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Cashing in on the campaign
Federal races
fuel record
$3 billion
in spending
By Ruth Marcus
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — The most expensive election by far in U.S. history comes to a close tomorrow, with an estimated $3 billion spent on the presidential and congressional races – including hundreds of millions by outside groups that do not disclose their donors or spending – and another $1 billion or more on increasingly expensive state contests.
‘The volume of [spending] is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.’
— LARRY MAKINSON
Center for Responsive Politics
THE MONEY SPENT on campaigns has been rising steadily for decades, but the 2000 race marks a quantum leap, up nearly 50 percent from what had looked like an astonishingly expensive election four years ago. “The volume of it is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign fundraising.
Candidates from the congressional contests to the presidential race raised unprecedented sums, with GOP nominee George W. Bush accomplishing the previously unimagined feat of collecting more than $100 million for his primary campaign alone.
The political parties took in record amounts of large “soft money” contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions – and the practice of collecting soft money spread to candidates and elected officials, meaning that companies and others with critical interests before Congress could lavish large contributions directly on those in office or hoping to get there.
Special-interest groups across the political spectrum poured millions into advertising, telephone banks and mailings, with much of the money coming from undisclosed sources. Individuals on the left and right spent seven-figure sums to promote favored causes: Actress Jane Fonda wrote two checks totaling nearly $12 million in September for a new group backing abortion rights, while Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper put $20 million into a California ballot initiative promoting school vouchers.
The money spent on campaigns has been rising steadily for decades, but the 2000 race marks a quantum leap, up nearly 50 percent from what had looked like an astonishingly expensive election four years ago. “The volume of it is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign fundraising.
Candidates from the congressional contests to the presidential race raised unprecedented sums, with GOP nominee George W. Bush accomplishing the previously unimagined feat of collecting more than $100 million for his primary campaign alone.
The political parties took in record amounts of large “soft money” contributions from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions – and the practice of collecting soft money spread to candidates and elected officials, meaning that companies and others with critical interests before Congress could lavish large contributions directly on those in office or hoping to get there.
Special-interest groups across the political spectrum poured millions into advertising, telephone banks and mailings, with much of the money coming from undisclosed sources. Individuals on the left and right spent seven-figure sums to promote favored causes: Actress Jane Fonda wrote two checks totaling nearly $12 million in September for a new group backing abortion rights, while Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper put $20 million into a California ballot initiative promoting school vouchers.
NO SINGLE CAUSE
Several factors fueled this escalation. The high stakes and close nature of the fight for control of the White House and both branches of Congress made the money chase critical. At the same time, the booming economy spurred donors to write bigger checks than ever before, with at least 20 contributors giving more than $1 million to political parties.
Most of all, the increasing elasticity – laxness, to critics – of election rules allowed parties and outside groups to spend unlimited sums on “issue advertising” that does not directly urge viewers to vote for or against a particular candidate but that can otherwise be as slashing as any ordinary campaign ad.
The result is that candidates can find themselves effectively bystanders in their own races, with the money put into the contests by parties and outside groups exceeding what the candidates themselves can raise and spend.
For example, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center at New York University Law School, the Republican Party spent $36 million on television advertising supporting Bush from June 1 to Oct. 24, compared with $28 million by the Bush campaign itself. Likewise, the Democratic Party spent $31 million, supplemented by $9 million from outside groups, on ads backing Gore, almost double the Gore campaign’s $21 million.
“The outstanding development this cycle is that this is the first election in which non-candidate spending in close races for the House, Senate and presidency will exceed spending by the candidates,” said Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute.
The development began in 1996 but was carried out in the 2000 campaign on a far more audacious and massive scale. What was seen then as a daring maneuver around federal spending limits – pioneered by President Clinton and the Democratic Party – has become standard political operating procedure.
REFORM MEASURES INEFFECTIVE
The result, according to election lawyers and political scientists and practitioners, is that the basic pillars of the campaign finance system – a ban on corporate contributions, strict limits on individual donations, public financing for the presidential general election campaign – have been effectively eroded.
Corporations have been barred since 1907 from making direct political donations. Now they can make soft money gifts of any size and have them used to great effect in party “issue ads” – or run the ads themselves through outside groups that often do not have to disclose where the money comes from.
Congressional candidates are supposedly limited to taking contributions of no more than $1,000 from individuals or $5,000 from political action committees per election. Now they can take in unlimited sums from any source – corporate, union or individual – by establishing separate soft money committees that run ads and engage in other activity on their behalf. Similarly, political parties, which are supposedly limited in what they spend on congressional races, can pour in unlimited amounts through issue advertising.
