We do know there is now coordination

WOLF: That’s the transparency side. What’s the problem with the condition that these groups, wink nod, must be independent and not coordinate with campaigns?

GHOSH: There have been many, many instances where someone has filed a complaint saying this is coordination. This group is taking their cues from this candidate or from the party committee, and the Federal Election Commission has never enforced the law in anything approaching a way that would actually keep these groups honest about being independent.

In 2024 things got a little bit worse. The FEC, in the spring of 2024, issued an advisory opinion called Texas Majority PAC, where basically they said that certain types of activity, coordinated canvassing operations — that this is a paid service that committees and campaigns pay for, essentially hiring people to go door to door, meet voters and basically tell them why they should vote a certain way. That service, the FEC said, could be coordinated.

You could see, overnight, that from that opinion, the various outside groups backing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign immediately took notice and immediately began planning how the Trump campaign could outsource their ground game to these outside groups. No group made, I think, bigger use of that decision than Elon Musk’s America PAC. His super PAC immediately began spending money on these canvassing operations, particularly in swing states, in open coordination with the Trump campaign.

You went from a place in 2010 where the Supreme Court said no risk of corruption, because this will be independent activity, to where we are in 2024, with a billionaire spending hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of which was for activity openly coordinated with a presidential campaign.