Who's paying for the GOP midterm convention in Dallas?

The GOP is hosting a midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday. But there’s been some confusion over who’s funding the event and just how that money is being spent.

Joedy McCreary is a senior reporter at OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics. He’s been trying to answer those exact questions.

“We ran into maybe some roadblocks just because we couldn't track down any specific dollar figures,” he said.

One thing we do know about the convention, McCreary said, is that the private group supporting the event — called the Dallas 2026 Host Committee — said it raised $45 million in less than four weeks.

“They collected that money from local, state, national, all sorts of individuals and companies, but they haven't identified them,” he said.

McCreary has been trying to hunt down some of those dollars and donors, but there's really just a lack of transparency — which is pretty common in campaign finance, and it's not exclusive to one event, one party, or one election.

“Dark money is a big factor in U.S. election spending, in particular, because we can't trace where all the money goes back to,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.

“What we've seen recently is sort of the rise of what we'd call like ‘mom and apple pie’-sounding groups, so things like ‘Americans for an American America,’ right, that don't necessarily contain party labels attached to them,” she said. “That's important for a lot of reasons. One of which is that it's not always clear where the money is coming from and who the money supports.”

Whether it's ads or events like this convention, “campaigns care much more about winning than they care about efficiency. So the worst-case scenario after Election Day, if you have lost, is that you didn't spend as much as you had in your chest,” Fowler said.

That means that campaigns want to spend the money they raise — even if the public doesn't know where it comes from.