National Review Online editor-at-large and Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg contributed some typical bullshit on Fox News this week. Again, typically, he cast the Republicans as victims in the spending race this election, even standing up for the poor beleaguered Koch brothers.
[Democrats are] spending a lot more money. In North Carolina, they’re outspending Republicans, I think, 2-to-1, and yet they claim that it’s all the evil Koch brothers and their sort of other James Bond-like villains who are throwing all the money into Republicans. When the reality is, is that most of the money is actually on the Democratic side, but a lot of the mainstream media covers it as if, “Oh, it must be the Republicans who are taking advantage of all of this outside money.”
And then there’s, you know, reality:
The Koch Brothers-led groups (Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, Concerned Veterans for America, Generational Opportunity) have outspent Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action, $33 million to $5.6 million. And that’s in money spent just in the general election (after the primaries). It doesn’t include any spending in 2013 through the primaries, when Americans for Prosperity was bombarding Democratic incumbents on health care.
So that’s the dark money part, where clearly the Kochs are pretty much just a massive black hole swallowing up air time. You add up that and all the money being spent in all the states where there are contested Senate races, and Republicans are outspending in every single state.
And in pretty much all of those states, races are very tight. Maybe that’s why conventional wisdom—and Goldberg—assume Democrats have the spending edge. If Democrats are keeping it tight, they must be spending more than the Republicans because they aren’t being sunk by the hundreds of millions being poured into ads against them. Again, never mind reality.
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That’s the good news in all of this, millions in negative ads haven’t done much to secure a Republican Senate. People have been so inundated with them for so long—since last November—that they just tune them out. Which also means that we win this, we beat the Koch brothers with what we’re best at, a positive message that gets out the vote.
