Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the mechanics of political influence since we talked about the pro-Israel lobby, and he's asking us to get into the weeds. What actually is a PAC versus a Super PAC? Why did this split happen in 2010? And the question that's harder than it sounds: are these things inherently partisan, or can a PAC genuinely be bipartisan?
This is the infrastructure episode. You can't understand how money moves through American politics without understanding these two legal vehicles. And what's wild is that in the 2024 cycle, Super PACs spent about two point seven billion dollars on federal elections. Traditional PACs spent one point one billion. The parties themselves got outspent by their own shadow committees.
Two point seven billion. That's the GDP of a small island nation being spent by entities that didn't legally exist fifteen years ago.
So let's start with the basics. A traditional PAC — a political action committee — is a straightforward thing. A group of people pools their money. Each individual can give up to five thousand dollars per year. The PAC can then give up to five thousand dollars per election directly to a candidate. Hard caps on both ends. It's regulated, it's transparent, it's been around since the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971.
Five thousand in, five thousand out. The financial equivalent of a polite handshake.
And then you have a Super PAC — legally called an independent expenditure-only committee — where one donor can write a check for fifty million dollars. The committee can spend unlimited amounts on ads, mailers, whatever. But they can't give a single dollar directly to a candidate, and they can't coordinate with the campaign.
The trade-off is: unlimited money in, but you can't talk to the candidate about how to spend it. Which raises the question — why would a donor choose the five thousand dollar handshake over the fifty million dollar megaphone?
Because the five thousand dollar handshake comes with access. When a traditional PAC gives directly to a candidate, the candidate knows who gave. There's a relationship. The Super PAC donor gets influence too, but it's more diffuse — they're shaping the environment around the race, not directly funding the campaign's operations.
The candidate can't thank them for a specific ad. That's coordination.
That's coordination. Which is the word that does all the work in this system. But to understand why we have this split, we have to go back to 2010 — specifically, two court decisions that rewrote the rules in the span of three months.
Walk me through the before picture. What did campaign finance look like pre-2010?
You had the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — McCain-Feingold. It banned two things: soft money going to political parties, and corporate or union money being spent on electioneering communications within thirty days of a primary or sixty days of a general election. The idea was to close the loophole where corporations and unions were running issue ads that were functionally campaign ads.
"Call Senator So-and-So and tell him to stop eating puppies." Not an endorsement, just a concerned message about canine welfare.
That was the exact playbook. And McCain-Feingold tried to shut it down. Then along comes a nonprofit called Citizens United. They made a documentary called "Hillary: The Movie" — a deeply critical film about then-Senator Hillary Clinton — and they wanted to run it on video-on-demand during the 2008 primary season. The FEC said no, that's an electioneering communication, you're a corporation, you can't do that under McCain-Feingold.
Citizens United sued.
They sued, and on January twenty-first, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled five to four in their favor. The core reasoning: political speech is protected by the First Amendment, and corporations — including nonprofits like Citizens United — have First Amendment rights. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion and said something that reads differently now than it probably did then. He said, quote, "The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.
That's an extraordinary sentence. The Court basically said: don't worry, unlimited corporate spending won't erode public trust.
You can argue about whether that prediction held up. But the legal reasoning was the important part. The Court said the government cannot suppress political speech based on the speaker's corporate identity. If a corporation wants to spend money on political speech, that's protected. The ban on direct contributions to candidates remained — that's a different constitutional question — but independent spending?
Citizens United said corporations can spend independently on political speech. But it didn't create Super PACs.
It didn't. This is one of the most common misconceptions. Citizens United removed the ban on corporate independent spending. Super PACs were created two months later by a different case: SpeechNow dot org versus FEC, decided by the D.Circuit Court of Appeals on March twenty-sixth, 2010.
What was SpeechNow?
SpeechNow dot org was a small group that wanted to run ads supporting or opposing candidates based on their free speech positions. They only wanted to take money from individuals, not corporations. But they wanted to take unlimited amounts from those individuals. The FEC said no — contribution limits apply. Circuit, applying the logic of Citizens United, said: if independent spending is protected speech, then limits on contributions to groups that only do independent spending are unconstitutional. Because the only justification for contribution limits is preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption, and if the spending is truly independent, there's no corruption risk.
The chain is: Citizens United knocked down the spending ban, and SpeechNow knocked down the contribution limits for independent groups. Together, they created the Super PAC.
