"Campaigns leave a directive to groups on their public-facing websites describing the kind of targeted advertising that they want, which outside spending groups then use to craft advertisements on their behalf.

Around the text on their website is a literal red box " flagging committees to pay attention."

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"Since the US supreme court ruled in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission in 2010 that corporations and outside groups can lavish unlimited amounts of money on elections, spending has increased dramatically, with wealthy donors pouring money into elections " including state and local ones.

In its ruling on Citizens United, the court added a caveat: groups can spend unlimited funds on elections as long as they are not coordinating directly with the campaign to do so.

To get around that requirement, authors Gabriel Foy-Sutherland and Saurav Ghosh found, at least 240 Senate and House candidates in the 2022 elections cycle employed red-boxing; the strategy was most commonly used in competitive races.

And it pays off " campaigns that engaged in red-boxing earned hundreds of times more dollars in advertising by "independent" groups supporting their candidate.

The Federal Elections Commission has not only declined to prosecute red-boxing cases, it has also practically endorsed the strategy.

In response to a complaint that the 2020 presidential campaign for Pete Buttigieg had violated the rule against coordinating with independent groups by tweeting out a suggested advertisement strategy, FEC commissioners wrote in a memo that "the request or suggestion standard is meant to cover requests to select audiences, not statements to the general public".

In effect, said Foy-Sutherland, campaigns engaging in red-boxing are "outsourcing responsibility" to Super Pacs that "don't face the same kind of regulations on raising and spending money".

The practice is not limited to either party. Foy-Sutherland and Ghosh found that the strategy was deployed in 2022 by Democrats and Republicans alike."

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Both Parties do this, as happens when the rules can be stretched by one side, the other side has to do it to keep up.

But one Party got Citizens United into the Law, while the other has voted to change it.

CU explained: