It is against the law for candidates and outside groups to share private, strategic information. Yet some candidates and outside groups try to circumvent that restriction by hiding such information in plain sight in the public domain.
Ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, the National Republican Congressional Committee and at least two Republican-aligned outside groups — American Crossroads, a super PAC, and American Action Network, a dark money group — used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data for congressional races with alphanumeric codes that looked like gibberish to outside observers. In 2012, Democratic Party operatives ran a similar Twitter account to share information about advertising buys.
Typical tweets from these accounts would read as follows: "CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52-->49/476-10s” or “Bill Enyart for Congress/DCCC”,IL-12 GEN,10/23,10/29,broadcast,281,A35+,30,KTVI,23800,101.9 #buydetails.”
If they knew where to look for it and how to interpret it, political operatives for campaigns and outside groups would find this data incredibly useful.
Act Now on Climate, the super PAC that supported the 2020 presidential bid of Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA), ran hundreds of explicitly pro-Inslee ads on Facebook that, as The Daily Beast reported, secretly provided valuable targeting information to his presidential campaign.
The super PAC’s digital ads each used unique links to direct traffic to Inslee’s campaign website. By doing so, the group was able to provide the Inslee campaign with a path to learn, thanks to Facebook’s public political ad library, which ads were the most effective at reaching people based on their age, gender, and location — demographic information that could have been useful for the campaign’s own messaging decisions. (The Inslee campaign denied using it.)
Government watchdogs have filed multiple complaints with the FEC against several of the groups that have appeared to share strategic information, but the commissioners have deadlocked on all of them (e.g., here, here, and here).
The bipartisan Political Accountability and Transparency Act would explicitly define this practice as illegal coordination. Read more here.
Here are 5 other ways to spot coordination:
