How the Other Half Lives.

Words.

"About once a month, a dozen or so of the country’s most influential Republicans meet in a bare-walled conference room in Washington to discuss how to make further gains in the Congressional elections next year and defeat President Obama.

They share polling and opposition research, preview their plans for advertising and contacting voters in swing states, and look for ways to coordinate spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 12 months, drawing on years of experience laboring for the party.

But almost none of them hold office or a job with the Republican Party itself. Instead, they represent conservative groups that channeled tens of millions of dollars into last year’s Congressional campaign. And as 2012 approaches, the groups — among them the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, the American Action Network and Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers — have gathered into a loosely organized political machine poised to rival, and in many ways supplant, the official Republican Party apparatus.

...They have recruited some of the Republican Party’s best-known officials, like Speaker John A. Boehner and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, to help raise money. And in a shift from 2010, when the groups focused largely on television advertising, they plan to put far more money into voter contact, social media and grass-roots outreach, hoping to buttress the party’s own get-out-the-vote work.

Such heightened coordination is the latest development in the growing role of the outside groups, which operate free of many of the legal restrictions that govern the official parties.

...For the most part, the new groups are focused on the same broad goals: winning the White House and full control of Congress..."

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Outside Groups Eclipsing G.O.P. as Hub of Campaigns