First Read: “The Dems’ bundler model (whereby candidates race to get maxed-out checks from donors) has been replaced by the ActBlue model (where they hunt for small-dollar donors over the internet).”

“This transformation — at least for the first quarter — has resulted in less overall money.”

“In the first quarter of 2007, the Top 6 Dem candidates (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Dodd) raised a combined $85 million, led by Obama and Clinton at about $25 million each. Yet in the first quarter of 2019, the Top 7 Dem candidates so far (Sanders, Harris, O’Rourke, Buttigieg, Warren, Klobuchar, Booker) have raised a combined $63 million.”

“But the transformation also has resulted in many more small donors, who can donate again. And again. And again.”

“As Democratic presidential hopefuls promise not to boost their candidacies through spending by outside groups with cash from wealthy donors, sometimes given secretly, a new report says the party received most of the so-called ‘dark money’ spent on political ads in the 2018 midterms,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Walter Shapiro: “Democrats, unlike Republicans, have never firebombed each other with unlimited Super PAC money in presidential primaries. That Democratic record of restraint owes as much to a quirk of timing as it does to party-wide opposition to whatever-it-takes fundraising.”

“Barack Obama ran unopposed for the nomination in 2012, the first election cycle after the Citizens United decision. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with a shaky commitment to campaign reform, decided for strategic reasons not to attack the small-donor-powered Bernie Sanders.”

“But as more than a dozen serious Democratic candidates game out their potential 2020 presidential races over the holidays, thoughts turn to sugar plums and, sadly, to Super PACs. A recent front-page New York Times story, augmented by my own reporting, suggests that 2020 is likely to be the year when ambition leads some Democratic candidates to try to follow the Super PAC route to the nomination.”

Rep.-elect Ross Spano (R-FL) “is struggling to hire office staff as he relies on a controversial adviser: one of the friends at the center of a campaign finance scandal that is rocking the Florida Republican,” Politico reports.

“Spano, an attorney and outgoing state legislator with past financial troubles, recently admitted in a letter to the Federal Election Commission that he might have committed a campaign finance ‘violation’ in failing for two months to disclose $180,000 he accepted from two friends.”

“But if the FEC deems the ‘loans’ to be campaign contributions, they would exceed legal donation limits of $2,700 per cycle, per contributor. And experts say it could constitute a criminal violation by Spano and, potentially, the two people who gave his campaign the money — Cary Carreno and Karen Hunt.”

Mother Jones finds evidence which suggests that the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign may have illegally coordinated campaign ad spending.

“The two purchases may have looked coincidental; Red Eagle and AMAG appear at first glance to be separate firms. But each is closely connected to a major conservative media-consulting firm called National Media Research, Planning and Placement. In fact, the three outfits are so intertwined that both the NRA’s and the Trump campaign’s ad buys were authorized by the same person: National Media’s chief financial officer, Jon Ferrell.”

“Newly elected members of Congress benefited from millions of dollars indirectly tied to party leaders in Washington. But much of that money was spent on ads that appeared to be from local groups,” Roll Call reports.

“The tactic is legal, thanks to campaign finance laws that have not been updated since the dawn of the digital age and Supreme Court rulings that have struck down limits on money in politics. But such strategies, laid out in the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center’s Dodging Disclosure report, represent the acceleration of ‘big money trends’ that have given deep-pocketed groups outsize influence over elections and made the 2018 midterms the most expensive in American history.”