Super PAC backing Warren makes $9 million Super Tuesday ad buy
February 27, 2020A mysterious Super PAC supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign is making a late attempt to save her candidacy with a $9 million ad buy in states voting next Tuesday.
Combined with the $3.25 million Persist PAC already spent in Super Tuesday states along with $2 million in Nevada and South Carolina, the shadowy group has committed over $14 million to try to buoy Warren’s candidacy.
All together, Warren — who has made the corrupting influence of dark money central to her candidacy — now has the biggest Super PAC advertising in the Super Tuesday states.
Asked if the group had any comment on where the money was coming from, Persist PAC’s spokesperson Joshua Karp texted back “no sir.”
“Our goal is to show voters that Elizabeth Warren has been fighting for the middle class her whole life,” Karp said in an email disclosing the ad buy.
The $9 million buy is only in three states: California, Texas, and Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, where Sen. Bernie Sanders has made a late play. The group is airing the same ad it ran in Nevada, South Carolina, and other Super Tuesday states that focuses on Warren’s humble upbringing and former President Barack Obama’s past praise of her.
The Warren campaign did not immediately respond to request for comment.
All of the Democratic candidates except for the billionaires — who have outspent their rivals with enormous sums of their personal wealth — have had help from outside groups.
A Super PAC supporting Joe Biden made a late ad buy in the low six-figures for next Tuesday and a Super PAC supporting Pete Buttigieg announced a seven-figure ad buy for Tuesday after helping them both in earlier contests.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has had help from several outside groups including the Nurses Union, groups affiliated with the left-wing groups Justice Democrats and Sunrise Movement along with the outside group Our Revolution that he founded after his 2016 presidential campaign.
Earlier in the race, Warren repeatedly criticized her opponents for getting help from outside dark money groups and Super PACs, trying to make it a winning contrast for her campaign. When a dark money group bought an ad in the Des Moines Register promoting her last November, she unequivocally denounced the group and asked them to stop.
Spokesperson Chris Hayden told POLITICO then that the “campaign was not aware of this and asks that those involved immediately stop purchasing advertisements of any kind. Elizabeth Warren believes democracy is undermined by anonymous, dark-money attempts to influence voters — whether that influence is meant to help or hurt her candidacy.”
Warren has pointedly not made the same request with Persist PAC and has argued that she would disavow it if other campaigns did the same. Persist PAC began advertising after her disappointing third and fourth-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“If all the candidates want to get rid of super PACs, count me in,” she said in Nevada. “I'll lead the charge. But that's how it has to be. It can't be the case that a bunch of people keep them and only one or two don’t.”
Source: https://www.politico.com/