Blogger DocDawg has delved into the financial records of the Mayday Super PAC. This year, the Mayday PAC is identifying eight congressional campaigns to fund, ostensibly on the basis of campaign finance reform, and so far those campaigns benefitting from Mayday’s largesse are half Republican, half Democrat.
Actual support for campaign finance legislation is not so evenly bipartisan. We already know that only 1.4% of the congressional candidates supporting the Mayday PAC’s slate of favored campaign finance reforms are Republicans, and that 96.2% of pro-reform candidates are Democrats. As DocDawg’s analysis shows, this pattern also hold for donors to the Mayday PAC itself. Of the 13 donors giving Mayday $100,000 or more who have given to other candidates, 12 give exclusively to Democratic candidates; only 1 has given to a Republican candidate. Of the 22 donors giving Mayday $10,000 to $99,999 who have given to other candidates, only 3 have given to Republican candidates.
Among candidates for Congress and campaign donors, support for campaign finance reform runs heavily Democratic and hardly exists at all among Republicans. Yet the Mayday Super PAC is splitting its support down the middle, sending half to Republican candidates and half to Democratic candidates. The effect is, perversely, to reward the Republican Party for mostly not supporting campaign finance reform and to punish the Democratic Party for overwhelmingly supporting campaign finance reform. If you are one of the very rare conservative campaign finance reform supporters, you’ll love this arrangement. If you are truly a single-issue citizen who only cares about campaign finance reform, this is not a problem. But if you believe that campaign finance reform is one of a set of liberal reforms that are all important, donating to the Mayday PAC may be a counterproductive way to further your goals.