And the FEC, applying SpeechNow, created the legal category of "independent expenditure-only committee." That's a Super PAC. It can raise unlimited money from anyone — individuals, corporations, unions — but it cannot contribute to candidates or coordinate with campaigns, and it has to register and disclose its donors to the FEC.
Let's talk about that word "coordinate." Because the entire regulatory structure hangs on it. What does coordination actually mean in practice?
This is where it gets interesting. The FEC has a three-part test for coordination. An expenditure is coordinated — and therefore an illegal in-kind contribution — if it meets three conditions: it's paid for by someone other than the candidate, it meets certain content standards like mentioning a candidate within a certain window before the election, and it meets certain conduct standards. The conduct standards are the key — things like the candidate or their agent requesting or suggesting the ad, or the candidate's campaign sharing material information about their strategy.
If a campaign manager emails a Super PAC and says "we're getting killed on healthcare, run an ad about the candidate's healthcare plan," that's coordination.
That's textbook coordination. But here's where the loopholes live. Former campaign staff can join a Super PAC after a one hundred twenty day cooling-off period. And Super PACs can share vendors — ad buyers, pollsters, media consultants — with campaigns, as long as those vendors don't share strategy between the two entities.
I can be the campaign manager in January, join the Super PAC in May, and run ads in September based on everything I know about the candidate's vulnerabilities. But I can't take a phone call from my replacement.
And the sharing of vendors means that the same ad-buying firm can be placing ads for both the campaign and the Super PAC, as long as they maintain a firewall. In practice, the firewall is often theoretical. Everyone in the business knows what the campaign's priorities are because campaign strategy is not a secret — it's visible in where the candidate is traveling, what issues they're emphasizing, what their own ads are about.
The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper — a firewall so thin you can hear the campaign's strategy through it.
And the FEC, which is designed to be gridlocked — three Democratic commissioners, three Republican commissioners — rarely enforces these coordination rules aggressively. Most enforcement actions require four votes, and in practice, the commissioners split along party lines on high-profile cases.
You have a rule against coordination, enforced by an agency structurally incapable of enforcing it, with a definition of coordination narrow enough to drive a campaign bus through.
That's before we get to the creative workarounds. One common technique: a candidate films a video for their Super PAC. They look into the camera and say "here's what I believe" — and then the Super PAC cuts that footage into ads. The candidate isn't telling the Super PAC what to do with the footage. They're just... making themselves available.
Of course they are.
Another technique: the "public signal." A campaign posts a public memo on their website about their ad strategy. The Super PAC reads the memo — anyone can read the memo — and designs ads that complement it. Is that coordination? The FEC has generally said no, because the information was publicly available.
Coordination is illegal unless you do it loudly in public.
That's the practical reality. And the result is that Super PACs have become essentially the air forces of modern campaigns. The campaign itself does the ground game — the canvassing, the phone banks, the direct voter contact. The Super PAC does the bombing runs — the negative ads, the saturation media buys. And because Super PACs face no contribution limits, a single billionaire can fund an entire air campaign.
Give me some numbers. What does that actually look like in real races?
In 2012, the Super PAC "Restore Our Future" supported Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. It raised ninety-six million dollars from fewer than two hundred donors. Sheldon Adelson alone gave ten million dollars. That's one donor writing a check for ten million dollars to influence a presidential election — legally.
The traditional PAC cap is five thousand.
So Adelson's single Super PAC contribution was equivalent to the maximum PAC contribution of two thousand individuals. The scale difference is not incremental — it's categorical.
What about the other side?
In 2016, "Priorities USA Action" supported Hillary Clinton. It raised one hundred ninety-two million dollars. Tom Steyer gave twenty million. George Soros gave nine point five million. Again, a handful of donors providing the vast majority of the funding.
This answers part of the prompt's question. These Super PACs are clearly partisan. Restore Our Future was Republican. Priorities USA was Democratic. Are there any that operate across party lines?
There are a few, and they're instructive precisely because they're so rare. The most prominent example is the "With Honor Fund." It supports military veterans running for office, regardless of party. They've backed Republicans and Democrats. But here's the structural limitation: because a Super PAC can only spend independently, it can't build a cross-party coalition. It can run ads supporting a Republican veteran in one district and a Democratic veteran in another, but it can't bring those candidates together to work on legislation or coordinate messaging.
It's bipartisan in its checkbook but not in its operation.
And that's the key insight. The legal framework assumes independent spending, not coalition-building. A Super PAC is legally a broadcast platform, not a political organization. It can say "vote for this person" across a hundred races, but it can't help those people govern together once elected.
