Republican Super PACs Plan $1 Billion Spending 'Blitz' Before November

Republican donors and campaign groups are planning 'not to leave anything in the locker room' in the coming months, as they plan to break all previous records for campaign spending in a bid to ram Mitt Romney into the White House and influence more control in Congress in November.

According to "officials familiar with the groups' internal operations", Republican super PACs and major league conservative players - including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - will be spending over $1 billion before November's elections.

The spending 'blitz' comes in addition to funds raised by the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee - which intend to raise an additional $800 million.

"The Republican financial plans are unlike anything seen before in American politics. If the GOP groups hit their targets, they likely could outspend their liberal adversaries by at least two-to-one, according to officials involved in the budgeting for outside groups on the right and left," write Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico.

Conservative groups such as the Koch network, Restore Our Future, and American Crossroads, will be spending between $100-300 million each, among many other donors.

"The intensity on the right is white-hot," said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. "We just can't leave anything in the locker room. And there is a greater willingness to cooperate and share information among outside groups on the center-right."

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Politico: GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz

Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign. [...]

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more.

And American Crossroads and the affiliated Crossroads GPS, the groups that Rove and Ed Gillespie helped conceive and raise cash for, are expected to ante up $300 million, giving the two-year-old organization one of the election's loudest voices. [...]

In targeted states, the groups' activities will include TV, radio and digital advertising; voter-turnout work; mail and phone appeals; and absentee- and early-ballot drives. [...]

The consequences of the conservative resurgence in fundraising are profound. If it holds, Romney and his allies will likely outraise and outspend Obama this fall, a once-unthinkable proposition. The surge has increased the urgency of the Democrats' thus-far futile efforts to blunt the effects of a pair of 2010 federal court rulings - including the Supreme Court's seminal Citizens United decision - that opened the floodgates for limitless spending, and prompted Obama to flip-flop on his resistance to super PACs on the left.

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