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Originally Posted by glatt
I haven't been following this Colbert Super PAC thing that closely. How much money is there in this Super PAC, and where did it come from? Did viewers send money in? If they did, can Colbert and Stewart keep it for themselves now?
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The money came from viewers and fans who donated through the website. Generally speaking his audience is young, moderate-to-liberal (not as liberal as Daily Show demographics,) and wants to see the system change, which is indirectly what he promises by mocking it. I'm not sure exactly how much money he has, but if I had to guess I'd say several hundred thousand, maybe over a million. He generally logs over a million viewers each night, and early on he was running the names of everyone who had donated at the bottom of the screen, and the ticker just kept going with no repeats for the whole show for weeks on end. And yes, legally Colbert could keep it all for himself, just like the owner of any SuperPAC could (and they do--Sarah Palin kept asking for money in emails to donors even after she officially ended her campaign. It was just money for her, no other purpose for it.) His whole point with this thing is to demonstrate all the ways in which the system is severely broken, not even by pushing them to their logical conclusions but by using them in the same way everyone else does every day.
The whole "Jon Stewart is not coordinating with Colbert" thing is real--John Huntsman's own father runs one of the SuperPACs that is running ads for John Huntsman, but they're "not coordinating" wink-wink-nudge-nudge. He has also been using funds to get an item on the ballot in South Carolina--just a non-binding referendum allowing voters to declare whether "corporations are people" or "only people are people," but all along the way everyone he's been working with to make it happen has made it clear that that's how anyone gets anything on the ballot, you buy it. It was awhile back so I forget the specifics, but Karl Rove was petitioning to alter the SuperPAC rules even more, such that even outright coordination wouldn't be considered coordination, so Colbert and never-had-a-chance-candidate Buddy Roehmer used Colbert's SuperPAC funds to make
this ad against it. It ran in major network ad spots.
Anyway, that's the deal with the SuperPAC. He's going to keep using the money to shed light on the system until the money runs out. But my understanding is that so far, people have liked what he's done and the donations are still coming in.