Independent Expenditure Best Practices

We wanted to answer some basic independent expenditure frequently asked questions (FAQs). From simply defining what an independent expenditure (aka IE) is to discussing contribution limits, this article aims to provide background and clarity on IEs and how they work.

Here at The Campaign Workshop, we have written a lot about independent expenditure strategy in the past, but the key takeaways never change:

1. Know your goals.
2. Do no harm.
3. Don’t duplicate efforts.

What information independent expenditure (IE) campaigns can use depends on who you ask, and what set of laws you’re covered by. In recent years, you may have seen candidate campaigns that appear to bend over backward to make photos and b-roll videos publicly available on their website (a classic example of this being “McConnelling,” which went viral in 2014). Why? What are voters going to do with all this stuff? Well, it turns out that in most cases, the audience isn’t the run-of-the-mill voter at all. These campaigns may instead be trying to make information publicly available for independent expenditure campaigns to use.

An independent expenditure is an effort that expressly advocates for or against a candidate which is not made in coordination with any candidate campaign by a third party entity. When planning an independent expenditure campaign for or against a particular candidate it’s important not to make these three common mistakes.

While they share a number of similarities, independent expenditure mail and candidate campaign mail also have quite a few differences. Both independent expenditure mail and candidate campaign mail may have the same primary goal (i.e., getting a candidate elected), but the means that they use to get there can vary.

Unlike TV or radio, digital IE spending doesn’t come with an easy competitive report to help you track who is spending what and where. It’s a bummer, I know. That said, in their efforts to stave off regulation, oversight, and additional congressional inquiries (or maybe I’m too cynical and it’s actually out of the kindness of their democracy-loving hearts), many of the large platforms have started to provide real-time databases for political advertising. To find out what an IE is spending, it will certainly help to know the name of the committee (especially if you’re working in a cluttered independent expenditure field), but there’s a fair amount of flexibility in the search terms, so you should be able to find what you’re looking for using related keywords (think: the candidate’s name).