Rebel Conservatives Excel in GOP Fund

Insurgent conservatives seeking to pull the Republican Party to the right raised more money last year than the groups controlled by the party establishment, whose bulging bank accounts and ties to major donors have been their most potent advantage in the running struggle over the party's future, according to new campaign filings and interviews with officials.

The shift in fortunes among the largest and most influential outside political groups could have an enormous impact in the 2014 election cycle, as the warring Republican factions prepare to square off in a series of Senate and House primaries around the country and as Republican leaders seek to rein in activists who they believe have fractured and endangered the party with policies that alienate independent-leaning voters.

Groups representing the party establishment, like Karl Rove's Crossroads, are struggling to bring in the level of cash they raised in 2012, when Crossroads spent more than $300 million in a failed effort to defeat President Obama and retake the Senate, leaving donors grumbling that their dollars had been wasted.

Meanwhile, insurgent conservative groups like the Tea Party Patriots - emboldened by activists' fury over compromises that Republican leaders have struck with Democrats on federal spending - now have formidable amounts of cash to augment their grass-roots muscle.

The money will go to television ads, direct mail and on-the-ground organizing in states like Alaska, Mississippi and South Carolina, where conservative and Tea Party-affiliated candidates are challenging incumbents or business-backed candidates.

Jenny Beth Martin, president of Tea Party Patriots, said the increase in fund-raising would allow the group to expand the number of races it could be active in and finance more sophisticated and data-driven voter outreach.

'Not just the amount of money, but the volume of donations and how many people are so active and engaged in our organization - those two things combined will allow us to get involved in more races,' Ms. Martin said.

The battles are being watched closely, especially in Kentucky, where the Senate Conservative Fund and other conservative groups are backing a primary challenge to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader and one of the most powerful Republican leaders in Washington.

No such division exists in the Democratic Party, where outside groups are successfully recruiting new donors and collaborating on big races. Two super PACs focused on helping Democrats in Congress announced record fund-raising on Friday, pulling in a total of $16.4 million - twice their total in 2011, the last comparable year.

The drop in establishment Republican fund-raising is also empowering other conservative factions, particularly the political and philanthropic network overseen by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. Americans for Prosperity, the free-market advocacy group founded by David Koch, has become by far the biggest single spender on early-campaign issue advertisements against Democratic incumbents. Since October, it has spent more than $23 million, chiefly on attacks on Democrats for supporting Mr. Obama's health care law.

That spree underscores the shifting balance in power in the party. During the 2012 campaign, Republican leaders counted on Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, the nonprofit arm of Mr. Rove's group, to soften up Democratic candidates with issue ads in the early campaign season. Now that job is falling largely to Americans for Prosperity, which has been critical of Republican leaders' strategy on issues like the debt ceiling.

'The model that we have been building for the past eight years - a state-based organization with a supportive home office but a permanent infrastructure on the ground, with real troops, and with real support behind it - is one that our supporters believe in,' said Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity.

Four Republican-leaning groups with close ties to the party's leadership in Congress - Crossroads and its 'super PAC' affiliate; the Congressional Leadership Fund; and Young Guns Action - raised a combined $7.7 million in 2013. By contrast, four conservative organizations that have battled Republican candidates deemed too moderate or too yielding on spending issues - FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth Action Fund, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Tea Party Patriots - raised a total of $20 million in 2013, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed on Friday.

'This is by far the biggest nonelection year we've ever had,' said Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has feuded with party organizations. 'It shows how committed people are to electing true conservatives and to advancing conservative principles.'

The emerging money gap is likely to put enormous pressure on deep-pocketed business groups to ante up, dragging historically cautious Beltway trade associations more fully into treacherous factional battles among their Republican allies.

Because some of the biggest groups are not required to report their fund-raising to the Federal Election Commission and did not volunteer the information, the figures do not include some major spenders on both sides, including Americans for Prosperity, and the American Action Network, which focused on House races and is affiliated with the Congressional Leadership Fund.

And the party-oriented organizations, which were organized and remain oriented toward helping Republicans win general elections, raise most of their revenue later in the election cycle.

'Our pledges are on track with previous cycles, and we are increasingly enthusiastic about prospects for winning a majority in the Senate and holding the majority in the House,' said Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads.

Moreover, major trade associations with ties to the Republican establishment have signaled they will spend heavily in this year's election cycle, in part to help elevate candidates who can perform strongly in matchups against Democrats. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, traditionally one of the biggest players in campaigns, is forecasting that it will spend about $50 million on a mix of general election and primary races.

Yet there are signs that some of the establishment-oriented groups are being careful with cash. American Crossroads, the American Action Network and the YG Network announced a joint $1.2 million advertising campaign in the special election for a congressional seat in Florida, suggesting that the groups were taking care to pool their spending to achieve greater impact.

Some of the decline in fund-raising by major Republican groups is also being driven by the fragmentation of the party's outside spending infrastructure. Mr. Rove's battles with rebellious conservatives have drawn enough controversy that some candidates decline to be openly associated with Crossroads. Instead, they are backed by smaller groups, often founded by the candidates' donors and former aides, that focus on a single race.

Such groups, in states like Alaska, Louisiana, North Carolina and Texas, have raised about $5 million among them, easing some of the gap with conservative groups.

'We still see ourselves as the serious underdogs,' Mr. Hoskins said.