr. Lamb’s background.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      How J.D. Vance Won in Ohio: A Trump Endorsement, a Fox News Stage and Money

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      A big endorsement was decisive, but a cable news megaphone and a huge infusion of spending helped pave the way to victory.CINCINNATI — It was only hours after J.D. Vance had announced his Senate campaign with an us-against-them speech last July that he stepped off the stage and sat down to make his case on one of the Republican Party’s biggest and most valuable platforms: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News.Speaking from his hometown in Ohio, one that his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” put on the map as a symbol of left-behind Middle America, Mr. Vance lamented the “elites and the ruling class” and how they “have plundered this country.”Mr. Carlson lapped it up — “I love that,” he beamed — and all but endorsed Mr. Vance’s campaign on the spot. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” Mr. Carlson said. “I’m really glad you’re doing it.”J.D. Vance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last July when he announced his run for Senate.Fox NewsThe victory of Mr. Vance, 37, in the Ohio Senate Republican primary on Tuesday was unquestionably fueled by the April 15 endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, which catapulted Mr. Vance toward victory. But other factors had set the stage for the former president to play such a decisive role.Mr. Vance had received both behind-the-scenes and very public help: from Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son; from the not-so-quiet support of Mr. Carlson; and from the extraordinary and early investment of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who is also Mr. Vance’s former boss.In the end, that group — Mr. Thiel, Mr. Carlson, and the two Trumps — formed a powerful alliance. Mr. Thiel’s $15 million appears to be the most ever spent by an individual megadonor to elect a single Senate candidate. Mr. Carlson’s program is the most watched on cable television and a trendsetter for conservative media. And the former president is the most popular politician in the Republican Party.Together, they helped deliver for Mr. Vance everything he would need for his Trump-toned, anti-corporate, nationalist message to succeed: funding, media attention and a late surge of momentum.Mr. Trump’s blessing was uniquely powerful in Ohio, where it effectively absolved Mr. Vance of his previous harsh denunciations of Mr. Trump — the focus of almost all the attacks on his campaign. Every race is different, and even Mr. Trump’s influence has limits: Mr. Vance won just over 32 percent of the vote, meaning most primary voters did not side with the former president’s pick.Still, given Ohio’s Republican leanings, Mr. Vance now enters the fall campaign as a favorite to enter the United States Senate largely owing his seat to the former president’s intervention.Supporters of J.D. Vance at a rally hosted by former President Donald J. Trump last month in Delaware, Ohio.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s emergence as a Make America Great Again standard-bearer in 2022 would have seemed unthinkable six years ago, when he was a self-styled “Never Trump” Republican and a fixture of the mainstream news media as a translator for liberals curious about the bombastic New Yorker’s cultural appeal. In early 2021, Mr. Vance sought to make amends. And it was Mr. Thiel who brokered and attended a meeting at Mar-a-Lago at which Mr. Vance began his rehabilitation and reinvention. Additional help came from the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a Trump favorite, who connected Mr. Vance with Andy Surabian, an adviser to Donald Trump Jr.An Inside Look at Fox NewsThe conservative cable news network is one of the most influential media outlets in the United States.Tucker Carlson: The star TV host stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, he transformed Fox News and became Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.What Trump Helped Build: Together, the channel and Donald Trump have redefined the limits of acceptable political discourse.How Russia Uses Fox News: The network has appeared in Russian media as a way to bolster the Kremlin’s narrative about the Ukraine war.Leaving Fox News: After 18 years with the network, the anchor Chris Wallace, who left for the now shuttered streaming service CNN+, said working at Fox News had become “unsustainable.”While rival Ohio Senate contenders pressured, and sometimes pestered, the former president for his support, Mr. Vance’s lobbying effort was more restrained. When four other candidates traveled to Mar-a-Lago for a fund-raiser for a House candidate and were corralled into an impromptu pitch session with Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance was not there. Two people close to him said he had stayed away deliberately, to avoid being seen as just one of a cluster of aspirants.The contrast, at that point, could have been unkind: The early G.O.P. front-runner was Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer and two-time Senate candidate. Two businessmen were also in the race — Bernie Moreno, a car dealer, and Mike Gibbons, a financial executive — as was Jane Timken, a former state Republican chairwoman.All of them, along with Matt Dolan, a wealthy state senator, could draw on millions of dollars of their own or from old campaign accounts. In contrast, Mr. Vance was a first-time candidate with no real national donor network, and was not rich enough to finance his own campaign.His super PAC, which received $10 million from Mr. Thiel months before he even entered the race, would be crucial.But there was a legal complication: Outside groups may not privately coordinate strategy with campaigns. So the super PAC found a workaround, publishing troves of internal data on an unpublicized Medium page where campaign officials knew to find it. The existence of the site was first revealed by Politico.The degree to which the super PAC worked as something of an adjunct to the campaign itself is remarkable. According to documents it posted, the outside group “recruited, vetted and hired staff who later joined” the campaign, sent text messages and robocalls to build crowds for Vance events and even paid for online advertising that directed donations to the Vance campaign.Yet for all his cash, Mr. Thiel absented himself from the super PAC’s operations, never once speaking to Luke Thompson, who ran it, so Mr. Thiel could legally continue to speak with Mr. Vance as an adviser, according to Mr. Thompson.Peter Thiel at a Bitcoin conference in Miami last month.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Thompson called Mr. Thiel’s approach “a venture capital mind-set,” likening the campaign to a start-up. “J.D. is the founder and picks his team,” he said.Even with the early Thiel money, Mr. Vance relied on conservative media for attention, appearing on the programs of Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.Appearances on Mr. Carlson’s Fox News program were most valuable of all.He has appeared on the program 15 times since July, according to Media Matters for America, often drawing heavy praise from the host. “Occasionally, you run into somebody who could actually change things,” Mr. Carlson said during an interview on the eve of the election. “That would be J.D. Vance.”