POLITICS

Hillary Clinton to Court Donors for Super PAC

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and 
Hillary Rodham Clinton at a round table discussion in Las Vegas on Tuesday.Isaac Brekken for The New York Times 
Hillary Rodham Clinton will begin personally courting donors for a “super PAC” supporting her candidacy, the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has fully embraced the independent groups that can accept unlimited checks from big donors and are already playing a major role in the 2016 race.
Her decision is another escalation in what is expected to be the most expensive presidential contest in history, and it has the potential to transform the balance of power in presidential campaigning, where Republican outside groups have tended to outspend their Democratic counterparts.
Mrs. Clinton’s allies hope that with her support, the top Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, will raise as much as $200 million to $300 million. That is on par with what the largest Republican organizations, such as the Karl Rove-backed American Crossroads super PAC and its nonprofit affiliate, spent in 2012.
Mrs. Clinton is meeting with Priorities USA Action donors on her current fund-raising swing for her campaign, which involves a three-day trip through California. One meeting was to take place in San Francisco on Wednesday and another in Los Angeles on Thursday, according to two people familiar with Mrs. Clinton’s schedule.
Running for re-election in 2012, President Obama reluctantly endorsed fund-raising by Priorities because of fears that he would be outspent by Republicans who were more aggressive in using what was then a new vehicle for raising large amounts of money that could be used in support of a campaign but not go directly to it. But he never appeared at any of its fund-raisers.
Mrs. Clinton planned to raise money for Priorities in her campaign but initially delayed doing so because of her desire to carefully pace the start of her campaign, her pledge to make campaign finance reform a critical issue and a lack of clarity about the management structure at the super PAC.
But supporters became anxious in recent weeks that she was squandering the enthusiasm generated by her official campaign announcement, and Mrs. Clinton decided she could no longer delay. Two leading Republican contenders have delayed officially entering the campaign, devoting their time to personally soliciting money for super PACs set up by their aides. Some, like Jeb Bush, have moved to shift costs like policy research and voter data maintenance to nonprofits that are formally independent of their campaign efforts.
The Clinton campaign and Priorities officials would not confirm the California events, but a campaign official acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton and her aides planned to do what they could to help the super Pac, within the law.
“With some Republican candidates reportedly setting up and outsourcing their entire campaign to super PACs, and the Koch brothers pledging $1 billion alone for the 2016 campaign, Democrats have to have the resources to fight back,” said one Clinton campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to explain the campaign’s thinking. “There is too much at stake for our future for Democrats to unilaterally disarm.”
Mrs. Clinton has expressed frustration and astonishment at how Mr. Bush has gone about raising money, according to two people who have spoken with her about it. His aggressive fund-raising was among the factors that prompted her to push up her own schedule. And in the past week, the delicate transformation of Priorities from a pro-Obama organization to one designed to support Mrs. Clinton continued; Guy Cecil, a Clinton loyalist, will help oversee it, and Harold M. Ickes, her longtime adviser, has stepped up his involvement in the super PAC.
Priorities decided not to raise funds in 2014, for fear of competing with midterm-cycle candidates for crucial dollars. But officials’ efforts to lure major donors in the past five months have been described by several people involved in the fund-raising as sluggish, especially without Mrs. Clinton or her campaign being involved.
Super PACs, which grew out of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 and other legal and regulatory shifts, were new and largely untested in the 2012 presidential campaign. Three years later, they are central to the 2016 campaign.
Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, has spent most of his first months raising money for a super PAC started by his allies. The group is expected to raise $100 million by the end of June.
As a declared candidate, Mrs. Clinton is prohibited from directly asking donors for more than $5,000 for a super PAC. But under current Federal Election Commission rules, she can appear at events for donors, and even speak, as long as requests for larger amounts are made outside her presence.
Like her Republican opponents, Mrs. Clinton will also be competing against her own party for the attention of her party’s biggest donors, thanks to legislation passed in December that allows party leaders to solicit million-dollar checks on behalf of the Democratic and Republican National Committees and congressional campaign committees.
Mr. Obama, who inveighed against the Citizens United decision and, like Mrs. Clinton, pledged to curb special-interest money in Washington, was far more tentative in endorsing super PACs.
Two of his former aides founded Priorities USA in 2011, but Mr. Obama withheld his blessing from the group, and he did not permit his political advisers to begin helping it court donors until almost a year later. Leery of the appearances for a sitting president, Mr. Obama never personally appeared at any of the group’s donor gatherings.
As a result, Priorities at first struggled, bringing in only a few million dollars during the early months of the campaign. The group’s ads attacking Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s Republican opponent, over his private equity career were credited with helping to weaken him. But the nearly $100 million the group ultimately raised was much less than what was raised by the biggest Republican groups.
“One of the hardest things I’ve ever done professionally was try to raise tens of millions of dollars to help a candidate who donors initially thought was indifferent to the effort,” said Bill Burton, a Democratic strategist who helped found Priorities. “To have a principal who is fully embracing the effort this early will hopefully make an important difference.”
But a bigger question is how donors will react. During Mr. Obama’s campaign, only one individual Democratic donor surpassed $10 million in contributions to super PACs, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, and only a handful gave more than a few million dollars.
Many of the biggest checks came from unions, while well-known liberal donors, such as George Soros, ultimately spent far less than in some previous elections. New liberal donors have since emerged, most notably the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. But when political nonprofits known as 501(c)(4)s, which do not disclose their donors, are counted, Republicans have generally enjoyed a larger bench of individual donors willing to give eight figures.
“Effectively, I think everyone is resigned to the reality that every campaign of sufficient magnitude can and will have its own super PAC (or more than one) to get around campaign contribution limits,” David desJardins, a past donor to Priorities USA who has not yet committed to giving again, said in an email. “And they will just operate as an extension of the campaign itself, at least until the Supreme Court or Congress or F.E.C. says no.”