501(c)(3) is a whole different animal. In that case, you must have a charitable mission, and as such any donations to your cause are fully tax-deductible by the donor.
With 501(c)(4), the statute says you can't have any political activity, but the courts changed that to "primarily" social welfare, and then the IRS further defined that to be at least 50.1% social welfare. In any case, donations aren't tax-deductible, but the big "get" here is that a 501(c)(4) doesn't have to disclose any of its donors. So essentially these 501(C)(4)s became giant money laundering operations that fed money to the conventional PACs (again not tax-deductible), but allowed these uber-rich donors to remain anonymous.
We really need to understand this for what it is -- it is a gross abuse of the statutes by PACs (mostly Republican, but the Dems followed along too). The scandal is in this money laundering by PACs, not in the questionnaire the IRS asked them to fill out.
Here's a tree:
Here's a forest:
See the difference?
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