Which means the "bipartisan Super PAC" is almost a contradiction in terms. It can support candidates from both parties, but it can't do the thing that makes bipartisanship meaningful — which is building relationships and coordinating action.
And most donors don't want bipartisanship anyway. They want ideological purity. If you're writing a seven-figure check to a Super PAC, you typically want a very specific outcome. You want your candidate to win, and you want them to do specific things once in office. The idea of funding both sides of a race is, for most donors, self-defeating.
There are some tactical exceptions.
The "Club for Growth Action" Super PAC is an interesting case. They're overwhelmingly conservative — they support Republicans in primaries against what they see as insufficiently conservative incumbents. But occasionally, very occasionally, they've supported a Democrat in a general election when the Republican nominee was too moderate for their liking.
Their bipartisanship is a threat. "Be conservative enough or we'll help the other side.
It's tactical bipartisanship in service of ideological purity. Which is not the same thing as genuine cross-party bridge-building. It's using the threat of Democratic support to discipline Republicans.
Like adopting a feral cat.
I'm not sure that metaphor tracks, but I appreciate the spirit.
Let's talk about the dark money connection. Because I know these Super PACs disclose their donors, but I also know there's a workaround.
This is the most important knock-on effect of the whole system. Super PACs do have to disclose their donors to the FEC. You can go on the FEC website right now and look up who gave to any Super PAC. But many Super PACs receive their largest contributions from 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations — social welfare organizations — and those 501(c)(4)s do not have to disclose their donors.
I give money to a 501(c)(4). The 501(c)(4) gives money to a Super PAC. The Super PAC discloses that it received money from the 501(c)(4). But nobody ever has to disclose that I was the original source.
That's the two-layer anonymity structure. And it's perfectly legal. The "American Bridge 21st Century" Super PAC, which exclusively supports Democrats, has a 501(c)(4) arm called the "American Bridge Foundation." Money flows from undisclosed donors through the foundation to the Super PAC. On the Republican side, groups like Crossroads GPS — a 501(c)(4) founded by Karl Rove — have funneled tens of millions into Crossroads GPS's affiliated Super PAC, American Crossroads.
When we say Super PACs disclose their donors, what we mean is they disclose the 501(c)(4) that cut them the check. Not the human beings behind the 501(c)(4).
And 501(c)(4)s are supposed to be primarily engaged in social welfare, not politics. But the IRS definition of "primarily" has never been clearly quantified, and in practice, many 501(c)(4)s spend the majority of their resources on political activity. The NRA's 501(c)(4), Planned Parenthood's 501(c)(4), the Sierra Club's 501(c)(4) — all of them spend heavily on politics without disclosing their donors.
The system has a transparency layer that's technically transparent and functionally opaque.
That's the phrase. Technically transparent and functionally opaque. The FEC filings are public. You can download the spreadsheets. But when you trace the money back, you hit a wall — a 501(c)(4) with no donor disclosure. At that point, you know the name of an organization, but you don't know who's behind it.
Which brings us to 2024. What were the big numbers in the last cycle?
The Senate Majority PAC, which supports Democrats, raised about two hundred eighty million dollars. The Senate Leadership Fund, which supports Republicans, raised about two hundred sixty million. Both are Super PACs, both are functionally partisan arms of their respective Senate leaders — Chuck Schumer for the Democrats, Mitch McConnell for the Republicans — and both are funded by a mix of disclosed individual donors, disclosed corporate donors, and undisclosed 501(c)(4) money.
Those numbers dwarf what the actual party committees raise.
The parties are constrained by contribution limits. The Super PACs are not. So the center of gravity in campaign finance has shifted from the parties — which are, in theory, accountable to their members and their candidates — to Super PACs, which are accountable to a handful of wealthy donors and the 501(c)(4)s that channel their money.
The parties can coordinate with candidates. Super PACs can't. So you have this strange division of labor where the coordinated entity is resource-constrained and the well-funded entity is coordination-constrained.
Which is why modern campaigns feel so disjointed. The candidate's ads are on-message and on-brand. The Super PAC's ads are often harsher, more negative, less nuanced. The candidate can't control them. They can disavow them — "I didn't approve this message" — but the Super PAC's disclaimer says "not authorized by any candidate." The candidate has plausible deniability.
Which is, of course, the point.
