Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post suggests that 527 groups are having less impact in this year's election than in 2004, leaving it to the official campaigns to raise controversial issues such as William Ayers and the Keating scandal. Cillizza speculates that "Although McCain and Obama have relaxed their initial opposition to the involvement of outside groups in the campaign, a series of attempts to organize efforts on the right and left have failed to get off the ground due to a lack of interest on the part of major donors to fund the efforts."

UPDATE: Some counter-evidence is provided by Evan Tracey, at the Campaign Media Analysis Group, who writes about four ads that have been shown 1,078 times.