Truesee's Daily Wonder

Sarah Palin is supported by a political operation befitting someone considering a presidential run. AP

A new financial report filed Sunday evening showed Sarah Palin’s political action committee has taken its fundraising to a higher level – and suggests that she has begun building a more sophisticated political operation in place of a bare-bones organization powered mostly by her rock star status and scrappy on-line presence.

The report, filed with the Federal Election Commission, shows that Palin’s political action committee raised more money in the second quarter of this year – $866,000 – than it had in any previous three-month stretch since Palin formed the group in January 2009.

The committee, SarahPAC, also spent nearly twice as much – $742,000 – as it had in any previous quarter, the lion’s share of which went to the type of list-building and fundraising (including its first major direct-mail campaign) that typically undergird top-tier political committees. It also reported its biggest-ever round of donations to candidates – $87,50 – and its highest outlays for travel costs, including $17,000 on private jet fare to crisscross the country for high-profile political speaking gigs, and speechwriting. It also showed continued payments for that speechwriting as well as foreign and domestic policy consulting, and its first ever payments to a scheduler.

In short, for the first time since the 2008 campaign when she was the vice-presidential running mate to GOP presidential candidate John McCain, Palin is supported by a political operation befitting someone considering a presidential run.

SarahPAC, a so-called leadership political action committee, relied largely on small donors for its fundraising haul between the beginning of April and the end of last month, according to the report, which shows more than $1 million in the bank at the end of the quarter.

Though the stated purposes of political action committees like SarahPAC are to boost like-minded candidates through contributions and appearances on their behalf, it’s become common for prospective presidential candidates to use such committees to pay for political staffs and travel before formally declaring their candidacies – as well as to collect chits by contributing to potential allies. Several of Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination – including Govs. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Haley Barbour of Mississippi and former Govs. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas – have their own PACs, and some have multiple committees in different states.

Most of their reports are due this week, though a spokesman said Pawlenty’s Freedom First PAC raised more than $700,000, while Romney’s field-leading Free and Strong America PAC, which reports monthly, had raised more than $1 million in April and May alone. Of the bunch, only Barbour had filed a second quarter report, which showed that one of his committees, a Georgia state committee called Haley's Leadership PAC quietly created late last year, pulled in nearly $70,000 from April through June, largely through a fundraiser last month that drew some big Republican names to a trendy restaurant in Washington’s Glover Park neighborhood.

Though SarahPAC has been competitive with all but Romney’s fundraising juggernaut in previous quarters, Palin and her PAC until recently had eschewed many of the traditional trappings of a big-time political operation. Instead, she largely relied on an ad hoc strategy built around Facebook posts, Tweets, and occasional speeches and fundraising emails, which sometimes left her appearing reactive or even flakey, such as on the few occasions where scheduling mix-ups or crossed signals prevented her making appearances at events at which she had been expected. 

But Sunday’s report offers a glimpse into an operation that is becoming more organized and streamlined as it builds out.

For instance, for the first time since it launched, SarahPAC reported payments – $11,000 worth – for scheduling assistance.

It also reported $128,000 in travel-related costs – more than twice as much as Palin had accrued in any previous three-month span, which reflects a packed political schedule that had Palin hop-scotching the nation stumping for candidates and appearing at political events. Take the $10,500 charter flight booked by the PAC in April; PAC officials said it jetted Palin between a fundraising rally for fellow tea party hero Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) in Minneapolis to New Orleans, where Palin spoke to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. The conference, considered a crucial stop for would-be presidential candidates, draws a cross-section of activists and operatives, and attendees got gift bags including caribou jerky from Palin, for which SarahPAC reported paying $3,800 to Indian Valley Meats in Indian, Alaska.

But perhaps most indicative of a more traditional, robust political operation were the $330,000 in fundraising costs reflected in the report, including $154,000 to HSP Direct, a direct-mail vendor that put together SarahPAC’s first direct-mail campaign. Palin had previously used primarily online fundraising techniques, which tend to have lower overhead but cannot necessarily equal the return rate of a well-targeted but more expensive traditional direct-mail campaign. HSP’s campaign for SarahPAC, which started in earnest in April, sent glossy fundraising solicitations to more than 500,000 conservative households, asking them to help the PAC support conservative candidates in 2010, according to SarahPAC treasurer Tim Crawford.

Through the direct-mail campaign and its continued online fundraising, SarahPAC added about 8,000 new donors in the second quarter, bringing its total contributors to more than 25,000, said Crawford, adding the PAC also has more than 200,000 emails on its list.

“Essentially when we started last January, we started from scratch,” Crawford said. “We didn’t have a big base of people coming out of the presidential campaign. Everybody knew that there was this massive amount of support, but she didn’t have it, because all that stuff was property of the McCain campaign. But now, I think we’ve got a pretty formidable thing going on, and it grows every day,” Crawford said.

Among SarahPAC’s $87,500 in second-quarter contributions were donations to candidates Palin has helped boost in contested GOP primary victories this year in states that will play a key role in determining the 2012 Republican presidential nominees, such as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle ($2,500), South Carolina congressional candidate Tim Scott ($5,000) and Iowa gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad ($5,000). SarahPAC also gave $5,000 to the reelection campaign of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, whose support will be courted assiduously by the field of 2012 GOP presidentiaal aspirants.

Palin’s endorsements and her PAC’s accompanying contributions have helped her forge a burgeoning reputation as queen-maker whose coveted support has been credited with helping a group of female Republican candidates – “mama grizzlies,” in her parlance – to victory.

But Sunday’s report shows more goes into her endorsement decisions than just her gut instinct.

In fact, the PAC continued paying a Sacramento-based researcher named Andrew Davis to vet most candidates before Palin endorses them.

The PAC also paid $5,700 for speechwriting to Lindsay Hayes, who previously penned speeches for the McCain-Palin campaign, and before that for former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. And SarahPAC continued paying $10,000 a month to a consulting firm run by former John McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann to provide consulting on “national and international issues” to Palin.

Her late June speech outlining a hawkish approach to international engagement was well received by conservative foreign policy types and taken seriously by the broader community – a marked contrast from the wide-spread criticism in 2008 that her views on international affairs were often ill informed.

Palin also got a surge of glowing press this week for a campaign-style video paid for by SarahPAC that promoted her message of conservative female empowerment and touted the surge of the grassroots tea-party activists who have in turn embraced her. Payments to the videographer hired to shoot and produce the video were not reflected in the report, likely because campaigns, like businesses, have a lag between delivery of goods and services, and billing and payment for them.

To be sure, SarahPAC in some ways still embodies Palin’s non-traditional, grassroots personae. It paid $6,000 a month to the consulting firm owned by Rebecca Mansour, a Los Angeles screenwriter and political neophyte whose creation of the popular cheerleading blog Conservatives4Palin endeared her to Palin’s inner circle and led to her being hired to help manage Palin’s Internet presence, including her closely watched Facebook page.