About once a month, a dozen or so of the country's most influential Republicans meet in a bare-walled conference room in Washington to discuss how to make further gains in the congressional elections next year and defeat President Barack Obama.

They share polling and opposition research, preview plans for advertising and contacting voters in swing states, and look for ways to coordinate spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 12 months, drawing on years of experience laboring for the party.

Almost none of them holds office or a job with the Republican Party itself. Instead, they represent conservative groups that channeled tens of millions of dollars into last year's congressional campaign. And as 2012 approaches, the groups – among them the Karl Rove-founded American Crossroads, the Republican Governors Association, the American Action Network and Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers – have gathered into a loosely organized political machine poised to rival, and in many ways supplant, the official Republican Party apparatus.

At a time when the Republican National Committee is weighed down by debt, outside conservative groups, freed from contribution limits by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision last year, are playing an ever larger role and operating in an increasingly coordinated fashion. In the coming months, the conservative groups will consult among themselves as they open pre-election advertising barrages against Obama and congressional Democrats.

They've begun talking about how to divide up swing states where each group is likely to focus its energies, with some – like Americans for Prosperity – expecting to shift chiefly to Senate races and the White House as others – like the Congressional Leadership Fund – look to preserve the GOP's hold on the House.

Such coordination is the latest development in the growing role of outside groups that operate free of many legal restrictions governing official parties.

Like the party committees they are rapidly coming to eclipse, the independent groups are financed by some of the GOP's wealthiest donors and operated by some of its most respected operatives and strategists. But thanks to the Citizens United decision, the independent groups can raise money in unlimited amounts and with negligible overhead. Much of it will be spent through not-for-profit organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Most of the groups answer only to a few dozen deep-pocketed donors, rather than the elected officials who oversee traditional party efforts. Yet if they lack the accountability imposed on the parties by campaign finance regulations and the ballot box, the groups also represent a marked shift from earlier generations of conservative-leaning groups, many of which were advocates for particular industries or policies or sought a shift in the ideological balance of their party.

For the most part, the new groups focus on the same broad goals: winning the White House and full control of Congress.

Steven J. Law, president of American Crossroads and a former official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said donors were willing to get behind his group in large part because they believe "that we have the party's best interests at heart – that there is a strong identification with a Republican platform and Republican leadership."

Democrats are also setting up independent groups staffed by party veterans. But their efforts appear to be progressing more slowly, in part because there is less of a vacuum to fill. Obama, the most prodigious fundraiser in the country, has been able to inject tens of millions of dollars in campaign financing into the Democratic National Committee.

The GOP groups also had a head start. Most were formed in 2010, an election cycle that their leaders viewed as a test run after the Citizens United decision.

Now, they are poised to expand those efforts substantially. American Crossroads alone hopes to raise and spend $240 million during the 2012 elections; groups financed by the Kochs or conservative donors close to them, like Americans for Prosperity, will reportedly spend as much as $200 million.

Such figures rival what the formal Republican committees will spend. Much of the independent groups' money will go to expensive television advertising, freeing the Republican National Committee and other party groups to focus their time and money on their traditional strength, voter turnout.

"I love the fact that Crossroads is up there with these huge ad buys softening Claire McCaskill or Jon Tester or whoever it is," said Rick Wiley, the GOP national committee's political director, referring to two Democratic senators high on Republicans' target list for next year.

The emerging network is changing not only campaigns, but also Washington's political culture. If the older generation of independent expenditure groups was a career backwater, popping into existence for a cycle or two before disbanding or fading, the new groups are attracting some of the party's top talent.

While the groups maintain their own strategies, they collaborate and divide up duties where possible. This month as American Crossroads pounded Obama with ads on his jobs plan, Americans for Prosperity organized rallies against the proposal in states like Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.