Not by donating $9,900 at a time to Marco Rubio’s senatorial campaign, but instead by spending over $3 million on targeted independent expenditure campaign ads supporting his candidacy and opposing that of his Democratic opponent, under what is a gigantic, glaring loophole in campaign finance law. Donald Trump, Richard Burr, Marco Rubio, Roy Blunt, Todd Young, and Rob Portman were the largest beneficiaries in the 2016 race of targeted campaign spending by the NRA. Most reporting focuses on FEC filings that cover donations made by organizations directly to candidate campaigns, which are limited by law to relatively small amounts. The real campaign influence comes from a loophole that allows any person or organization to spend as much money as they like to directly target campaigns, provided there is no coordination with the candidate campaign itself, in which case it would have to be reported as a donation and would be subject to Federal donation limits.
According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA spent an astounding $53 million under this loophole influencing the 2016 Federal elections for the Presidency and the Senate. Of this total, every single penny of it was spent either supporting Republican candidates, or opposing Democratic candidates. And in an explanation of why Republican candidates are quick to heel, the NRA had an astounding success rate of 95% on their dollars invested on elections where they intervened. The vast majority of the money they spent was on the Presidential race, where they spent a combined $31 million, nearly $20 million of which was spent on ads opposing Clinton, and $11 million spent on ads supporting Trump.
On the Senate side, the vast majority was spent on six senate races, where they spent a combined $17 million opposing the Democratic candidacies of Deborah Ross in NC, Patrick Murphy in FL, Jason Kander in MO, Evan Bayh in IN, Catherine Cortez Masto in NV, and Ted Strickland in OH. Of these, the only race where they placed a losing bet was in Nevada where their bet against Senator Masto failed. Note, these figures do not include the US House, where the NRA placed considerably smaller bets. Reviewing this data, it’s clear that in at least the 2016 race, the NRA focused on the Presidency and the Senate, placed their largest bets opposing a handful of Democratic candidates rather than supporting Republican candidates, and was astonishingly successful.