It is absolutely the point. Super PACs exist to do the dirty work that campaigns can't or won't do. Negative advertising is more effective when it doesn't come directly from the candidate. Voters say they hate negative ads, but the research shows negative ads are more memorable and more influential than positive ones. Super PACs let candidates keep their hands clean while the mud flies.
We've got about twenty-four hundred Super PACs and forty-six hundred traditional PACs active with the FEC as of mid-2026. That's the current landscape. And the prompt asks: are any of these bipartisan?
I'd say the honest answer is: some PACs are bipartisan in their giving, but the structure makes bipartisan operation nearly impossible. A traditional PAC can give directly to candidates from both parties. The "With Honor Fund" I mentioned does this. "No Labels" — the centrist group — has a PAC that supports moderate candidates from both parties. "Serve America," which was Pete Buttigieg's PAC before he joined the administration, supported down-ballot Democrats but framed itself around generational change, not partisanship.
These are exceptions that prove the rule.
And they tend to be small relative to the partisan behemoths. The structural reason is straightforward: most donors want to win, and winning in a two-party system means picking a side. If you give to both parties, you're hedging. Hedging is rational for a corporation that needs access regardless of who wins — that's why corporate PACs often give to both sides — but it's less appealing for the ideological donors who fund Super PACs.
Corporate PACs are a different animal entirely. They're traditional PACs, not Super PACs, and their bipartisan giving is access-driven.
A corporate PAC — say, Google's PAC or Lockheed Martin's PAC — will typically give to both parties, with the split tilting toward whichever party controls Congress. That's not ideology. That's a business expense. They're buying a seat at the table.
The glockenspiel of corporate approachability.
I don't know what that means, but I'm going to assume it's brilliant.
It means they're making a pleasant, non-threatening sound that signals "we're reasonable people, let's do business.
And that's exactly what corporate PACs do. They're the background music of Washington access. But Super PACs are not background music. Super PACs are the bass drop. They're designed for impact, not ambiance.
To answer the prompt directly: PACs and Super PACs can be bipartisan in a narrow sense — they can support candidates from both parties — but the legal structure makes genuine bipartisan cooperation difficult, and the donor incentives make it rare.
The distinction between PAC and Super PAC is not a distinction of degree but of kind. A traditional PAC is a regulated giving vehicle with hard caps. A Super PAC is an unregulated spending vehicle with no caps but a coordination firewall. They share the words "political action committee" but they operate under completely different legal regimes.
Which is confusing by design. The average voter hears "PAC" and doesn't distinguish between the two. But the difference in regulatory treatment is vast.
It all traces back to those two decisions in early 2010. Citizens United on January twenty-first, SpeechNow on March twenty-sixth. Three months that created a two-tier system.
What's the constitutional logic that holds it together? Because I can see the tension. The Court says independent spending doesn't corrupt, so it can't be limited. But then they also say direct contributions can corrupt, so they can be limited. But if a Super PAC is run by the candidate's former campaign manager, and everyone knows it's the candidate's de facto air force, how is that truly independent?
This is the argument that the Court's dissenters have been making for years. Justice Kagan, in subsequent cases, has essentially argued that the independence line is a fiction — that when you have the same consultants, the same donors, the same strategic objectives, the idea that the Super PAC is independent from the campaign is a legal pretense.
Yet it holds.
It holds because the current Court majority views campaign finance restrictions skeptically on First Amendment grounds. The logic is: if you can't prove actual quid pro quo corruption — "I'll give you money, you vote this way" — then the spending is protected speech. And the Court has defined corruption very narrowly. It basically means bribery. Anything short of an explicit exchange of money for official action is not corruption in the Court's framework.
"I'm giving ten million dollars to the Super PAC that everyone knows supports you, and I expect you to be friendly to my industry" — that's not corruption, that's democracy.
In the Court's framework, that's protected political speech. The donor is expressing a political preference through spending. The candidate may or may not be influenced. But the Court's position is that influence and access are not the same as corruption, and voters can evaluate candidates based on who supports them.
Which brings us back to Justice Kennedy's line about the electorate not losing faith. Has that held up?
The polling suggests otherwise. Gallup has tracked trust in government for decades, and it's been in steady decline since long before 2010. But the specific question of whether voters believe money corrupts politics — that number has been above seventy-five percent for years. People consistently say the system is broken. They just don't agree on how to fix it.