“Tucker was really, really important,” Mr. Thompson said. “It meant that our guy had a platform to go and talk to primary voters in Ohio — and small-dollar donors nationwide.”Then came the attacks.For weeks last fall, the anti-tax Club for Growth, which supported Mr. Mandel, pummeled Mr. Vance for his past denunciations of Mr. Trump. Mr. Vance’s own super PAC found that Ohioans knew little about him besides that he had once opposed Trump. By December, David McIntosh, the Club for Growth’s president, had repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to back Mr. Mandel, warning him that Mr. Vance’s candidacy was doomed.Josh Mandel conceding the primary race to J.D. Vance on Tuesday night in Beachwood, Ohio.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. McIntosh evidently was persuasive: Speaking with advisers, Mr. Trump mulled whether to get behind Mr. Mandel, saying that Mr. Vance was “dead, isn’t he?”“I like J.D. a lot, but everyone just tells me those ads killed him,” Mr. Trump told one adviser.In hindsight, however, Nick Everhart, a Republican strategist based in Ohio, said that “being shoved out of the first tier of the race” might have been “the best thing that happened to Vance,” because the attacks on him largely stopped.Records from AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm, show that ads attacking Mr. Vance slowed to a trickle in December and then stopped entirely in February.When ads supporting Mr. Vance began to run, he gained traction, though he still trailed. By April 4, his super PAC posted a memo saying Mr. Vance was no longer “primarily associated” with his prior criticisms of Mr. Trump.“J.D. showed a lot of resilience in this race — and when the political class in the Beltway wrote him off as dead in the water earlier this year, he clawed his way back into contention to get President Trump’s endorsement and ultimately win through his sheer determination and natural political talent,” said Mr. Surabian, who, along with Jai Chabria, ran Mr. Vance’s campaign. Indeed, Mr. Trump was swayed in part by how Mr. Vance handled himself on television. In one debate, when Mr. Mandel and Mr. Gibbons went toe to toe, Mr. Vance scolded them, rising above the fray — and impressing Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump was on a golf course, editing his statement endorsing Mr. Vance, when NBC News reported he was about to issue it. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, working with Mr. Vance’s opponents, were lobbying the former president not to, but the report only solidified his decision.Mr. Vance also benefited from a more accurate picture of the electorate.Mr. McIntosh, of the Club for Growth, repeatedly argued to Mr. Trump that the former president’s pollster, Anthony Fabrizio, who was also working for Mr. Vance, had modeled the Ohio primary electorate inaccurately.The Club for Growth’s polling last weekend showed Mr. Vance receiving 26 percent of the vote. Mr. Fabrizio’s polling had Mr. Vance at 32 percent.Mr. Vance finished with 32.2 percent.Jeff Roe, a Republican strategist who worked with the Club for Growth in Ohio, called Mr. Trump before the polls closed on Tuesday to concede. He told Mr. Trump that the former president was “100 percent responsible” for Mr. Vance’s win, according to a person briefed on the conversation.In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Vance thanked, among others, Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and, of course, the former president.Shane Goldmacher reported from Cincinnati, and Maggie Haberman from New York. More

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      Wealthy GOP Donors Form Secret Coalitions to Wield More Influence

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      Eager to offset a Democratic advantage among so-called dark money groups, wealthy pro-Trump conservatives like Peter Thiel are involved in efforts to wield greater influence outside the traditional party machinery.A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews.The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has laid out an ambitious goal — to reshape the American right by spending more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.The emergence of Rockbridge, the existence of which has not previously been reported, comes amid escalating jockeying among conservative megadonors to shape the 2022 midterms and the future of the Republican Party from outside the formal party machinery, and often with little disclosure.In February, another previously unreported coalition of donors, the Chestnut Street Council, organized by the Trump-allied lobbyist Matt Schlapp, held a meeting to hear a pitch for new models for funding the conservative movement.If those upstart coalitions gain momentum, they will likely have to vie for influence among conservatives with existing donor networks that have been skeptical of or agnostic toward Mr. Trump.One that was created by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch spent more than $250 million in 2020. Another, spearheaded by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, hosted top Republican politicians in February.The surge in secretive fund-raising does not end there — a number of nonprofit groups with varying degrees of allegiance to Mr. Trump are also vying to become leading distributors of donor funds to the right.Taken together, the jockeying highlights frustration on the right with the political infrastructure that surrounds the Republican Party, and, in some cases, with its politicians, as well as disagreements about its direction as Mr. Trump teases another presidential run.The efforts to harness the fortunes of the party’s richest activists could help it capitalize on a favorable electoral landscape headed into this year’s midterm elections, and — potentially — the 2024 presidential campaign. Conversely, the party’s prospects could be dimmed if the moneyed class invests in competing candidates, groups and tactics.The willingness of donors to organize on their own underscores the migration of power and money away from the official organs of the respective parties, which are required to disclose their donors, to outside groups that often have few disclosure requirements. It also reflects a concern among some influential Republicans that the political right faces a disadvantage when it comes to nonprofit groups that support the candidates and causes of each party.