However, by the 1990s, state, regional and national reform organizations launched numerous efforts—including “clean money” campaigns by a new group, Public Campaign—that expanded on this base to enact several full-funding programs for state and local candidates.

Five states now have full funding of campaigns for some or all state offices. Two of them (Arizona and Maine) authorize full funding of campaigns for all state offices, including their legislatures. Twelve city and county governments ranging in size from New York City to Cary, North Carolina, now also provide partial public financing of campaigns—seven of the programs enacted since 1998. North Carolina also recently enacted full public financing for state judicial elections.

A New Reform Infrastructure. Perhaps just as important, these reforms were aided by a new infrastructure of nonprofit research, advocacy and legal action organizations now pursuing further gains with a variety of strategies ranging from litigation to electoral research and advocacy. For more than a decade, Carnegie Corporation has been a key funder of these organizations [see pg.11], along with the Arca Foundation, Stern Family Fund, Florence and John Schumann Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. Commenting on the Corporation’s strategy in this area, Scott Nielsen, Alexander Nielsen Consulting Group, says, “Carnegie Corporation, through its prudent and sustained funding of pillar organizations and support to a well-conceived portfolio of groups, has been a crucial philanthropic force in building and strengthening the campaign finance reform movement.”

There are a number of efforts underway to continue this progress including ongoing litigation to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo that prohibited limits on campaign spending imposed by the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act. Other efforts include supporting expansion of public financing of campaigns at all levels of government, “follow the money” projects to improve collection and analysis of federal and state campaign contributions, training news media to report the nature and impact of campaign contributions, and bringing new constituencies—such as business leaders, minorities, immigrants and youth—into the reform movement.

How Reformers Succeeded

Enacting the McCain-Feingold Law

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 was the first major election campaign reform in nearly three decades, eliminating several gaping loopholes that had made much of the post-Watergate Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 ineffective. Enactment of McCain-Feingold was the culmination of more than seven years of painstaking legislative efforts by a broad coalition of members of Congress, public interest reform organizations, academics and activists.

At the beginning of the 1990s, there were few national nonprofit public interest organizations with the ability to mobilize broad support for nationwide reforms. By the decade’s end, there were dozens of such organizations representing widely varying grassroots constituencies, making their case with a vastly improved data, documentary and intellectual base provided by researchers, scholars and advocates. And the case they made was compelling, comprehensive and effective.

For example, in 1999, CED produced a report entitled, Investing in the People’s Business, endorsed by more than 300 prominent business and civic leaders nationally. It showed that business leaders resented the pressure to make large contributions to candidates and parties. “Corporate executives have grown tired of enduring the ‘shakedown’ from politicians seeking ever-increasing campaign donations,” said CED president Charles Kolb. “The business community wishes to compete in the marketplace, not through a political contributions arms race.”

Groups such as Common Cause and the Democracy 21 Education Fund provided formidable advocacy and outreach coordination of the coalition’s efforts on behalf of the intricate struggle for passage in Congress of McCain-Feingold. The Greenlining Institute and Fannie Lou Hamer Project provided crucial support to convince African American and Hispanic congressional caucus members to switch from opposing to supporting the reform bill. In addition, other groups coming forward to support the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act included former members of Congress, 21 state attorneys general, former leaders of the ACLU, AARP, the Sierra Club, and civil rights and religious groups.

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