This essay concerning the objectives of campaign finance reform is written one day before the election. If the Republican candidate wins, read no further. The issue will be moot. However, if Hillary Clinton is elected, democratizing the electoral process will at least be an agenda item, though far from easily achieved. For that reason, it is important to identify clearly the principles that should be satisfied with reform legislation.
We start from the assumption that because rich people disproportionately pay for electoral campaigns, they have too much influence on political outcomes. That influence protects their economic interests and biases politics to match their conservative viewpoints.
To make the political system less biased, the excessive role played by wealthy individuals needs to be reduced. What would seem to be an obvious solution would be limiting their campaign contributions. The problem here is that we already have such limitations. They, however, were weak when first enacted, and now after a succession of hostile Supreme Court decisions are easily evaded. In particular, the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to “outside spending” (legally uncoordinated with campaigns, but a constraint that is often ignored).
Soon thereafter that set-back, the Court’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission greatly relaxed individual aggregate contribution limits, allowing individual campaign donors to spend as much as $3.6 million in an election cycle. (1) The Court justifies its rulings by maintaining that contribution limits to campaigns violate free speech unless they are designed to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance of such corruption. That doctrine makes it impossible to solve the problem. The power of wealth is exercised more subtly than with outright bribes.
For contribution limits to work, the quid pro quo principle would have to be relaxed. The problem is that there is merit in the Court’s invoking the First Amendment with regard to campaign contributions. Limiting a donor’s political donations does in fact constrain that person’s political expression. Because that is so, even a liberal Court probably will not radically lower contribution limits, though some adjustment of the current virtual absence of aggregate limits is possible.
If a greater degree of political equality is to be achieved, most of the change will have to occur on the other side of the wealth divide. There will have to be an increase in the power of those who cannot afford to make big donations.
The dominant view among campaign finance reformers is that this can be done by developing a small donor funding system. This can be accomplished with public matching grants such as exists in New York City, where for each dollar contributed to a campaign up to a limit of $175, the city provides an additional six dollars. What this does is encourage candidates to seek out small donors, in the anticipation that their campaigns will be adequately funded because of the match.
Obviously, a small donor system represents an advance over the current one that depends on funding by plutocrats. But there are two important weaknesses in this method of campaign funding.
In the first place, a matching public financing system, like the one it replaces, does not remove the requirement that office-seekers solicit contributions to fund their campaigns. The ability to successfully obtain donations remains central to political viability. Money will still call the shots.
A second and related issue concerns the segment of society that would be providing those small donations. The only data set that I know of that addresses this issue was collected by the American National Studies (ANS) and reported by Kay Lehman Schlozman et al in The Unheavenly Chorus. The ANS study shows the percentage of people who give money to campaigns in each of five different income levels. There are no surprises here. The people in the richest 20 percent of the population are far more likely to make political donations than others. While 28 percent of the highest income earners contribute to campaigns, only about 14 percent of the next highest group do so, followed in order by 11 percent for the third highest group, about 7 percent for group second from the bottom, and only about 4 percent of the lowest income group doing so. (2)
The extent to which this pattern is present in a small donor system is not clear. With limits on their contributions, and therefore their power, donations from the wealthiest individuals will be at a lower level. Nevertheless it is likely that their participation will remain higher than any other group and that the general pattern will reappear: higher income people will still be more likely continue to donate more than those at the bottom.
It is therefore probable that the funding in a publicly financed matching system will be dominated by affluent people, though with a diminished role for the super-rich. The people whose income places them at lower levels will remain marginal to the funding of campaigns. In the absence of financial clout, it is not unreasonable to think that their interests too will remain marginal.
The only way to eliminate the connection between money and political outcomes is to create a system in which candidates do not have to solicit private funds at all. A full publicly funded system - where candidates each receive the same amount of campaign funds - is the only way to accomplish that objective.
(1) Russ Choma, “Supreme Court and Campaign Finance: McCutcheon Chapter,” Center for Responsive Politics, October 8, 2013, http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/10/supreme-court-and-campaign-finance-mccutcheon-chapter/
(2) Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verga and Henry E. Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012) p. 159.