All of this is public information. That's the thing I want to emphasize. The FEC requires disclosure. You can go to the FEC website — fec.gov — and look up any PAC or Super PAC. You can see who gave, how much they gave, and where the money went.
org makes it even easier. They compile FEC data and present it in a searchable format. You can look up any candidate and see every PAC and Super PAC that spent money supporting or opposing them. You can look up any donor and see where their money went. The data is public. The barrier is knowing where to look and being willing to spend the time.
Here's a practical tool for listeners: when you see a political ad, look at the disclaimer at the end. It'll say something like "Paid for by Americans for Prosperity Action" or "Paid for by the Senate Majority PAC." If it says "not authorized by any candidate," it's a Super PAC or a 501(c)(4). If it says "authorized by Candidate X," it's the campaign itself. That one line tells you which legal regime you're looking at.
Then you can go to OpenSecrets, type in the name of the group, and see who's funding it. Or you can go to the FEC's website and pull the actual filings. The forms are called FEC Form 3X for PACs and Super PACs. The donor lists are public record.
It's the financial equivalent of reading the ingredients label. Most people don't do it, but the information is there.
The ingredients are often surprising. You'll find that a Super PAC with a folksy name is funded almost entirely by two billionaires. You'll find that a group that claims to represent grassroots voters is actually a vehicle for a single industry. The naming conventions are part of the obfuscation — "Americans for a Brighter Future" could be anything from a solar energy lobby to a hedge fund's personal Super PAC.
Covering the covers.
And the names are chosen to obscure, not to inform. A Super PAC called "Freedom Partners" sounds like a grassroots organization. It was actually funded by the Koch network. "Priorities USA" sounds like a nonpartisan civic group. It was the main Democratic Super PAC.
To wrap up the core answer: a PAC is a regulated committee that raises limited money from individuals and gives limited money to candidates. A Super PAC is an independent expenditure-only committee that can raise unlimited money from anyone but can't give directly to candidates or coordinate with them. The split was created in 2010 by Citizens United and SpeechNow. Most are partisan, a few are technically bipartisan in their giving but structurally limited in their ability to build cross-party coalitions. And the dark money connection through 501(c)(4)s means that even the disclosure requirements have a transparency gap.
That's the summary. But I want to add one forward-looking note, because the legal landscape isn't static. As we record this in June 2026, there are cases before the Supreme Court that could change everything.
What's on the docket?
There are two significant ones. FEC versus Ted Cruz for Senate challenges the limits on how much a candidate can use post-election contributions to repay personal loans they made to their own campaign. That seems narrow, but the reasoning could affect broader contribution limits. And there's a challenge to Montana's state-level ban on corporate independent spending — which would test whether states can impose restrictions that the federal government can't.
The Court could further loosen the rules.
Or tighten them, depending on how the cases are framed. But the trend over the last fifteen years has been in one direction: toward deregulation. If the Court were to rule that coordination restrictions violate the First Amendment — and there are justices who've signaled interest in that argument — the distinction between PACs and Super PACs could collapse entirely.
At which point we'd just have unlimited money flowing directly through campaigns, with no pretense of independence.
That's the logical endpoint. Whether we get there depends on the Court. But the direction of travel is clear: the wall between campaigns and outside spending groups has been getting thinner every cycle.
Which makes understanding the current system all the more important. The rules are written in legal language, but the effects are written in campaign ads, in policy outcomes, in who runs for office and who doesn't.
The rules are accessible. That's the thing I want listeners to take away. You don't need a law degree to understand this. The FEC's website is public. OpenSecrets is free. The forms are complicated, but the summaries are not. You can trace the money, and you should.
If you want to understand why a particular politician votes a particular way, follow the money. It's not the whole explanation — ideology, constituency, and conviction all matter — but it's the explanation that's most often hidden in plain sight.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1920s, microbiologists in British Somaliland published a now-abandoned theory that camel milk cheese naturally ferments through a symbiotic relationship between lactobacilli and a then newly discovered airborne spore they named Lactobacillus somaliensis aerophilus. The theory's central claim — that the spore could survive the Sahara's dry heat for decades and spontaneously activate upon contact with camel milk fat — was mainstream in East African dairy science for nearly fifteen years before being debunked in 1937 when researchers demonstrated the "spores" were actually fine grains of windblown gypsum dust.
Windblown gypsum dust. The original airborne probiotic.
Fifteen years of dairy science built on sand.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to understand the mechanics behind the headlines — how money actually moves, what the legal structures are, and what's at stake when those structures change — this is the show for you. Find us at myweirdprompts.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
