Anti-big money super PAC reels in big money

Mayday PAC, the self-styled anti-super PAC super PAC fighting big money in politics, raised $1.5 million since mid-August, with $650,000 coming from just five super-rich donors.

Former children’s shoe mogul Arnold Hiatt, a major liberal donor who has championed campaign finance reform, wrote the biggest check — $250,000 — to Mayday PAC, according to a report filed Wednesday afternoon with the Federal Election Commission, covering Aug. 21 through the end of last month.

During that span, the PAC also received $100,000 donations from BuzzFeed co-founder John Johnson, Twitter and Tumblr investor Fred Wilson, green energy executive David Milner and Ian Simmons, the husband of Hyatt hotel heiress Liesel Pritzker Simmons.

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The five major donors combined to give more than the roughly $525,000 the PAC collected from donors who gave less than $200 — a distribution that highlights the power of major donors in politics and seems to strain the group’s characterization of itself as the “crowd-funded super PAC to end all super PACs.”

To be sure, a majority of the $1.5 million haul in its recent report did come from hundreds of small and mid-sized contributions. A combination of tech types (Google, Twitter and Facebook appear often in the employer field of the PAC’s donor rolls), regular folks, and at least one celebrity (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gave to the super PAC. Even a Democratic super PAC (House Majority PAC) gave a $219 in-kind contribution of polling.

The recent report brings Mayday’s tally for the year to nearly $7.6 million — a significant haul for a PAC with the admittedly ironic goal of raising big money to fight big money in politics.

So far, Mayday has reported spending $3.9 million on ads supporting congressional candidates who support reforms to reduce the role of money in politics.

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The super PAC was co-founded by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who has worked hard to cast it as nonpartisan, despite the fact that its animating issue has very little support from Republican politicians. Lessig actually featured himself doing the voiceovers in its highest-profile ad campaign to date — in support of Jim Rubens’ long-shot campaign for New Hampshire’s Republican Senate nomination.

When Rubens lost badly to former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, Lessig wrote on his blog that the result “forces me to rethink how much we can do right now.”

The group is currently airing ads against a pair of Republican congressional candidates — Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, who it’s attacking for taking money from insurance and drug companies, and David Young of Iowa, who it accuses of trying to weaken Medicare.

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And Mayday last week made a big splash by committing $1 million to support Democrat Rick Weiland’s surging campaign in South Dakota’s three-way Senate race. Mayday went up with an ad praising Weiland as a small-business owner working to reduce the influence of “big money that controls our democracy.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story reported that Lawrence Lessig was the founder of Mayday PAC. He co-founded it with Republican strategist Mark McKinnon.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect the nature of House Majority PAC’s contribution to Mayday PAC....