How to Win Florida on $1 Million a Day

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In the past 10 days, the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and the pro-Newt Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our future dumped $10.4 million trying to sway Republican voters in the Sunshine State. That’s about as much as the total all outside groups had spent at this point in the 2008 election cycle. Where did the money go? MoJo tallied up their spending based on what they’d reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Most of Restore Our Future’s spending went to attacking Gingrich. For every dollar spent promoting Romney, the super-PAC spent $25 dragging Gingrich through the mud.

Of the $12 million Winning Our Future has spent so far in this cycle, more than a third left the PAC’s coffers in the past week. It spent most of the money talking up Gingrich; only a sliver was dedicated to attacking Romney. 

How did they reach their audience? Restore our Future spent the bulk of their money, $5 million, buying up television and radio spots slamming Gingrich for having “tons of baggage.” Since the beginning of January, in Florida alone, Restore our Future has run 3,443 television spots, 1,018 cable ads and 234 radio ads attacking Gingrich.

 

Winning our Future spent $4 million on TV and radio advertising (with at least $1.5 solely on radio).


GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate