Mitt Romney's 'Restore Our Future' Super PAC Donors: Own Your Ad

Thanks to the financial floodgates opened by the Supreme Court's decision in the now-infamous Citizens United decision, campaign spending in the 2012 election cycle is projected to reach a record high.

The decision, along with subsequent lower court rulings, enabled creation of so-called super PACs, which are independent campaign groups that are allowed to solicit and spend unlimited amounts of money in support of their preferred candidates or political issues. Independence, however, is a term that is quite loosely enforced in this case; while the super PACs can't officially coordinate strategy with a candidate's campaign, that doesn't mean that candidate's friends, former employees and business partners can't donate and help operate the committee. Nor does it prevent the candidate from asking their friends to chip in.

The Mitt Romney-supporting Super PAC, Restore Our Future, is one of the best funded and active groups; thus far, it has spent over $18 million this election cycle. Largely, it has received donations from wealthy interests and former associates of the candidate; it has received 12 separate $1 million donations, including multiple seven figure deposits from employees of Bain Capital, the financial firm Romney founded. Romney, for his part, encouraged the creation of the Super PAC and attended more than one donor event.

Here, we put their faces to an ad that they helped fund; the only one missing is Ed Conard, one of the Bain-based donors.

Comments

[Jeff Burdick]

06:07 AM on 02/10/2012

Super-PACs and mega-bundling "Leadership Circles"... what's not for an average citizen to love... our elections have become kind of like a Google-Plus for the 1%. An estimated $8 billion will be raised and spent on political campaigns of all sorts this election cycle. Wow, for all the contention about the fairness of raising taxes on the very rich, they seem very willing to just donate the money to politicians (with no expectation of getting anything in return, of course). Maybe we should just tax political donations at the same tax bracket rate as income? It's enough to make you laugh, as does this funny YouTube video about one member of "Obama's Secret Service." Enjoy: http://tinyurl.com/6sevqsj

[bdelraso]

10:25 PM on 02/09/2012

Thanks to the Paul & Sandra Edgerley and other for your donations to Romney's Super PAC fund raiser. Santorom might had his 3 states win but his money is getting pretty low while Romney's goes up. GO MITT!!! PRESIDENT ROMNEY 2012 - sounds great!