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.An analysis by The New York Times found that 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with the Democratic Party spent more than $1.5 billion in 2020 in funds for which the donors’ identities are not disclosed. That compared to roughly $900 million in so-called dark money spent by a comparable sample of 15 groups aligned with Republicans.The effort to close that gap — and to make gains in political consulting and technology that undergirds the right’s political infrastructure — has been a major subject of discussion among these coalitions.Former President Donald J. Trump addressed the Rockbridge Network on Tuesday night at his private club in Mar-a-Lago.Brittany Greeson for The New York Times“We need to show our side is organized and has the necessary institutional know-how and financial support, in order to have any shot at winning future elections,” reads a brochure for the Rockbridge Network.The brochure, which circulated in Republican finance circles this year, calls Rockbridge “a kind of political venture capital firm” that will “leverage our investors’ capital with the right political expertise” to “replace the current Republican ecosystem of think tanks, media organizations and activist groups that have contributed to the Party’s decline with better action-oriented, more effective people and institutions that are focused on winning.”Among the initiatives cited in the Rockbridge brochure are media-related functions — including public relations, messaging, polling, “influencer programs” and investigative journalism — with a combined budget of $8 million.A “lawfare and strategic litigation” effort with a projected cost of $3.75 million is intended to use the courts “to hold bad actors, including the media, accountable.” A “transition project,” with an estimated price tag of $3 million, is intended to assemble policy experts and plans to create a “government-in-waiting” to “staff the next Republican administration.”A “red state project” is intended to mimic a model pioneered by the left in which strategists coordinate the efforts of an array of movement groups to complement one another and avoid overlap. It is estimated to cost $6 million to $8 million per state, and is initially focused on the swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Michigan.A person familiar with Rockbridge described those projects, and their fund-raising goals, as aspirational, and said the coalition had so far focused on allocating donor funds to pre-existing groups to accomplish its goals, rather than creating new ones.The person said that the coalition had tested some of its plans, including a voter registration initiative, last year in Arizona, which is identified in the brochure as a case study.Arizona was the site of Rockbridge’s first summit, which was held last year. It featured a speech by Mr. Thiel, the billionaire tech investor. He and Ms. Mercer, the daughter of the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, were among Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, and worked closely together on his presidential transition team.Since then, Mr. Thiel has emerged as a key kingmaker, supporting 16 Senate and House candidates, some of whom have also been backed by Ms. Mercer. Many of their candidates have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election.One, Blake Masters, a former employee of Mr. Thiel’s who is running for Senate in Arizona, spoke at the Rockbridge dinner reception at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night before Mr. Trump, and conceivably could benefit from Rockbridge’s efforts.Mr. Thiel donated $10 million each to super PACs supporting Mr. Masters and J.D. Vance, an Ohio Senate candidate.It was not clear whether Mr. Thiel or Ms. Mercer attended the Rockbridge gathering this week, which included sessions at another hotel in addition to the dinner reception at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday night. The Mar-a-Lago dinner occurred just before another event there that drew Trump loyalists — the premiere of a movie critical of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook parent company Meta, for providing grants in 2020 to election administrators struggling to cover the costs of holding an election amid a pandemic. Mr. Thiel has been a board member at Meta, but is leaving that position to focus on trying to influence the midterm elections. His involvement in Rockbridge suggests he could be branching into dark-money nonprofit spending.Rockbridge was founded by Christopher Buskirk, who is the editor and publisher of the pro-Trump journal American Greatness and has advised a super PAC supporting Mr. Masters.A spokesman for Mr. Thiel declined to comment. Efforts to reach Ms. Mercer were not successful.Mr. Schlapp, who helped expand the Koch brothers’ political operation more than 15 years ago, said he created the Chestnut Street Council because donors approached him after the 2020 election “expressing frustration with the more normal routes for funding political operations.”“We decided that it made sense to work with these donors to find better investment opportunities,” he said.He suggested that the group would support legal battles over voting rules.At a Chestnut Street Council meeting in February, donors heard a presentation from the veteran Republican fund-raiser Caroline Wren.Ms. Wren, who helped raise money for many Trump political initiatives, including the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said the right should try to replicate the left’s system of donor alliances and nonprofit funding hubs to incubate new groups and increase cooperation between existing ones, according to a person familiar with the presentation.While new funding hubs have emerged on the right in recent years, none have matched the sophistication or spending levels of those on the left.The Conservative Partnership Institute, has sought to become “the hub of the conservative movement.” It claimed in its 2021 annual report to have played a role in the creation of several new conservative nonprofits, including America First Legal, which is led by former Trump aide Stephen Miller; the Center for Renewing America, led by another Trump alumnus, Russ Vought; and the American Cornerstone Institute, led by Ben Carson, the former secretary of housing and urban development.Rebekah Mercer, right, was among Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, and worked on his presidential transition team.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressThe group also houses the Election Integrity Network, which is led by Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer who was on the hourlong call with Georgia officials and Mr. Trump when the then-president pressured them to “find” enough votes to flip the result. The Conservative Partnership Institute received a $1 million infusion from Mr. Trump’s PAC last summer and held a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club, last spring.Such groups have far fewer disclosure requirements than campaigns and political action committees. Funding hubs like the Conservative Partnership Institute and another nonprofit network shaped by the judicial activist Leonard A. Leo are required to disclose their grants to other groups, but not the donors who supplied the cash, while donor coalitions like the Rockbridge Network and Chestnut Street Council will likely not be required to disclose either.The willingness of Mr. Trump and other officials and prospective presidential candidates to engage with these coalitions is a testament to their increasing centrality in American politics.Recent private gatherings hosted in Colorado and Palm Beach, Fla., by Mr. Singer’s coalition, the American Opportunity Alliance, drew appearances by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador.Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was expected to speak at the Rockbridge Network meeting in Palm Beach this week. More

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      A Democratic Super PAC’s Ad Buy Shows a Widening Battle for House Control

