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November 23, 2012 Think superPACs were a waste of wealthy donors' money this election season? Consider how New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's superPAC was able to help engineer an upset in one congressional race outside Los Angeles.

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November 19, 2012 Debate over the so-called fiscal cliff has dominated the post-election agenda. But the challenge of dealing with long-term debt and the annual deficit has been brewing for years. And one man who has kept his focus and money on that target is the billionaire Peter G. Peterson.

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November 12, 2012 A "return on investment" is a concept better known to Wall Street than to Washington. But after President Obama and the Democrats won most of the close elections last week, there are questions about the seven- and eight-figure "investments" made by dozens of conservative donors.

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November 7, 2012 This presidential election attracted $1.5 billion in outside spending — TV ads, robocalls and other political activity by groups created to take advantage of the new rules of campaign finance law. But on the day after the voting, their track record is open to question.

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November 7, 2012 The battle for the Senate was a proving ground for the new Citizens United politics. Outside groups unleashed heavily funded barrages of attack ads meant to help elect candidates while letting them keep their distance from the nastiness. In Ohio and Virginia, the tactic failed in rather dramatic ways.

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November 6, 2012 Republican Senate candidates Linda McMahon in Connecticut and Tom Smith in Pennsylvania spent a combined $56 million of their own money in losing efforts.

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November 5, 2012 Pick your adjective — enormous, astronomical, colossal. The political spending in 2012 was unprecedented and already has implications for the next campaign cycle.

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November 3, 2012 From a DVD claiming that President Obama's real father was a communist poet, to small-market TV ads of child readers urging support for the president, this campaign season has seen its share of outside-the-mainstream efforts to influence the election.

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October 31, 2012 A barrage of unsolicited anti-Obama text messages appears to be linked to a GOP consulting group, based in Virginia. The websites sending the messages have been suspended.

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October 15, 2012 Most of the TV ads supporting Mitt Romney have come from outside groups, not from Romney's own campaign. And those groups raised more than half of their money from secret donors, a much higher proportion than the secret donors backing President Obama, according to a new analysis.

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