In return for refraining from raising money for their general election campaigns, the two major party presidential candidates each receive $67.6 million in public funds. But that public funding is now exceeded by the amounts of soft money the two parties spend to promote their presidential contenders.
“We haven’t seen an election like this since 1972 in terms of the effectively unlimited amounts of money being spent,” said former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, a Republican, referring to the period before modern campaign finance laws.
Some advocates of tighter campaign finance laws phrase the situation in even stronger terms. “All the fig leaves have disappeared in this election,” said Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21. “There is such a sense now that anything goes that people aren’t even looking for cover in terms of massive use of unlimited, unregulated funds.
‘MOCKERY OF ... ELECTION LAWS’
‘The outstanding development this cycle is that this is the first election in which non-candidate spending in close races for the House, Senate and presidency will exceed spending by the candidates.’
— MICHAEL MALBIN
Campaign Finance Institute It’s not just campaign finance activists who feel this way. “The raw dollars that have been injected into this campaign are unprecedented, and it’s really made a mockery of the federal election laws,” a leading GOP strategist said.
Still, to keep campaign spending in perspective, consider that even assuming the combined total for federal and state spending approaches $5 billion this cycle, that puts the price of politics somewhere between the market for laundry detergent, $4.7 billion, and batteries, $5.6 billion.
Amid the orgy of campaign spending, there were some hopeful signs this election season for those who want to see changes in the law. During the GOP primaries, Arizona Sen. John McCain demonstrated a strong appeal to voters with a campaign that featured his call to do away with soft money, and the raising of soft money became an issue in some Senate races, especially in New York.
After more than $2 million was spent on ads opposing McCain by a previously unknown group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air – it turned out to be financed by two Texas brothers close to Bush – Congress passed the first significant change in campaign finance rules in two decades, requiring some outside groups to disclose their donors and spending.
Those groups spent an additional $130 million on election-related activities, according to an analysis by the Associated Press, but millions more went unreported as some groups reconfigured themselves to avoid having to comply with the new law and others did not fall under its coverage to begin with.
‘We haven’t seen an election like this since 1972 in terms of the effectively unlimited amounts of money being spent.’
— TREVOR POTTER
former Federal Election Commission chairman For those who gauge the seemingly inexorable rise in election spending, campaign 2000 offered a number of benchmarks:
Bush broke the $100 million barrier for his primary campaign alone – the first time an eventual major party nominee chose to forgo federal matching funds in order to be free to raise and spend unlimited amounts during the primaries.
The parties collected record amounts of soft money contributions from wealthy individuals, labor unions and corporations. Through Oct. 18, the last reports filed before the election, Republicans took in almost $211 million, 74 percent more than four years ago, while Democrats raised $199 million, an 85 percent increase.
The biggest increase came in the soft money collected by both parties’ congressional committees. The House Democrats’ campaign committee raised $49 million, and Senate Democrats took in $52 million; four years ago, each committee raised less than $10 million.
The cost of individual campaigns continued to reach new heights as well. Overall, candidates for the House and Senate raised $801 million, up nearly 40 percent from two years ago. In the New Jersey Senate race, Democrat Jon Corzine, a former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, put a record $57 million of his own money into the race. In New York, the Senate race between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Rick Lazio topped $60 million – and that doesn’t include the millions more in soft money Clinton raised.
The California House race between incumbent Republican James E. Rogan and Democrat Adam Schiff set a new high for expensive House races, with more than $10 million raised by the candidates themselves.
State-level contributions are also increasing. The National Institute on Money in State Politics estimates that more than $1.4 billion was contributed to state candidates during the 1998 campaign, an amount that does not include contributions to state parties or the skyrocketing spending on ballot initiatives.
Although there are fewer expensive gubernatorial campaigns this year, the amounts being poured into state legislative races in advance of redistricting, along with heated judicial races, suggest that “the dollars are increasing, and at a good clip,” said the institute’s research director, Edwin Bender.
In Michigan, for example, the state trial lawyers association has contributed more than $650,000 and the state teachers union more than $800,000 to the Michigan Democratic Party. A Florida company, Grand Building Corp., gave a record-breaking $500,000 to the state GOP – on top of an additional $225,000 to the Republican National Committee.
“If you look at 2000 in comparison with other years,” Wertheimer said, “campaign records are being shattered everywhere. Not broken, but shattered.”
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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