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      The Democrats’ House Majority PAC is spending nearly $102 million to reserve advertising time in 51 media markets, staking out a broad battlefield for the coming midterm elections.WASHINGTON — The House Democrats’ main political action committee is spending nearly $102 million to reserve advertising spots in 50 media markets, from Bangor, Maine, to San Diego, Calif., a battlefield that is considerably larger and more expensive than it was in the past two congressional elections.The breadth of the congressional map reveals the scope of Democrats’ worries about holding seats in midterm elections. Areas once considered safe, like South Texas, greater Pittsburgh and Seattle will see Democratic advertising.But Democrats will be playing some offense, too, especially in California, where redistricting has opened up Republican targets.“We are doing whatever it takes to hold the majority, and there are opportunities across the map,” said Abby Curran Horrell, the executive director of the House Democrats’ political action committee, known as House Majority PAC, adding, “We feel confident about the races that we plan to play in.”Her Republican counterpart, Dan Conston of the Congressional Leadership Fund, said the huge expenditure is a sign of weakness and an admission that inflation, rising crime rates and an unpopular Democratic president will not only cost Democrats swing districts but also make some districts President Biden won handily fiercely competitive.“I think they believe they’ve already lost the majority,” he said. “This is about staving off losses in some deep blue, traditionally Democratic areas.”The spending comes even as redistricting has shriveled the number of districts considered competitive based on election results in 2020. House district maps gerrymandered by both parties have left fewer than 40 seats — potentially far fewer — that would have been closely divided between Republican and Democratic voters in 2020. But the new advertising reservations point to a map that has expanded far beyond those districts.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Wednesday’s reservations in 51 markets stand out, even in recent history. In 2020, House Majority PAC made initial advertising reservations in 29 media markets, with half the money it is spending Wednesday. In the Democratic wave year of 2018, $43 million was put down early for reservations in 33 markets.Democrats holding swing seats will see advertising spent on their behalf. Among the beneficiaries will be Representatives Jared Golden of Maine, Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria of Virginia, Cindy Axne of Iowa, Sharice Davids of Kansas, Angie Craig of Minnesota and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.But with Mr. Biden’s approval ratings hovering near 40 percent, House Majority PAC is reserving advertising time to defend some entrenched Democratic incumbents, whose political holds are weakened not just by the president but by newly drawn districts. Representative Sanford Bishop, for instance, has represented a swath of southern Georgia since 1993. Yet the PAC is reserving $2.6 million of ad space in three media markets to boost his re-election.A member of the Kildee family has represented the area around Flint, Mich., for 45 years — first Dale Kildee, then his nephew Dan, who took the seat nearly a decade ago. But new district lines and a stiff political headwind have forced House Majority PAC to make a hefty advertising reservation of more than $1 million to try to save the younger Kildee’s House career. Media stations in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., will get more than $1.7 million as the PAC tries to save Representative Matt Cartwright, another veteran.In Colorado, the last several elections seemed to turn the districts around Boulder and Denver into a reliable shade of blue. But redistricting and the retirement of Representative Ed Perlmutter have prompted House Majority PAC to pony up $4.4 million in the Denver media market to defend the state’s seventh and eighth districts.And the marked movement of Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party is forcing Democratic spending in South Texas to try to secure two House districts that stretch from the once reliably Democratic Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio and its suburbs.Rep. Katie Porter at a town hall meeting in Irvine, Calif., in 2019.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesRep. Mike Levin at an event hosted by the Democratic Party of Orange County, Calif., in 2019.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesDemocrats are also preparing to spend big to stave off defeats in Southern California, focusing their defenses on Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin.The advertising reservations also show how painful it will be to defend the seats of the 31 House Democrats who have announced their retirements or are seeking other offices. Millions of dollars will be spent to save the seats of Mr. Perlmutter and other retiring Democrats, including Ron Kind of Wisconsin, Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona, Cheri Bustos of Illinois and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina.Democrats are defending the seats of the 31 House Democrats who have announced their retirements or are seeking other offices. They include, from left, Rep. Cheri Bustos, Rep. Ron Kind, Rep. Ed Perlmutter, Rep. G.K. Butterfield, and Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. Win McNamee/Getty Images, Lauren Justice for The New York Times, Pool photo by Anna Moneymaker, Erin Schaff/The New York Times, Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times, Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star, via Associated PressThe multitude of races in some states is also challenging Democratic efforts. In Nevada, for instance, where Democrats are trying to hold onto the governorship, a Senate seat, and three House seats, House Majority PAC is shelling out $11.6 million in Las Vegas alone.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Peter Thiel, the Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker

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      The wine flowed. Donald Trump Jr. mingled with the guests. And Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and host of the event, had a message for the well-heeled crowd: It was time to clean house.The fund-raiser at Mr. Thiel’s Miami Beach compound last month was for a conservative candidate challenging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming for a spot on the ballot in November’s midterm elections. Ms. Cheney, one of several Republicans who had voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on charges of inciting the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, was the face of “the traitorous 10,” Mr. Thiel said, according to two people with knowledge of the event, who were not authorized to speak publicly. All of them had to be replaced, he declared, by conservatives loyal to the former president.Mr. Thiel, who became known in 2016 as one of the biggest donors to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, has re-emerged as a key financier of the Make America Great Again movement. After sitting out the 2020 presidential race, the venture capitalist this year is backing 16 Senate and House candidates, many of whom have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the election.To get these candidates into office, Mr. Thiel has given more than $20.4 million. That essentially puts him and Kenneth Griffin, the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, in a tie as the largest individual donors to Republican politics this election cycle, according to the nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets.What sets Mr. Thiel’s spending apart, though, is its focus on hard-right candidates who traffic in the conspiracy theories espoused by Mr. Trump and who cast themselves as rebels determined to overthrow the Republican establishment and even the broader American political order. These campaigns have raised millions in small-dollar donations, but Mr. Thiel’s wealth could accelerate the shift of views once considered fringe to the mainstream — while making himself a new power broker on the right.