One Nation Money

Robert Maguire writes at Open Secrets:

One of the most active groups in the 2016 cycle wasn’t a super PAC — though those were plenty busy — but a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, One Nation. From mid-2015 through 2016, the group spent about $40 million in a largely successful push to protect the GOP’s fragile majority in the Senate. And it did so without disclosing a single donor to the public.

This was One Nation’s first election in its current form, but the group is not new. Founded in 2010 as the Alliance for America’s Future, it had been dormant for years until operatives from another dark money powerhouse, Crossroads GPS, took over last year.

Under new management and a new name, One Nation’s revenues went from nothing to more than $10 million, according to newly filed tax documents obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics that cover 2015. (One Nation’s tax filing covering its 2016 activities isn’t due until November 2017.)

More than 61 percent of those revenues came from just four anonymous donorswho gave $1 million or more; one topped out at $2.5 million