Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2004
In his classic essay “The Basic Liberties and Their Priority” (1982), the political philosopher John Rawls wrote that the central problem caused by unregulated private money in campaigns is not bribery or apparent corruption, but unequal political influence. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court greatly limited the capacity of states to regulate the political role of private money. That decision was “profoundly dismaying,” Rawls writes, because it appeared to say that democracy is nothing more than a form of “political rivalry between unequals.” He urged that the public reject that conception, embrace a view of democracy as securing “for all citizens a full and equally effective voice in a fair scheme of representation,” and regulate private money to ensure such voice. This has been the task and imperative of the campaign finance reform effort for the last decade.
The campaign finance laws increasingly have foundered in the quarter century since landmark post-Watergate campaign finance reforms in the 1970s. With those scandals fading in memory, political parties and special interests, aided by key court and regulatory decisions, opened a series of loopholes that allowed money to surge into campaigns in a variety of ways—reversing much of the post-Watergate progress.
With help from Carnegie Corporation of New York and other funders, a new campaign finance reform infrastructure of nonprofit research, advocacy and legal action organizations has achieved several noteworthy recent successes. This coalition is now pursuing further gains with a variety of strategies ranging from litigation and electoral to research and advocacy—recognizing that such successes are only provisional and require a sustained effort.
“Our program’s overall goal,” says Geri Mannion, chair of the Corporation’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy program, who has guided the Corporation’s finance reform grantmaking, “has always been to increase civic—including political—engagement in the United States. One of the fundamental barriers to achieving that goal is the way campaigns are financed. The escalating ‘arms race’ for raising political contributions from a relatively small segment of the American public reduces competition for political office, increases public cynicism about politicians and government, and often subverts the public interest in the protection of special interests, especially those of business.”
Challenge and Response
The past decade has seen both a surge of money into politics and a remarkable
number of reforms to respond to that trend.
Runaway Campaign Spending
At the national level, several key statistics tell the story.
• Having raised $100 million (and foregone public financing) for his election in 2000, President George W. Bush adopted a goal to raise $200 million for his re-election in 2004 (and had raised $131 million of that by the end of 2003). Leading Democratic candidates for their party’s 2004 nomination responded by foregoing public financing and raising record-high sums of their own.
• Money raised by national parties eclipses even that level of campaign spending. For the 2002 U.S. House and Senate elections, it totaled $1.15 billion—a 50 percent increase over the 1998 elections. For example, in the 2000 elections, Jon Corzine spent about $70 million to win a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey, while Hillary Clinton spent the same amount to win her Senate seat in New York.
Because data gathering becomes more complex at thestate and local level, available statistics are incomplete and fragmentary. However, the data we do have are revealing:
• State parties raised $1.9 billion in 48 state elections in 2002—twice the $960 million total raised for the 2000 state elections. Candidates in 2002 in those elections raised even more, $1.95 billion—twice the total raised in 2000. In California alone, candidates and parties raised an astounding $352 million for the 2002 state elections.
• Spending in big city mayoral elections also rose dramatically.