“When you have a funder who is actively elevating candidates who are denying the legitimacy of elections, that is a direct assault on the foundation of democracy,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning group New America, who studies campaign finance and hyperpartisanship.The candidates Mr. Thiel has funded offer a window into his ideology. While the investor has been something of a cipher, he is currently driven by a worldview that the establishment and globalization have failed, that current immigration policy pillages the middle class and that the country must dismantle federal institutions.Mr. Thiel has started articulating his thinking publicly, recently headlining at least six conservative and libertarian gatherings where he criticized the Chinese Communist Party and big tech companies and questioned climate science. He has taken issue with what he calls the “extreme dogmatism” within establishment institutions, which he said had sent the country backward.At an October dinner at Stanford University for the Federalist Society, he spoke about the “deranged society” that “a completely deranged government” had created, according to a recording of the event obtained by The New York Times. The United States was on the verge of a momentous correction, he said.“My somewhat apocalyptic, somewhat hopeful thought is that we are finally at a point where things are breaking,” Mr. Thiel said.Mr. Thiel, 54, has not publicly said what he believes about the 2020 election. But in Mr. Trump, he sees a vessel to push through his ideological goals, three people close to the investor said. The two men met recently in New York and at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Thiel also funded an app company run by John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, two people with knowledge of the deal said.Unlike traditional Republican donors who have focused on their party’s winning control of Congress and the White House, Mr. Thiel has set his sights on reshaping the Republican agenda with his brand of anti-establishment contrarianism, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.“I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate,” said Mr. Bannon, who has known Mr. Thiel since 2016. “I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country.”How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Power Struggle: Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, a band of anti-Trump Republicans is maneuvering to thwart the ex-president.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Post-Presidency Profits: Mr. Trump is melding business with politics, capitalizing for personal gain.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.Mr. Thiel’s giving is expected to make up just a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are likely to flow through campaigns this cycle. But the amounts he is pouring into individual races and the early nature of his primary donations have put him on the radar of Republican hopefuls.In the past, many courted the billionaire Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate. This year, they have clamored for invitations to Mr. Thiel’s Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes, or debated how to at least get on the phone with him, political strategists said.Mr. Thiel personally vets the candidates he gives to, said three Republican strategists, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. In addition to Harriet Hageman, the challenger to Ms. Cheney, he is backing Joe Kent and Loren Culp, both of whom are running against House Republicans in Washington State who voted to impeach Mr. Trump. He also gave to a political action committee associated with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who is not up for re-election this year. More

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      Hochul Amassed a Campaign Fortune. Here's Who it Came From.

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul’s record-setting $21.6 million in donations flowed from a who’s who of New York’s special interests.Last November, when many of Manhattan’s skyscrapers sat half-empty, Gov. Kathy Hochul made a high-stakes wager on New York City’s commercial real estate industry: She vowed to move ahead with a marquee plan to restore Pennsylvania Station and erect new office towers around it.For Manhattan’s mega-rich real estate developers, the announcement signaled Ms. Hochul’s support for the kind of grand projects that foretell a windfall, and some found a concrete way of showing their approval to the new governor.In the weeks that followed, Ms. Hochul’s campaign received checks for $69,700, the legal limit, from some of the city’s biggest real estate executives, including Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust, which is positioned to directly benefit from the project that he once called a “Promised Land.” Other checks trickled in from developers, builders, engineers and even some who opposed it.The campaign contributions flowed from a broader spigot of cash turned on last fall by New York’s varied special interests, from real estate and building trades to hospitals, labor unions and gaming companies, directed toward Ms. Hochul’s election campaign.The donations included $200,000 in checks from the family behind a major construction firm with millions in state contracts, $47,000 that was tied to a gaming giant leaning on the state to expand legal gambling, and $41,000 traced back to a single Albany lobbyist.The funds helped Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who unexpectedly ascended to office last August, assemble a record-setting $21.6 million war chest, and claim a steep advantage heading into June’s Democratic primary and November’s general election.People and industries with financial interests before the state have long been reliable donors to top elected officials, showering them with money that, at times, can pose ethical and legal problems.There has been no evidence that the contributions from Mr. Roth and other developers were directly related to Ms. Hochul’s Penn Station plan, but those and others may still prompt scrutiny about her decision-making as she negotiates the state’s $216 billion budget.“It’s not like this isn’t a problem, but it is a well-trod path,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, which pushes for tighter campaign finance laws. “She’s just running through it instead of walking.”More than 95 percent of the funds she collected came from donors who gave $1,000 or more, according to a review of publicly available campaign filings, despite the Hochul campaign’s claims of success in pulling in small donations. Dozens of people wrote the governor checks for the legal maximum.Jerrel Harvey, a spokesman for Ms. Hochul’s campaign, pointed to contributions from every county in the state and said that the campaign was proud that her agenda “has resonated with a diverse coalition of supporters.”