As I previously wrote about here, the Super PAC App has published all of their data so that anybody interested can take a look. Last week I looked into which types of organizations had the highest proportion of ‘Fail’ ratings for the ads they sponsored. It turns out that the clear ‘winner’ — and by ‘winner’ in mean the organization type that was found to ‘Fail’ most often — was non-profit organizations.
I provided a few reasons as to why this could be the case. To sum them up, it seems likely that these organizations either (1) were more crude in their argument construction and execution, leaving them open to easy criticism, or (2) they may have simply had less to lose from a credibility standpoint than the campaigns, parties, and PACs, and were more willing to be dishonest in their claims. I’m sure there are many other plausible reasons as well.
In my first pass of analysis, I intentionally didn’t even look at which organizations were affiliated with which parties and candidates. As I dig further into the topic, it’s clear that most of these organizations were supporting the Romney campaign. Of the 79 ads that were sponsored by non-profits, all but 5 of them were right-leaning:
And these 79 ads were sponsored by a total of 8 non-profit organizations, 7 of which, representing 74 of the ads, supported Romney:
Clearly the tactic of using non-profit organizations to sponsor campaign ads was used primarily by Romney supporters, as just one non-profit organization sponsored ads supporting Obama’s campaign.
Next, I took a look at what proportion of the ad ratings were ‘Fail’ by non-profit organization to see whether the trend I identified in the previous post is consistent across each of the 8 organizations. Here’s what I found:
There’s obviously a bias towards Romney-supporting non-profit organizations getting high proportions of ‘Fail’ ratings, while the one Obama supporting non-profit had ads that were rated considerably more honest than the overall average across all ad sponsoring organization types (i.e., campaigns, national parties, PACs, etc). For a reference, see my first post on the topic.
My first question is what types of non-profit organizations are these? Are they essentially PACs, but registered differently? How long have they been around? I’m out of time for now, but in the next post I hope to dig a bit further and find out what they’re are all about. And then maybe we can see some of their ads.