Campaign 2012

The latest deadline for the presidential candidates and the major superPACs to disclose their finances was Sunday night. The public and the media can find out who has been giving to the candidates, and how that money was spent.

But there's a lot of political spending that isn't being reported. Outside money groups are spending millions of dollars, and the donors remain anonymous. Two recent court rulings could force those groups to file public disclosures, but there already seems to be a way around that.

Unlike superPACs, these big-spending groups don't disclose their donors. They operate mostly as tax-exempt advocacy organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. It's a status that lets them hide the sources of their money.

In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, only one candidate remains to challenge presumptive nominee Mitt Romney: Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

Even Paul has said he will no longer campaign in states that have yet to hold their primaries. And Paul has always been considered a long shot to win. But that hasn't deterred many of his hard-core supporters, including the Silicon Valley billionaire who has bankrolled the superPAC backing Paul.

Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal. He hit the jackpot again when he gave Mark Zuckerberg the money to launch Facebook.

If you're eligible to vote but aren't registered yet, watch out. They're coming to get you!

Campaigns, political parties and interest groups are all mounting massive voter registration campaigns this year to influence the outcome of the November elections.

The target is the millions of Americans — the Pew Center on the States estimates that number is 51 million — who are eligible to vote but not registered. The belief is that even a relative few of these voters could swing the election results.

The NAACP says it plans to sign up 1.5 million new voters this year and will draw on a network of black churches, sororities and fraternities to help identify unregistered African-Americans.

Following the release of what his campaign called his first ad of the general election, Romney participated in a "tele-town hall" with supporters in the swing states where the ad is running: Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa.

Friendly questions from five participants ranged from how he'd rein in medical costs (jettison Obamacare and sell health care like shoes and food and other consumer products) to where he'd cut government spending (his list includes the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some funding to NPR.)

President Obama's performance in next Tuesday's Arkansas primary won't be as embarrassing as what happened in West Virginia two weeks ago, when he gave up 41 percent of the vote to someone who happened to be sitting in a federal prison in Texas for embezzlement.

But it may well do more lasting damage to his party.

Obama lost Arkansas by 20 points in 2008 and has virtually no chance of carrying the state this year in the November general election. Even many Democrats, it seems, have never warmed to him.

Challenging an incumbent president means finding ways to narrow the stature gap between the Oval Office occupant and would-be president.

Mitt Romney releases his first general election campaign ad. Plus wealthy GOP investors say their super PAC won't run a smear campaign connecting controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright with President Obama. Host Michel Martin discusses the latest political developments with Lenny McAllister of Politic365.com and author Michael Fauntroy.

It's the 300th episode of the It's All Politics podcast, and we hear from not only NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin, but from The Listener, as well.

Plus: one anti-Obama group wavers on hearing more from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Nebraska Republicans decide they've heard enough political mudslinging, and Americans Elect fails to find a candidate it can promote.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Mitt Romney is disavowing a plan by some wealthy Republicans to attack President Obama for ties to his controversial former pastor. Even the people behind that proposal said they are abandoning it after their idea was plastered on the front page of The New York Times.

The proposal centered on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was a mentor to Obama before the two parted ways during the last presidential campaign.

Republicans unaffiliated with Romney were considering spending $10 million on a racially tinged advertising campaign tying Wright to the president.

In Florida on Thursday, Romney disapproved of the plan: "I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America."

Earlier this year, President Obama's fundraising machine ran millions of dollars ahead of even the best-financed Republican presidential candidates. But now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee, the money gap is narrowing.

Battleground states like North Carolina are where the action is when it comes to presidential contests. Thus, they are where political tactics like, say, the anti-Obama ad campaign featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, first reported by The New York Times Thursday (and now disowned by virtually everyone the Times linked to it), are most likely to be rolled out.

One of the highest-profile political matchups of the season is playing out in Virginia, where two former governors with powerful friends and big-money backing are battling to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Jim Webb.

The dead-heat matchup pits Democrat Tim Kaine, 54, a favorite of President Obama and a former Democratic National Committee chairman, against George Allen, 60, namesake of his legendary Washington Redskins football coach father and a U.S. senator until undone in a re-election bid by what has become known as his "macaca moment."

The campaign for GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney and the Republican Party together raised $40.1 million in April, just shy of the $43.6 million that President Obama and the Democratic Party took in.

This is the first monthly report since Romney effectively wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination. And because money is one way to keep score during a presidential campaign, the news is getting a great deal of attention from the political media this morning.