Through the first six months of this year, Jeb Bush's presidential campaign raised $11 million. His super PAC raised $103 million.
Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign raised $8.9 million, from more than 12,000 donations. The Florida senator's super PAC raised nearly twice that much, $16 million, with $12 million of that coming from just four ultra-wealthy individuals.
In last year's elections, Grow WV, a conservative super PAC, spent more than $1.4 million to help Republican legislative candidates in West Virginia. Honest West Virginians, a union-backed group, spent nearly that much helping Democrats. The spending of both committees dwarfed that of any individual candidate.
Two conservative brothers from Wichita have announced that their political network will spend a whopping $889 million on the 2016 elections, more than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined spent on the 2012 elections.
"The spending goal," The New York Times reported, "would allow their political organization to operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican parties."
"A historic sum," Politico reported, "that in many ways would mark Charles and David Koch and their fellow conservative megadonors as more powerful than the official Republican Party."
That's the unheralded outcome of the post-Citizens United era, argues Heather Gerken, a professor at Yale Law School - not the flood of money that can be raised in unlimited amounts, but the growing power of various of political organizations that are supplanting traditional political parties.
The unprecedented amounts of money being spent on politics is creating "shadow parties," Gerken says, that isolate elites from regular people interested in getting involved in the political process. It's not so much the money as it is the exclusive networks that the money creates.
Gerken, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter and a legal adviser to both of President Barack Obama's presidential campaigns, will speak about the subject at Marshall University's Amicus Curiae lecture series on Thursday at 7 p.m.
While the current spending numbers are unprecedented, there has always been money in politics. Before there were super PACs and politically active nonprofits there were "issue ads" and tax exempt 527 organizations. Before "issue ads" and 527s there was "soft money."
Political money, it's been said, like water pushing up against a leaky dam, will find the cracks and sluice through.
When Gerken refers to "shadow parties," she means super PACs, political nonprofit groups and various 501(c) organizations that can raise money in unlimited amounts, often anonymously, to support candidates.
"What we see is an entire shadow party system being built around the current party system, and it's draining the lifeblood from the parties," Gerken said in a phone interview. "What we're seeing emerge is a system where the elites are housed in the shadow parties and everyday people are housed in the regular parties and that's not good for democracy."
For all their faults, for all the tales of party bosses and smoke-filled rooms, political parties offer a way for concerned citizens - the party faithful - to get involved.
Parties court big donors, yes, but they also need people to knock on doors and make phone calls and show up to caucuses.
"One of the signal strengths of the modern political party is that it has many points of entry," Gerken says in an article she co-wrote for the Supreme Court Review. "Large donors matter a lot, but they are not the only ones who matter. Shadow parties, in contrast, answer to their donors alone."
Concerned citizens, Gerken says, simply do not have the same ability to get involved in the political process through the shadow party system that they do through the traditional party system.
And the more money and resources politicians get from shadow parties, the more they outsource traditional campaign functions to super PACs, the fewer opportunities there are for the party faithful to have meaningful involvement, Gerken says.
"This isn't only a story about the rich getting richer," she writes. "It's also a story about the parties being hollowed out and thereby losing their ability to serve as robust democratic arenas. It's a story about the party faithful, already in decline, being left with a depressingly anemic role in American political life."
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.