Days before Election Day, several “pop-up” super PACs emerged seemingly out of nowhere.
We know how much these super PACs are spending, but we don’t know who is behind them – and won't know until long after election results have been called.
Super PACs can receive and spend unlimited sums of money with few restrictions. Unlike candidate committees, super PACs are allowed to accept unlimited contributions from shell companies and dark money 501(c)(4) nonprofits. This makes super PACs an attractive conduit for last-minute outside spending.
A super PAC formed days before an election is called a “pop-up super PAC.” Any American citizen can form one: all you need is a name, an email, and a mailing address. It’s something you could do from your couch.
Most pop-up super PAC names offer no hint as to who their donors might be or what their regulatory goals are.
One super PAC, Our Heritage Matters, formed two and a half weeks before election day, spent over $8 million across House and Senate races in 18 different states as of November 2nd. Their website is scarce, with a mission that reads, “American culture, values, and traditions are worth defending. We stand for the principles that built this nation — and we will not stand by while they are eroded by enemies foreign and domestic.”
Since the super PAC registered with the FEC precisely on October 15th, the group is not required to report its donors to the FEC until December 3rd.
As of November 2nd, Our Heritage Matters spent money in 61 races – with over $4.4 million spent supporting 25 third-party candidates and over $3.5 million spent opposing 35 Republican candidates.
One House candidate, Rustin Levem Provance, who ran without a party for Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District has benefitted from over $161k spent on “digital advertising” distributed across 15 payments from Our Heritage Matters. Provance has not raised a single dollar of his own and his candidate website has not been updated since 2022.
Research suggests that late-disclosing super PACs often “support more ideologically extreme candidates than [do] super PACs who disclose their donors prior to an election.”
Even when the donors to Our Heritage Matters are eventually disclosed, we still might not know who these individuals actually are.
Big super PAC donors often evade disclosure by first giving to 501(c)(4) nonprofits or shell companies. These groups then funnel their donations into super PACs, allowing their donors to hide behind vague names like “Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers LLC” or “Green Dragon Coalition.”
Andrew Mayersohn, the Committees Researcher at OpenSecrets commented, “As super PACs account for a larger and larger percentage of campaign spending with each passing election cycle, it is every bit as important to know who backs them financially as it is for candidates,”
“If the donors to some of the biggest spenders have yet to be revealed on Election Day, voters must choose without a full picture of the interests supporting or opposing the names on the ballot," he continued.
Many legal scholars – including Al Alschuler, Laurence Tribe, and Lawrence Lessig – believe that the solution lies in super PAC contribution limits.
With limits in place, if a super PAC that was formed days before an election wanted to spend $1 million, it would have to receive donations of, for example, $5,000 from 200 different people. This is much harder to do than getting $1 million from one or two megadonors. Contribution limits disincentivize the very thing that makes super PACs so attractive to last-minute donors: anonymity.
In 2024, over 600,000 Maine citizens turned out to vote in favor of super PAC contribution limits that would cap individual donations at $5,000 for all super PACs spending in Maine elections.
Maine’s citizen-passed initiative was immediately challenged with an injunction and was appealed to the First Circuit Court, where a decision is pending.
A victory in the First Circuit would give the Supreme Court an opportunity to reinstate super PAC contribution limits nationally without having to overturn Citizens United. This way, pop-up super PACs like Our Heritage Matters would not have the ability to funnel dark money into elections within days of November 3.
Maia Cook is the executive director of Equal Citizens, a nonprofit founded by Lawrence Lessig dedicated to fighting big money in politics. Equal Citizens is being represented by Neal Katyal in DTA v. Schneider, a lawsuit defending Maine’s citizen-passed super PAC contribution limits. Before joining Equal Citizens, Cook worked at OpenSecrets and did campaign finance research at Yale University, where she graduated with a BA.