wmLambert, The name of the group you're looking for is, the first letter of each of the following words. Apples Randomly Against Basic Eggs Largely Labelled As Apple Deniers Victorious In Sequence Or Rotating Systems. The have a bad reputation for suppressing their name.
They're a clearing house for dark money on the left that takes giant donations and filters them down to a large network of other left dark money groups for deployment. They're how it's possible for newly formed issue groups to pop into an area with a $20 million war chest.
As far as the specifics in this thread:
Of course Republicans are against disclosure of donors, leftists harass and threaten anyone whose name they can find. They get them fired, they ruin their businesses, they destroy their lives. All of which is fundamentally the opposite of free and fair elections.
It makes no sense that we have strict caps on individual contributions to elections that a billionaire can get around with trivial ease. This isn't because of Citizens United. No campaign reform laws passed by politicians ever do anything but stack the deck.
Despite their protests and pretending to be the good team, the Democrats structural advantages in the dark money space are insurmountable. One of the fundamental characteristics that pushes people to be a Republican or a Democrat is whether you believe the ends justifies the means. There is no large group of Republican voters that believes that an equivalent dark money organization on the right would be legitimate to create or use, whereas the refrain from the left is always it worked.
Spending money to try and get the other party to nominate a worse candidate? It works, ergo okay.
The structural advantage of Democrat control of virtually the entire media, dwarfs by a factor of at least a hundred and probably far more every dollar the Republicans could ever spend. How would the voters ever make an informed decision on the actual issues when the media won't fairly cover (or sometimes cover at all) any issue that makes Republicans look better than Democrats. I mean, worst administration in history for the border, and the media pretended like it didn't exist for most of the last 2 years. Inflation? You have hours of "inflation-denier" coverage, "inflation is transitory" coverage, we aren't in a recession coverage, it's "all actually Trump's fault" coverage, it's "all the Republicans' fault coverage," Democrats passed a "reflation reduction" act that's making a difference, and even, it's Republicans fault that people even know what the word inflation is, to practically zero actually putting the blame where it belongs on decisions of the Biden administration and Democrat single party passed legislation. If they covered it honestly, how many points does that equate to in an election? More than enough in most races.
The cash and in-kind contributions by unions to Democrats who then negotiate deals with those unions is both corruption and incalculably valuable. If Republicans had such a deal with anyone, the left would be screaming corruption at every turn and so would the media.
The fact that Democrats have legally established that they can conduct Lawfare on any number of issues they care about from organizations that are tax exempt and many of which are funded from the public coffers is incalculable. This causes a massive distortion, where Democrat causes effectively get free, subsidized and virtually unlimited access to the legal system. Republicans are slowly catching up but still face situations where subsidized Democrat legal activism can bankrupt organizations that try to protect their rights. There's virtually no consequences when they are caught abusing people.
Bureaucrats overwhelmingly tip the scales on virtually every conceivable grounds to the left in hundreds of thousands of ways that make equal play impossible.
Honestly, given the factors at play in this election cycle, which in fact should have led to a red tidal wave (with the caveat that the SC's abortion decision was real factor in play in the other direction), the results of the actual election demonstrate the level of operational handicap that Republicans are suffering. Literally, 90% plus of what Americans see is hand picked by pro-Democrat people to either make Dems look good, hide or dismiss problems that would make Dems look bad, make Republicans look terrible, and make non-existent any dialogue on things that make Republicans look good.
For example, I saw someone say Fetterman was so much better than Oz that if they'd switched parties the results would have been the same. Honestly that's delusional. If Fetterman had been a Republican, his stroke would have been covered wall to wall and every mishap would have been magnified in every broad cast, a dozen reporters would have been hammering him everyday and he would have tripped up over and over. His whole incident with chasing an unarmed black man with a gun would have been packaged into a frequently shown bit about how racist he was. He would have lost by 20 points. You can see an actual example of something like that from back when Doug Jones got elected to the Senate in deep red Alabama - the media was relentless and it mattered.
Honest to goodness, an unbiased media would probably cost the Democrats 10-15 points nationally. That's real state of where we are.
