Oct 1, 2023

In a very surprising twist, the September spend by Super PACs came in at a little over half of the spend in August .Why?

1. Best of America PAC that supports Gov. Burgum reduced their spending by half, but still spent the most of all Super PACs in September.

2. AFP also reduced their spending by half.

3. Stand for America, supporting Gov. Haley, almost disappeared entirely in September

But this is surprising for a number of reasons, first being August is usually considered a dead month, people are tuned out, on vacation, enjoy the last gasp of summer or getting the kids back to school; it is not a good time to have a message penetrate an audience. The second reason this is surprising is September is generally considered a much better environment for message penetration, people are back in their normal routines post August.  But even more surprising is we are past the first GOP Presidential debate, the field is showing the first signs if winnowing and we are in the sprint to Iowa. But the spike in spending did not materialize.

There may be other reasons spending is down; donors may not be giving as much money as they'd like to insinuate, Trump’s shadow could be affecting even the super pac spending…who knows. We will see some clues as we move thru October. It would not have been surprising to some super pacs down and some up for the month but to have such a dramatic drop across the board is very surprising.

So what were the numbers?
The numbers presented below are from September 1 to September 30

Top Lines:

$24,279,237 in Sept. vs. 41,387,758.05 in August, was spent on IE.

Best of America PAC (Gov. Burgum aligned), was the big spender of the month in September despite reducing their spending by half.
$4,828,766 was spent in September, vs. 9,312,373.00 spent by Best of America PAC in August. Despite their biggish spend, they were unable to move Gov. Burgum up the debate stage and we will see if he remains on the stage for the Nov. 7th debate.

Trust in the Mission PAC (Sen. Scott Aligned)

$3,582,247 was spent in Sept. vs. 2,692,430.41 spent in August supporting Sen. Scott

Americans for Prosperity -  $3,402,998 was spent in Sept. vs. 6,490,921.94 spent in August again split almost evenly between opposing Donald Trump and opposing Biden.

Make America Great Again Inc. (Trump Aligned)
$3,325,595 was spent in Sept. vs. 2,941,702.20 spent in August. Again, they had an almost even spend supporting Trump and opposing Biden, and then threw in $268K to oppose DeSantis.

Never Back Down (Gov. DeSantis aligned) despite their Cash On Hand and pledge to run a $100M field program, they are still way off a pace that would have then at $100M in canvassing by NV primary.
$2,145,448 was spent in Sept. vs. $2,243,122.91 was spent in August. $2,076,698.90 supporting DeSantis and $68,750.00 opposing Trump.

American Exceptionalism (Vivek Ramaswamy aligned)
$$1,588,086.34 was spent in Sept. vs. $1,407,308.64 spent in August supporting Vivek.

SOS PAC (Mayor Suarez aligned)
$1,254,663.54 was spent supporting Suarez.  This PAC seemed to employ a unique strategy of small dollar conduit fundraising across the country in an attempt to get Suarez the prerequisite number of donors to make the first debate stage...and it worked! Suarez actually hit the donor threshold but missed the polling threshold.

Tell It Like It Is PAC (Christie Aligned) -
$398,317 was spent in Sept. vs. 824,921.00 in August, split almost evenly between supporting Christie and opposing Trump.

Committed to America (Pence Aligned)–
$$565,115.00 was spent in Sept. vs. $664,379.85 spent in August supporting Pence

Stand For America (Gov. Haley Aligned)
$82,824 was spent in Sept. vs. $7,952,990.55 spent in August supporting Gov. Haley. Largest drop off of any pac supporting a candidate last month.

Win It Back PAC (Trump Opposed) –

$0

This was the Club for Growth’s attempt to test messages and see if they could get Trumps supporters to move away from him. IN a very honest memo last week, they said they had not been able to move his numbers despite the money and messages they put behind it.

Yet again, these groups are still generally spending to support a candidate. As teh GOP field continues to seek to differentiate themselves from each other going into the early state primaries, there is an expectation that these IE groups will start spending in opposition to the other candidates, but the mud slinging hasn’t started in earnest yet.
 
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These numbers are being generated by the 527tracker, a data platform developed by Perspective Strategies that aggregates, analyzes, and alerts to all federal Super PAC spending in real time. If these types of numbers or analysis are important to you, or if you are on a campaign and need real-time spending alerts, go check out the dashboard.

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