DES MOINES — As he swung through Iowa this week,
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
rarely passed up a chance to bash the rising tide of money in politics, a
system he said on Tuesday was “corrupt and undermining American democracy.”
At many of these stops, he was accompanied by members
of National Nurses United, a seven-year-old union, fanning out from a
bright-red bus in matching red scrubs to corral potential Sanders votes.
But the union is not just busing nurses into Iowa.
The union’s “super PAC” has spent close to $1
million on ads and other support for Mr. Sanders, the Democratic presidential
candidate who has inspired liberal voters with his calls to eradicate such
outside groups. In fact, more super PAC money has been spent so
far in express support of Mr. Sanders than for either of his Democratic rivals,
including Hillary Clinton, according
to Federal Election
Commission records.
“I do appreciate the irony,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, the
executive director of National Nurses United. “All things being
equal, we would rather not be doing this. On the other hand, we want to see
Bernie as president.”
Mr. Sander’s unlikely rise to super PAC pre-eminence
is, in part, the story of an unusual alignment of strategies by different
outside groups, including Republican ones eager to bloody Mrs. Clinton and lift
Mr. Sanders, whom conservatives believe will be easier to defeat in a general
election. While the nurses’ super PAC is the biggest left-leaning outside
spender in the Democratic primary, conservative organizations have also spent
at least $4.3 million attacking Mrs. Clinton in recent months.
One recent online ad from the Republican super PAC American
Crossroads has assailed Mrs. Clinton for her Wall Street speaking fees —
echoing an argument Mr. Sanders often makes against her. Another conservative
group, Ending
Spending, bankrolled by the Wyoming billionaire Joe Ricketts,
has begun a $600,000 campaign in Iowa highlighting Mr. Sanders’s promises to
raise taxes on the rich and provide free public college tuition, calling him
“too liberal for Iowa.” But the ad’s language and
imagery, including a contented-looking superrich couple hugging in front of a
mansion and expensive cars, has led some Democrats to believe it is actually
meant to bolster Mr. Sanders.
But the super PAC spending by the nurses’ union also
underscores an aspect of the Supreme Court’s Citizens
United decision that Mr. Sanders rarely dwells on in his campaign speeches
attacking the ruling. The same decision that gave corporations the ability to
“buy and purchase the United States government” — as Mr. Sanders put it on a
visit to Grinnell College on Monday — bestowed the same rights on labor unions,
freeing them to spend unlimited money from their treasuries on election
advertising.
While the vast majority of super PAC money still
comes from wealthy individuals, union cash — pooled from the dues and
contributions of members — has become a critical source of money for outside
groups on the left. In 2012 and 2014, unions gave more than $200 million to
super PACs. More than half of it went to union-controlled groups that spent
tens of millions of dollars on advertising, mailers and other “independent
expenditures.” So far in 2016, according
to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, seven
of the top 20 organizational contributors to super PACs were unions or their
affiliates, not corporations.
“When you have hundreds of thousands or millions of
dues-paying members, you can wield a significant amount of influence,” said
Robert Maguire, an investigator at the center. “It’s the flip side of a lot of
other spending we’re seeing this days.”
No union has spent as much money in the Democratic
primary as National Nurses United, which was born out of a 2009 merger of three
smaller unions and has unapologetically embraced liberal politics and
movement-building. In 2011, union nurses provided health care at the Occupy
Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan, and the organization has lobbied
forcefully for single-payer health care and a financial transaction tax.
When most large labor organizations backed Mrs.
Clinton, the nurses were among a handful to support Mr. Sanders, among them the
Communications Workers of America and the postal workers’ union. They are
guided, the nurses’ leaders say, by the principle that taking care of patients
means taking care of the country, too.
“This sick government we have right now is killing
our democracy,” said Jean Ross, a Minnesota nurse now serving as one of the
group’s three co-presidents, at a Sanders event in Des Moines on Tuesday. The
union’s bus stood outside a steelworkers union hall, where the red scrubs worn
by the nurses speckled a room full of Carhartt jackets and denim. At any given
time, as many as 30 nurses from around the country are on the campaign trail
helping Mr. Sanders, rotating in on vacation days and weekends.
“We have a bus, he has a bus,” Ms. Ross said gaily.
“Nurses get on, nurses get off.”
The group’s campaigning advocacy for Mr. Sanders has
drawn charges of hypocrisy from Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. While Mr. Sanders
frequently declares that he has no super PAC of his own, he has not publicly
called on the nurses to refrain from their efforts on his behalf. He has
welcomed their help, thanking the nurses by name in campaign speeches and
referring to the union in one recent appearance as a “one of the sponsors” of
his campaign.
“This is one of the prime examples of Senator Sanders
saying one thing and doing another,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs.
Clinton. “For months he had criticized super PACs and pledged to shun them in
his campaign, but all along he has benefited from hundreds of thousands of
dollars in independent expenditures from one of those very organizations.”
Mr. Sanders insists there is no contradiction.
“The difference is a pretty simple difference,” Mr.
Sanders told reporters on Tuesday. “Hillary Clinton goes out raising money for
her own super PAC. I don’t have a super PAC, and in the best of all possible
worlds, which I hope to bring about, we will get rid of super PACs, we will
overturn Citizens United.”
Mrs. Clinton has indeed helped raise money for a
super PAC: Priorities USA Action, a group originally formed to help re-elect
President Obama and now run by a former Clinton campaign aide. The group has
raised more than $40 million since the beginning of last year, including
seven-figure contributions from the kind of billionaire financiers Mr. Sanders
delights in lampooning on the campaign trail. A research and rapid-response
super PAC, Correct the Record, founded by the
Clinton ally David
Brock and funded by wealthy liberals, has also taken swipes at Mr. Sanders
in recent days over his record on gun control.
Priorities USA has continued to husband most of its
money for later in the campaign, however, in anticipation of a major general
election battle with Mrs. Clinton as the nominee. Several other liberal groups
have spent money on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, including Planned Parenthood’s
political arm and the League of Conservation Voters. But those expenditures
totaled only $847,000, according to spending reported to the elections
commission through Monday, less than the amount spent by the nurses’ super PAC,
National Nurses United for Patient Protection.
Ms. DeMoro, the nurses’ union official, scoffed at
any comparison between the two efforts, one by nurses, the other by a political
operative.
“This is almost a morality play,” Ms. DeMoro said.
“It’s Clinton’s David Brock versus Bernie’s nurses.”
Correction: January 28, 2016
An earlier version of this article misspelled the
name of an investigator with the Center for Responsive Politics. He is Robert
Maguire, not McGuire.
Yamiche Alcindor and Sarah Cohen contributed
reporting.
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