Super PACs, or as they are officially called, “independent expenditure-only political action committees,” are frequently depicted as villains in U.S. politics: they offer the super rich a tight grip over elections and provide an avenue for shady deals and corruption. They are a lobbyist’s dream — super PACs can raise and spend unlimited funds, with the only limitation being that they are not allowed to directly coordinate with candidates. Despite their massive influence, however, most of them have quite innocuous and formulaic names: “America First Action,” “Independence USA PAC” and so on — names that hide their true interests.

These ordinary names piqued my interest; I wondered if there was any pattern to how super PACs are named. The vast majority of them have a partisan lean and are affiliated with either the conservative or the liberal side of the aisle — so is there any difference between how the two sides name their PACs? Does this have any implications about the wider language that political players use and have used in the past?

To answer these questions, I explored the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets website: their data charts, super PACs’ partisan orientation and money spent each election cycle. In the 2020 cycle alone, there were 571 super PACs that spent money on the elections, with 285 leaning liberal and 262 leaning conservative. I excluded the 24 remaining super PACs that were labelled “bipartisan,” as my analysis focused on the differences in political language across ideologies.

I used this publicly available data from OpenSecrets to create a database of 782 words that appeared in the names of super PACs from the 2020 cycle. Along with the words, I collected the partisan lean of the PACs the words appeared in, their frequency and how much money the PACs that contained a particular word spent. Afterward, I removed filler words like “Fund,” “PAC,” “At” and “For” which, while common, said nothing about political dialogue. I ended up with 741 words, 620 of which were unique.

This visualization shows a selection of words that appear in the names of both liberal and conservative PACs. The graph is ordered by the partisan lean of the PACs in which these words appear, with words more common in the names of liberal PACs appearing at the top. While the liberal–conservative axis exists in much of the world, in the U.S., it broadly corresponds to the two dominant parties, the Democrats and Republicans. The parties are not strictly aligned with the two ideologies, but they can be treated as equivalent within the U.S. context for the sake of analysis.

One can easily see the ideological differences reflected in each side’s word choices. Liberals dedicate plenty of organizations — and money — to reinforce their strength in numbers and progressivism, with words like “United,” “Vote” and “Change” among the most frequent words. Conservatives, on the other hand, pride themselves in the U.S. American greatness and exceptionalism: “Great,” “Freedom” and “America” are common sights in conservative PAC names. There are, of course, words prized by both sides: “Action” being the most prominent, but also “Values” and “Senate.”

While word frequency gives a better idea of the political language favored by each side, looking at what words are associated with greater money spent can help shed light on practical versus ideological priorities — especially if there are large differences between the two.

These dual axis charts reveal the difference between frequency of words and money spent on both the liberal and conservative sides. The Senate arises as a top keyword where money is concerned, mainly spearheaded by the two highest spending super PACs of the 2020 cycle: the right-wing “Senate Leadership Fund” and the left-wing “Senate Majority PAC.” This priority should come as no surprise: the Senate wields immense power in U.S politics, and majority control over it is hotly contested in every election. More generally speaking, the biggest spenders dominate the money spent distributions: the top five wealthiest super PACs spent 43 percent of all money splurged in the 2020 cycle. Four out of these five supported conservative causes, making the imbalance even heavier in favor of the Republican side.

After analyzing the data in the last election cycle, I became curious about historical trends in political language. Were the popular words always the same or did they change according to the political climate? I took the top ten most frequent words from each election cycle from 2010 — the year super PACs were born thanks to a controversial Supreme Court decision — onwards. While the following graphs start from 2010, it should be noted that super PACs only really matured by 2012, as evidenced by the relatively low numbers in the first cycle.

Much of the conservative PAC vocabulary has remained the same for the past ten years. “America” and “Action” share the top two spots every cycle, while “Freedom,” “Leadership” and even “Conservative/s” have all proven to be words with perceived consistent ideological value. Some newer words have also shown some staying power, like “Right” and “Victory,” potentially signaling new narratives in conservative politics.

With that being said, there has certainly been some linguistic evolution. Many words appeared in force for one cycle, such as “Future” in 2012, “Priorities” in 2014 and “Opportunity” in 2016, but disappeared by the next. These one-hit wonders could have arisen as a result of their cycle’s unique narratives. In 2012, there was much talk about diversifying the old, white and male Republican base to account for the U.S.’s future demographic trends. Although that discussion faded, in 2014 the party campaigned for and managed to capture both chambers of Congress, allowing them to start working on their legislative priorities without opposition. And in 2016, then-nominee Trump was viewed as more moderate than his Republican opponents, which many saw as an opportunity to inject new life into the party.

Another interesting word to highlight is “Great” — a part of Republican former President Donald Trump’s 2016 (“Make America Great Again”) and 2020 (“Keep America Great”) slogans, and a word that appeared in the names of 12 PACs for the first time in 2020. The only other Republican presidential candidate in this ten-year period was Mitt Romney in 2012, and his slogan “Believe in America” made no visible impact on PAC names. As the next graph below portrays, no such effect can be observed in liberal circles either, further underscoring Trump’s deep impact on political language.

The most frequently used liberal words tell the story of a paradigm shift that happened in 2018. “America,” a popular PAC name until then, fell considerably in 2018 and 2020. While “Action” stayed on top, formerly consistent words like “Working” and “Majority” lost popularity, replaced by newcomers such as “Progress” in 2018 and “Vote” in 2020, joined by the newly resurgent “United” and “Future.” This paradigm shift in words illustrates recent upheavals in Democratic politics as the party shifts further left than ever before. The particular importance of “Vote” to the liberal cause in 2020 should also be clear, as they campaigned heavily for turnout in a pandemic-stricken election year.

“Blue” — the color of the Democratic Party — also makes its entrance in the top ten exclusively in 2020, a sign of ever-stronger identification of liberalism with the Democrats. Equally curious is the absence — in all cycles — of the word “Liberal” or “Liberals.” While explicitly naming their partisan lean is a popular feature in conservative PACs, liberal ones want to emphasize national unity with words like “We” and “Our” instead.

As mentioned before, Democratic presidents and candidates have not had much of an effect on PAC naming. None of the words from Barack Obama’s 2012 (“Forward”), Hillary Clinton’s 2016 (“Stronger Together”) or Joe Biden’s 2020 (“Build Back Better”) slogans made it into the top ten of their respective cycles, although “Forward” was a popular word in 2016.

So despite their innocuous and formulaic exterior, super PAC names have quite a lot to tell. Wielding unprecedented financial power, these organizations can reveal popular political language from both ideological and practical perspectives. They can herald the winds of change and the stubbornness of old dogmas for conservatives and liberals alike, supporting trends that we can observe in the media and elsewhere in politics as well.