“In keeping with the governor’s commitment to maintain high ethical standards, campaign contributions have no influence on government decisions,” he said.Many of her donors are fixtures in New York politics and were stalwart supporters of her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo, who collected tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions by often using the same tactics Ms. Hochul is employing. But where Mr. Cuomo had years to build those relationships and fill his campaign coffers, Ms. Hochul has done so in a matter on months.Few industries gave more — and frequently in large amounts — than real estate, where large developers are keenly watching how Ms. Hochul will not only approach large, state-funded capital projects but the future of the state’s affordable housing law.Douglas Durst, who oversees a multibillion dollar real estate empire and chairs the influential Real Estate Board of New York, gave her $55,000. The family of Scott Rechler, a top donor to Mr. Cuomo whose RXR Realty controls millions of square feet of commercial real estate, gave $60,000. Members of the Rudin, Tishman and Speyer families — whose names dot buildings across the city — collectively contributed more than $400,000. Top executives at Related Companies, the group behind Hudson Yards, maxed out.The new governor, who has cast herself as pro-business and greenlighted a rash of expensive capital projects amid an influx of federal funds, also quickly began collecting funds from the state’s construction industry. Hundreds of thousands of dollars came from unions, trade groups and executives representing bricklayers, sheet metal workers, engineers, elevator constructors, machine operators, construction companies and even a law firm that specializes in construction accidents.Hospitals, nursing homes and other health groups, who scored significant victories in Ms. Hochul’s budget, including retention bonuses for frontline health workers, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well. Over two days in October and December, for example, more than 60 LLCs associated with nursing or rehabilitation homes all gave $1,000 or more apiece.Three family members associated with the Haugland Group, a Long Island construction and energy firm with lucrative state contracts at Kennedy Airport and with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, gave more than $200,000 altogether.A Guide to the New York Governor’s RaceCard 1 of 5A crowded field. More

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      As Midterms and 2024 Loom, Trump Political Operation Revs Up

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      The former president is set to headline an event at Mar-a-Lago next month for endorsed candidates and major donors to benefit a supportive super PAC.Donald J. Trump and his allies are scheduling events and raising money for initiatives intended to make the former president a central player in the midterm elections, and possibly to set the stage for another run for the White House.He and groups allied with him are planning policy summits, more rallies and an elaborate forum next month at his Mar-a-Lago resort for candidates he has endorsed and donors who give as much as $125,000 per person to a pro-Trump super PAC.The efforts seem intended to reinforce the former president’s grip on the Republican Party and its donors amid questions about whether Mr. Trump will seek the party’s nomination again or settle into a role as a kingmaker.Taken together, the pro-Trump groups form a sort of shadow political party that could help start another presidential campaign and, if that were successful, shape his administration. They include Mr. Trump’s own PACs, which amassed more than $100 million by last summer, employ an overlapping roster of former top officials from his administration and have signaled that they intend to embrace policies and candidates supported by Mr. Trump.The groups have also helped reinforce his properties as a center of Republican power, holding events at his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump has welcomed to the clubs a stream of Republicans seeking his political blessing, issuing nearly 100 endorsements to aligned candidates, including challengers to G.O.P. incumbents who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment or supported the certification of his defeat to President Biden in the 2020 election.The candidate forum at Mar-a-Lago is being planned for Feb. 23 by a super PAC run by some of Mr. Trump’s closest allies called Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., according to an email to donors from Roy W. Bailey, a Texas businessman and Republican fund-raiser.“There will be an all-day candidate forum with back-to-back speeches from the endorsed candidates and familiar faces in the Trump orbit,” wrote Mr. Bailey, who was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and inaugural committee, then registered to lobby his administration. “We want those who attend to leave thinking that it was the best political event they have ever attended,” he wrote.Donors who raise $375,000 will be invited to a private dinner with Mr. Trump.Mr. Bailey noted that the PAC’s national finance director was Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is dating Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and that its board included Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who advised Mr. Trump during his first impeachment; Richard Grenell, who was Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acting head of national intelligence; and Matthew G. Whitaker, who was acting attorney general.The forum is for federal candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump. It is not clear how many of them intend to attend. But some, including Harriet Hageman, who is mounting a primary challenge against Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of Mr. Trump’s harshest Republican critics, and Kelly Tshibaka, who is running in the primary against Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, have been asked to hold the date, according to a person familiar with the planning who was not authorized to discuss it.Still, Mr. Trump’s political activities have generated some grumbling within his circle of supporters.One donor who had supported Mr. Trump’s campaigns said he was leery about donating to Make America Great Again, Again! because of concerns that the money would be wasted. Citing events at the former president’s properties as an example, the donor, who insisted on anonymity to avoid antagonizing Mr. Trump and his allies, said he declined invitations to the February candidate forum and to a $125,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner with Mr. Trump held by the super PAC last month at Mar-a-Lago. Other donors and party leaders worry about the damage that could be done by Mr. Trump’s backing of primary challenges to Republicans who pushed back against his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Mr. Trump was impeached twice, including after his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. Since