pop-up super – A Michigan Senate primary sparked scrutiny after a newly created “mystery” group bought $5 million in TV ads without clear ties to donors. The pattern reflects how super PACs, pop-up affiliates, and party-specific conduits can keep ultimate funding sources hid
When a bitter Michigan Senate primary heated up earlier this month, a group with a bland name moved fast—buying $5 million in TV advertising to boost the candidate preferred by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the Democratic race for Haley Stevens.
The group, the Center for Democratic Priorities, looked like a blank slate.. It had no track record in Michigan politics and was incorporated in Delaware just seven months earlier. with details kept out of public view.. But online investigators quickly noticed something that complicated the mystery: the same consulting firm tied to an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC had been used to buy the ads.. AIPAC denied funding the campaign.
The practical effect for voters was immediate and frustrating. Federal Election Commission rules can delay clarity, meaning the true origin of the ad spending can remain unknown for months—an outcome that turns transparency into a deadline problem, rather than a straight answer on election day.
That tension sits inside a broader system.. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 16 years ago helped open pathways for special interests to move money without naming themselves in the way voters typically expect.. Super PACs can accept unlimited donations and spend unlimited amounts without coordinating directly with candidates.. Yet political money has continued to evolve—especially through increasingly sophisticated legal loopholes designed to obscure who is paying.
The pattern is consistent across the examples laid out here: new political entities appear late, the filings that identify their donors arrive only after voters have already cast ballots, and the end result is that election-day attention and voter understanding arrive on different timelines.
Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division, described what anonymity can do to voter decision-making.
“All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning.”
She later added: “All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning and have no indication of the broader groups they are tied to.” Ports said the result is “very damaging to transparency for that reason.”
In the 2026 cycle, those tactics are proliferating, and not only among well-known networks. Cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries are drawing into the same political atmosphere, though the mechanics they use don’t always match AIPAC’s “pop-up” approach.
Instead of always relying on sudden entities that emerge close to voting. groups aligned with the two tech industries have split their efforts into Democratic- and Republican-aligned affiliates.. Ports said the benefit can be twofold: hiding the ultimate source of donations and also attracting voters who are only willing to support one party’s messaging.
“They know that a Republican voter doesn’t want to hear from a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates.. [Republican voters] are not going to trust that messaging as much, or vice versa,” Ports said.. “They are dividing this money up to try to present their message as persuasively as possible to their target audiences.”
In Illinois, AIPAC’s web of committees showed how quickly “pop-up” operations can be set up.. AIPAC itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit, which prohibits it from directly engaging with electoral politics.. But it is publicly affiliated with a traditional political action committee that can take donations of up to $5. 000 per year. and that AIPAC PAC can donate directly to candidate campaigns.. AIPAC’s supporters can also give to United Democracy Project, a super PAC openly affiliated with AIPAC.
As AIPAC weighed involvement in the Illinois primaries. three new “pop-up” super PACs took advantage of reporting loopholes designed around timing.. Elect Chicago Women. Affordable Chicago Now. and Chicago Progressive Partnership were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over.
The donors were ultimately revealed after the election.. The disclosures included two wealthy Chicago political donors: Michael Sacks. the CEO of an asset management firm. and Anthony “Tony” Davis. the co-founder of a private equity firm.. The financial chain also connected the groups more directly: after the pop-up entities filed official reports. Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now received funds from United Democracy Project.. Then Elect Chicago Women handed $1 million to Chicago Progressive Partnership.
That two-step mattered for how Chicago Progressive Partnership could run ads.. Observers said the ads were misleading while the group attempted to boost one pro-Palestinian candidate in the Illinois’s 9th Congressional District. aiming apparently to harm another—an influencer. Kat Abughazaleh.. Abughazaleh ultimately lost.
In the same congressional race, Elect Chicago Women spent money to support state Sen. Laura Fine and oppose progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who won.
In other contests, tracking the money was easier—sometimes because the “pop-up” super PACs never appeared. In those races, United Democracy Project spent directly.
Michigan’s case remains unfinished in a similar way to how secrecy lingers: the Center for Democratic Priorities has yet to file any registration documents with the FEC. If it is classifying itself as a super PAC, Ports said it will not have to file disclosures revealing its donors until July 15.
While AIPAC’s involvement in Michigan is still disputed—AIPAC did not respond to requests for comment about potential tactics—observers expect a similar pattern to continue as primary candidates battle over AIPAC’s influence and the timing rules keep voters in the dark.
Gambling on Races
The money coming into elections also reflects different industry playbooks.. With AI and crypto becoming more common, Washington has been trying to sort out how to regulate the industries.. The businesses involved, the report notes, have invested heavily in election influence while taking different approaches than AIPAC.
Rather than using pop-up super PACs, crypto operations have divided influence into Republican and Democratic affiliates.
Fairshake is described as the biggest crypto super PAC.. It is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. as well as two crypto companies the firm has invested in: Coinbase and Ripple Labs.. The venture capital firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen rose to fame in the 1990s for co-founding the web browser Netscape.. More recently. he has become notable as one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders in the tech world and a frequent visitor to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.
Fairshake spends through its GOP affiliate, Defend American Jobs, and through a Democratic operation called Protect Progress.. The report says Fairshake portrayed itself as an equal-opportunity operation. but its “extraordinary spending” in favor of Republican candidate Bernie Moreno in 2024—when he ousted former Democratic Sen.. Sherrod Brown in Ohio—opened it up to accusations of partisanship.
