Salon: Will dark money swamp the blue wave? Democrats’ fundraising lead could be deceptive

“In the past eight years,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, “unlimited spending and fundraising by outside groups has played an increasingly important role in federal elections. Any analysis that fails to take into consideration outside group spending is incomplete.” …

“If you want to fly under the radar and operate a dark-money group and raise tens of millions of dollars and spend it in the 2018 election, you could do that,” Ryan said, “and no one will know about it until you start making ad buys. Even then, they won’t know where you got the money or how much you have left in the bank.” …

In theory, outside groups are not legally allowed to coordinate with the official campaigns. In practice, Ryan said, campaigns “know exactly what the outside groups are doing. They’re sharing the information in increasingly sophisticated ways that generally avoid violations of law.”

To make it worse, he added, the use of outside group spending adds to the increasingly negative tones of campaigns. “Candidates, for the most part, keep their ads quite positive and leave their attack ads to the outside groups,” Ryan added. “When voters complain about the tone of the election, the candidate says, ‘Yeah, I agree, voter. I don’t like all these negative ads, but I can’t do anything about it.’” …