# Mirrored Support Oppose Reporting When an outside group buys an advertisement, it has to tell the FEC which candidate the ad is **for** and which it is **against**. Most ads are one or the other. But a single ad very often does both at once — it attacks one candidate and, by doing so, helps the other — and the form gives a committee no single box for that. **Mirrored support/oppose reporting** is what some committees do about it. They take one invoice and enter it **twice**: once as money *supporting* candidate A, once as the identical sum *opposing* candidate B, same vendor, same date, same race. The FEC counts the money once. Anyone adding up the rows counts it twice — once on each side. ## Why it matters to a reader Outside spending is almost always described in the press, and on this wiki, as a split: *"the committee spent 91% of this notice attacking Democrats."* Mirrored reporting makes that number unreliable in a specific and predictable way: - **The "support" total and the "oppose" total are both inflated** by the mirrored amount. - **The notice's overall size is not** — the FEC's own total is correct. - So a committee that mirrors heavily looks like it is doing **twice as much** campaigning in **both directions** as it is. In the extreme case the split becomes meaningless. On **2026-10-30** the committee [[Building Together]] filed a notice of **$1,716,689.46** in which **every single line was mirrored**: 71 pairs, 142 rows, $858,344.73 supporting and $858,344.73 opposing, identical to the cent. Read off the rows, that committee spent exactly half its money for Democrats and half against Republicans. Read honestly, it ran **one set of House ads** and reported each of them from both ends. ## It is a bookkeeping convention, not a trick > [!important] This is not hidden money and there is no evidence of intent > Every dollar is disclosed, the vendor is named, the dates are real and the FEC's own arithmetic is > right. Reporting one ad from both ends is a defensible reading of a form that asks a binary question > about something that is not binary — and committees that do it are being *more* specific about who an > ad affects, not less. The problem this page records is a **reading** problem: the rows invite a > conclusion about a committee's strategy that the rows do not support. ## Who does it The wiki first recorded the pattern on [[No Going Back PAC]] on 2026-10-22 and then on [[Safety and Affordability PAC]], both filing through the same compliance firm — which made it easy to read as one shop's house style. **On 2026-10-30 that explanation stopped working.** Three committees reported mirrored pairs above 10% of a notice on one day, from unrelated operations and on opposite sides of the ballot: | Committee | File | Notice total | Mirrored | Share | |---|---|---|---|---| | [[Building Together]] | 2044596 | $1,716,689.46 | $1,716,689.46 | **100.00%** | | [[America PAC]] | 2044695 | $1,638,106.13 | $959,674.55 | **58.58%** | | [[No Going Back PAC]] | 2044687 | $4,061,823.69 | $668,837.92 | 16.47% | | [[Our Heritage Matters]] | 2044582 | $1,052,466.29 | $2,497.42 | 0.24% | Building Together is a Democratic-side committee; [[America PAC]] is Elon Musk's Republican-side one. The convention crosses the aisle and crosses compliance firms, which makes it a **feature of the form** rather than a feature of any one operation. ### It happened again the next day, and both 100% cases share a vendor On **2026-10-31**, [[Principled Patriots PAC]] filed a notice of **$310,937.96** — 38 lines, 19 pairs, **100.00% mirrored**, no line left unpaired. That is the fourth committee above the 10% mark in two days and the **second** at exactly 100%. | Committee | File | Received | Notice total | Mirrored | Payee | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | [[Building Together]] | 2044596 | 2026-10-30 | $1,716,689.46 | **100.00%** | [[Movement Labs]] | | [[Principled Patriots PAC]] | 2045186 | 2026-10-31 | $310,937.96 | **100.00%** | [[Movement Labs]] | The two committees are unrelated — one spent on House races nationwide, the other on promoting long-shot candidates against Republicans in eleven Senate races — but **every line of both notices names the same payee**. That does not undo the conclusion above: committees using three different compliance firms, on both sides of the ballot, mirror to some degree, so the form is still the cause. What the shared payee suggests is narrower and worth recording: **the extreme form of the practice may travel with a vendor's filing habits.** Two cases are not a pattern, and this site does not yet know whether the choice is made by the firm or by each committee's own filer. ## What this means for figures on this wiki Every support/oppose split published on this site before 2026-11-01 should be read as an **upper bound on both halves**. Where a page quotes a percentage opposing or supporting, the real figure is that or lower, by the mirrored share of the notice — which is zero on most notices, 16% on some and, at least once, everything. The size of a notice, the vendor totals, the race totals and the candidate totals are **not affected**: those are sums the FEC also makes, and mirrored rows are counted once in them. ## See Also - [[Independent Expenditure]] — what a Form 24 notice is and when it is due - [[Super PACs]] · [[Dark Money]] - [[No Going Back PAC]] · [[America PAC]] · [[Building Together]] · [[Our Heritage Matters]] - [[Principled Patriots PAC]] · [[Movement Labs]] - [[Safety and Affordability PAC]]