Brown is now running to return to the Senate against JD Vance’s Republican replacement, Jon Husted. His rhetoric this time around has been notably more muted when it comes to crypto.
Ports said the party-specific affiliate model may be less deceptive than pop-up super PACs, but she described it as still misleading. She pointed to how splitting messaging by party can make it easier to tailor attacks and appeals while still drawing from the same political funding ecosystem.
Fairshake’s structure also allows donors to pick a single-party affiliate. Ron Conway, a Democratic megadonor and angel investor, donated to Protect Progress in 2024 and later announced he was breaking from the network over its support of Moreno.
In the crypto world, other groups take even sharper partisan positions.. The Winklevoss twins—brothers behind a top Coinbase competitor. a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini—have given millions’ worth of bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC.. The report describes that PAC as explicitly opposed to the Democratic Party.. Digital Freedom Fund has also drawn donations from crypto exchange Kraken.. The report says it has not spent heavily on political campaigns so far. but that could change as midterm election season heats up.
Another committee mentioned is The Fellowship PAC.. It is chaired by an executive at the domestic affiliate of the stablecoin company Tether.. The report says Cantor Fitzgerald—holding U.S.. Treasury notes that back Tether’s stablecoins—has backed the stablecoin with $10 million in donations. and that former Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick serves as Trump’s commerce secretary.. The Fellowship PAC has endorsed only Republican candidates thus far.
Artificial Interference
The AI industry is also stepping into electoral influence, but with an internal rivalry reflected in the political organizations it funds.
Two of the industry’s biggest players—OpenAI and Anthropic—are backing rival operations aimed at different approaches to AI regulation.. The report says OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife donated to Leading the Future. a super PAC meant to function as an umbrella organization for the industry like Fairshake.
Perplexity AI and Andreessen Horowitz—an early investor in OpenAI—have also given money to Leading the Future.
Leading the Future has a Democratic affiliate, Think Big, and a Republican arm, American Mission. Conway has given only to Think Big, while Joe Lonsdale, the right-wing venture capitalist, has given to American Mission.
The structure is described as closely mirroring Fairshake in part because one of Leading the Future’s “shot-callers,” Josh Vlasto, previously worked for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of New York.
The report also contrasts how the companies’ regulatory preferences align with their political strategies. OpenAI generally favored a more relaxed approach to AI regulation. Its competitor, Anthropic, has staked out—at least rhetorically—a position in favor of stricter rules.
To pursue that aim, Anthropic recently created a traditional corporate political action committee, AnthroPAC, which can donate directly to politicians.
The report says Anthropic. with its corporate scale of $380 billion. also made a major donation to a political nonprofit called Public First Action.. Public First Action sits at the heart of a network of affiliated super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC. the Democratic-aligned Jobs and Democracy PAC. and the Defending Our Values PAC for Republican causes.
The Republican and Democratic affiliates are led respectively by former Reps. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and Brad Carson, D-Okla. Public First Action donated to all three super PACs.
In a statement to the report. a spokesperson for Public First Action said the three PACs are “aligned” but operate independently and that Anthropic does not play a role directing the groups’ political spending.. The spokesperson. Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez. said: “Public First Action did not establish Jobs and Democracy PAC. Public First PAC. or Defending Our Values PAC. all of which are independent from Public First Action and were established separately.”
In North Carolina, the report says Public First Action’s Democratic affiliate spent $1.6 million boosting incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee over her opponent Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who supported a moratorium on AI data center construction.
Allam said she believes the Anthropic-backed super PAC network split its spending into Democratic and Republican affiliates to blunt attacks like those that have dogged United Democracy Project.. She said AIPAC’s super PAC has long faced criticism in Democratic primaries for drawing donations from Trump-supporting billionaires. and she believes the AI-backed network used a similar tactic to reduce scrutiny.
Anthropic and its backers “are trying to confuse folks to say, ‘we’re not the same,’ so that their spending is not on the same FEC reports,” Allam said.
The report says Anthropic voluntarily disclosed its donation to Public First Action.. But because Public First Action is set up as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee. voters may not know who Public First Action’s other donors are.. Rivera-Rodriguez said the group does not intend to disclose them.
“We’d welcome a broader conversation about transparency in political spending. starting with the hundreds of millions Big Tech companies are spending to prevent any regulation of AI whatsoever. ” he said.. “That said. Public First Action. Jobs and Democracy PAC. Public First PAC. and Defending Our Values PAC make all public disclosures required by law either to the FEC or the IRS. and those filings are publicly available online.. Additionally, all advertisements by those groups include the required disclaimers identifying who is paying for the advertisement.”
Allam pointed to election results as evidence of influence. She said she received 48.2 percent of the vote compared with Foushee’s 49.2 percent.
“For the incumbent to not receive more than 50 percent of her district’s support. that shows you that working families want change. they want something different. ” Allam said.. “We can build a progressive grassroots movement without being aligned with the same people who gave us Trump and MAGA Republicans.”
Even as voters face a growing volume of ads. the timing and naming rules described across these cases remain the core source of friction: some operations disclose donors only after ballots are cast. while other structures split spending by party to keep messaging—and the funding behind it—more flexible.. For election cycles ahead. the report suggests. the legal mechanics may continue to outrun the public’s ability to follow the money.
2026 midterms campaign finance super PACs front groups pop-up super PACs FEC disclosure Citizens United AIPAC United Democracy Project crypto PACs Fairshake OpenAI Anthropic AI regulation