then, he has been banned from the social media accounts he had wielded so effectively to generate attention and punish enemies without spending any money.While Mr. Trump has announced the formation of his own media company, including a new social network to reinsert himself into the conversation, it has yet to launch and its financing has come under scrutiny from securities regulators.Mr. Trump’s team also has continued fund-raising voraciously online for various PACs that he directly controls, which had compiled a war chest of more than $100 million last summer, and his team has continued financing campaign-style rallies. He has plans for one in Arizona this month, and more to follow, according to a person familiar with the matter.Many of Mr. Trump’s rallies in 2021 were paired with private donor round tables to raise money for his super PAC. He is planning more rallies in 2022 at locations chosen to help the candidates he has endorsed, according to people familiar with the plans.Groups allied with him have stepped up their fund-raising in recent months, indicating they intend to spend funds to promote his causes and endorsements.A nonprofit group called America First Policy Institute, which was started last year to serve as a think tank for Trump world, has the look of a Trump administration in waiting. It raised more than $20 million last year and has 110 employees, including Ms. Bondi, Mr. Whitaker and a number of former Trump cabinet members, such as David Bernhardt (who ran the Interior Department), Rick Perry (Energy Department) and Andrew Wheeler (Environmental Protection Agency).The group held two events with Mr. Trump at his properties — a fund-raising gala at Mar-a-Lago in November, and an event at Bedminster in July with Ms. Bondi to promote a lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump against tech companies that barred or limited his use of their platforms — and it is planning twice-a-year policy summits around the country.The next summit, planned for April in Atlanta, could feature Mr. Trump, according to the group’s president, Brooke Rollins, who served as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Mr. Trump and says she remains in contact with Mr. Trump about her group’s efforts.She said her group’s goal was to persuade Americans to support policies like those Mr. Trump pursued as president, and “not about getting anyone re-elected,” though she said she hoped the group’s efforts would shape the debates around the midterms and the 2024 presidential election.“The metric of a successful policy organization is how much those policies are part of the debate,” she said.A linked nonprofit group called America First Works is promoting policies that comport with Mr. Trump’s agenda. They include voting rules that make it “hard to cheat,” according to a fact sheet that seems to echo Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which his allies have been relying on to reshape election laws in a manner that could favor Republicans.But the raft of new groups has brought with it some of the drama and infighting that marked Mr. Trump’s campaigns and presidency.A previous iteration of the super PAC behind the Mar-a-Lago forum was replaced after one of its founders, the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was accused of sexual misconduct by a donor.That super PAC, which reported $5.6 million in the bank in mid-August, was supplanted by the new PAC, according to a statement announcing the shift in October that said the assets of the old PAC would be transferred to the new one.The statement called the new group “the ONLY Trump-approved super PAC.” More

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      That ‘Team Beto’ Fund-Raising Email? It Might Not Be From Beto.

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      Mimicking official correspondence is an age-old marketing trick. But look-alike emails suggesting links to Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for governor show the tactic has accelerated in the digital era.Kenneth Pennington, a top digital strategist for Beto O’Rourke, had a simple plan.Mr. O’Rourke would announce his bid for governor of Texas early on a recent Monday morning and then Mr. Pennington would break the news via email to Mr. O’Rourke’s lucrative list of supporters, a loyal following that had already raised tens of millions of dollars for Mr. O’Rourke in his past bids for the Senate and the White House.But Mr. Pennington soon noticed something troubling: a parallel wave of look-alike emails from groups completely unaffiliated with the O’Rourke campaign that were designed to capitalize on the Texas Democrat’s moment. The emails used subject lines, sender names and URLs embedded with phrases like “team Beto” and “official Beto.” And in most cases, none of the money these emails eventually raised went directly to the campaign.Mr. O’Rourke still brought in more than $2 million from 31,000 donors, the largest 24-hour sum that any new candidate has announced this year, his campaign said. But for Mr. Pennington and the rest of the campaign, the nagging question was how much more they might have hauled in if other Democratic groups hadn’t been so busy siphoning off their share.“The frustrating thing,” Mr. Pennington said, “is we will never know how much we lost.”Welcome to the sometimes-sketchy world of online campaign fund-raising, where misdirection and misleading everyday Americans — often older Americans — to maximize clicks and cash is increasingly a dark art form.Imitating others and mimicking official correspondence with postage-paid mailers is an age-old trick that marketers have used since long before the internet. The tactic has been adapted and updated for the digital era — and appears to be accelerating in prevalence in the political sphere.At stake can be millions of dollars in an era when mass online political donating is in vogue in both parties. Copycatting Mr. O’Rourke’s brand surged in popularity recently, but on the Republican side, mimicking the brand of former President Donald J. Trump has been common for months.In some cases, established organizations are simply capitalizing on the day’s big news or the politician of the moment to gin up excitement among their own supporters with some verbal sleight-of-hand. In others, political action committees with anodyne names are raising funds in the name of a popular politician that they have no affiliation with at all. Mr. Pennington described such groups as “leeches” and “scam PACs.”Where the money goes from there can be murky, though big payments to the operatives and consulting firms that operate those PACs have drawn increasing scrutiny from political colleagues, regulators and law enforcement alike.Some of these operations are legal, sometimes burying the requisite disclaimers in the fine print. Others may not be. This month, the Justice Department charged three political operatives with running a scheme that prosecutors said defrauded small donors of $3.5 million.“I am not at all surprised that unscrupulous actors are essentially impersonating popular Democratic campaigns to try to raise money,” said Josh Nelson, a Democratic digital strategist who runs a firm, The Juggernaut Project, focused on growing email lists more ethically. “That’s the unfortunate trend we’ve seen.”Mr. Nelson has been publicly pressuring progressives to abandon more deceptive fund-raising tactics, and has asked the leading Democratic technology companies to intervene because new laws are unlikely to stiffen penalties for deception anytime soon.“Ultimately, I think it is going to take technology vendors cracking down on these tactics,” Mr. Nelson said.For now, there seems to be little that the most aggressive politicians and PACs in both parties won’t say to raise more money from online supporters.“Your covid test result,” read the alarming subject line of a fund-raising email from the campaign arm of House conservatives the day before Mr. O’Rourke entered the governor’s race. (The email was about mobilizing opposition to a Covid-19 vaccine mandate.)A new favorite tactic of the Republican National Committee has been making it appear as if supporters have urgent and overdue bills. “WARNING: Payment Incomplete” has been the sender line of more than 15 party emails since August, including one just before Thanksgiving. (A warning this week was about membership status as “Trump Social Media Founding Supporter.”)The day after Mr. O’Rourke’s announcement, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sent an email to supporters who had not ordered anything, using “Your Order Confirmation” as the sender and “Order ID: 73G526S” as the subject line. (The email was an effort to sell “Let’s Go Brandon” wrapping paper, which references a popular conservative phrase that has become a stand-in for an insult aimed at President Biden.)The House Conservatives Fund, the Republican National Committee and Mr. Abbott’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.Some of these examples may seem like easily detectable and even harmless deceptions. But strategists in both parties say a huge share of online cash is raised from older Americans who are less adroit online and have a harder time separating fact from hyperbole. The reason that so-called Nigerian prince scams exist, after all, is because people fall for them.When Mr. O’Rourke ran for Senate in 2018, he shattered Democratic fund-raising records, and his entry into the 2022 governor’s race has been highly anticipated. His campaign team held discussions before the announcement about how to limit the funds that less scrupulous actors might try to cannibalize.Two PACs sent out similar emails suggesting they were raising money for Mr. O’Rourke, using “team beto” and “official beto” in the URLs of their donation links. But all of the funds went directly to the PACs instead of the campaign.And outside groups did pounce almost immediately.“Official: Beto is in!!” came one such message the morning his run was announced. It listed its sender as “Team Beto (BSP).”The “BSP” stood for Blue South PAC, a new political action committee that sprung up this year and was among the more aggressive imitators of Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign. The group sent no less than five emails from a sender that included the phrase “Team Beto” in the campaign’s first three days.“At the very least, they’re trying to trick people into opening the email as if it’s from the campaign,” Mr. Pennington said, adding that he raced to send out the campaign’s first fund-raising message sooner than planned when he saw others already arriving.In one solicitation, the link to the Blue South PAC donation page on ActBlue, the Democratic digital donation-processing site, was highlighted in bright yellow and appeared as if it belonged to the campaign: actblue.com/donate/team-beto.Those who clicked were greeted by a message: “Show your support by donating and joining Team Beto!” Except 100 percent of the funds went to the Blue South PAC, according to the fine print on the donation page.A related group, Defeat Republicans, deployed a nearly identical email, featuring a similar URL highlighted in yellow: actblue.com/donate/official-beto.Both groups are linked to the same digital strategist, Zach Schreiber, who emailed a statement on behalf of both Blue South PAC and Defeat Republicans saying that their digital strategy was “in line with the industry best practices.”“Our community looks to us for news, action alerts, and opportunities to help elect Democrats,” the statement said, adding that the PACs “look forward to working with the Beto campaign.”Founded in the summer of 2020, Defeat Republicans raised almost $1 million in less than a year through the end of June 2021. In that time, federal records show it paid Mr. Schreiber $133,000 and directed another $208,000 to a firm, Opt-In Strategies, that lists him as a consultant on its website. Blue South PAC had spent only about $37,000 through the end of June, with more than one-third of the spending going to another consulting firm, UpWave Digital Solutions, founded by Mr. Schreiber.Federal records show that Defeat Republicans has given more than $400,000 to Democratic campaigns. The biggest chunk, $230,000, went to Jennifer Carroll Foy, who ran for governor of Virginia as a Democrat; Ms. Foy’s campaign paid Opt-In Strategies $67,500 for “list acquisition,” state records show. The PACs also said it had contributed $5,000 to Mr. O’Rourke.Plenty of other groups with missions that bear little relation to Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign seized on his entry into the race. These PACs have no formal affiliation with Mr. O’Rourke, even as they cite his campaign in fund-raising, and have no obligation to spend any of what they collect to help him.One PAC, The Majority Rules, ostensibly devoted to ending partisan gerrymandering, wrote an email to its list on Mr. O’Rourke’s first day that read, “The first 24 hours after a campaign announces are critical to its success. We still need another 103 grassroots Democrats to step up before midnight to give Beto the momentum he needs.”All the funds went to the PAC.A solicitation email sent from a PAC called 314 Action.Another PAC, 314 Action, devoted to electing scientists, sent an email with the subject line “BREAKING: Beto is running for Texas governor” the day he entered the race. The funds went to the PAC. The sender line in that email displayed as “Beto O’Rourke Update” — a format that industry insiders say can make it appear, at a glance, as if the politicians themselves sent the missive. (Directly using a politician’s name alone without consent is generally not allowed because it is seen as writing directly in his or her voice without authorization.)A nonprofit arm of 314 Action has announced it will spend up to $500,000 this year targeting four Republican governors, including Mr. Abbott of Texas. Joshua Morrow, the executive director of the 314 Action groups, did not respond to questions about the group’s fund-raising tactics but said in a statement that Mr. Abbott is “at the top of the list” of “anti-science politicians” they will target into 2022.314 Action uses other techniques to lure potential supporters, including sending three emails so far this month from “BREAKING from NBC News.” Another set of 314 Action emails used “NBC News Alert” in the sender line in September.Mr. Nelson, the Democratic digital strategist pressing his industry to curb such tactics, said groups keep doing it because it works — at least in the short term. But he worries that over time bad actors could poison the well for the whole party if donors stop trusting political groups with their money.“Ultimately there is a real risk that we’re going to push donors away,” he said. More