Blog - 2/16/08 - The Presidential Election Process
Presidential candidates typically appear at between 200 and 250 fundraising events the year before the election and spend 80% of their time on the phone or at fundraisers. The most demoralizing—and shameless—thing candidates have to do is to ask for money from thousands of strangers, virtually every day for more than a year. Why do they do it? Because they have to if they want their message to resonate with voters. At a time when television networks and local TV stations keep decreasing the amount of air time on actual political news, they keep getting richer from paid political ads. According to the Alliance for Better Campaigns, candidates, parties, and issue groups spent slightly more than $150 million in 1980 and more than $1 billion in 2002—so much, in fact, that they are now one of television’s leading sources of revenue. Candidates must have sufficient funding to purchase campaign commercials, otherwise they don’t have a chance.
Prior to 1971, all efforts to regulate campaign contributions were largely ineffective, easily circumvented and rarely enforced. In 1971, Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act, requiring broad disclosure of campaign finance. In 1974, fueled by public reaction to the Watergate Scandal, Congress passed amendments to the Act establishing a comprehensive system of regulation and enforcement, including public financing of presidential campaigns and creation of a central enforcement agency, the Federal Election Commission. Other provisions included strict limits on contributions to campaigns and expenditures by campaigns, individuals, and other political groups. The new law was immediately challenged on First Amendment grounds in Federal Court, resulting in a landmark Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo.
The Buckley decision recognized that regulation burdened the rights of free speech, but held that the government interest in preventing corruption justified some restrictions on free speech. The problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo is that the court implies that an individual’s freedom to donate money to a politician’s campaign is equivalent to that individual’s freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the right to convey your ideas to others without risking punishment from the government. The right to donate to a campaign is about using your power (money is a form of power) to influence the outcome of a campaign. Equating free speech with freedom to donate to a campaign gives wealthy people greater ability to influence the outcome of an election.
In every presidential election since 1976, the candidate who has raised the most money at the end of the year preceding the election, and been eligible for federal matching funds, has become his party’s nominee for the general election.
All major presidential candidates and most national political reporters recognize that the top money chaser the year before the election almost assuredly will be the nominee of his political party. That means that the race for the White House is substantially decided before any actual votes are cast. Wealthy special interests essentially hold a private referendum the year before the election; otherwise respectable candidates who didn’t put up sufficiently impressive cash numbers are often driven from the race and cast as “losers” who can’t put together “an effective organization.” By January of the presidential election year, the biggest money is already down on the next president of the United States, which effectively predetermines whom the nondonor public gets to vote on.
Of the 16,200 donors who contributed $1,000 to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign of 1996, 94% gave their money in 1995. Similarly of the 48,000 donors who contributed the maximum $1,000 to Republican presidential candidates in the same reelection campaign, 83% contributed their cash in 1995. Prior to the 2000 campaign, no single presidential candidate had found more than roughly 19,000 donors contributing the maximum $1,000 contribution. That all changed in 1999-2000, when George W. Bush received 59,279 donations of $1,000, more than triple that of any previous contender.
A contribution check of $1,000 isn’t something the average American can write; most often, those who open their checkbooks are lawyers, lobbyists, or the vested economic interests they represent who want something in return from the government.
How did George W. Bush, a state governor just starting his second term—an elected official for less than five years—pull off such a historic fundraising feat? The answer lies with an unusual, “Pioneer” fundraising system, for which the participants pledged in writing to each raise at least $100,000 by aggressively “bundling” together $1,000 checks from family, friends, and acquaintances. (For the 2004 election, the Bush campaign has introduced a new wrinkle to the bundling program in response to the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that more than doubled the contribution limit of hard money, from $1,000 to $2,300 per election cycle: in addition to the $100,000 Pioneer fundraisers, it has added the $200,000 “Rangers.”)
The Pioneer/Ranger system uses tracking numbers for contributions listing the donor’s industry code enabling the campaign to track the level of contributions by industry. What is unusual about the Pioneer/Ranger system is the unabashed directness of the transaction: You help us and we’ll credit you and remember your loyalty and support later.
Raising money this way has long been controversial because such exceptionally well organized bundling violates the spirit of limiting the size of contributions, which is one of the hallmarks of the post-Watergate campaign finance laws.
With the use of emails, faxes, phone calls, mail, newspaper ads, and radio and TV commercials, if your resources are superior enough, inconvenient facts can be rendered irrelevant. With saturation through paid advertising, phone banking, direct mailing, and e-mailing-compounded by a tepid, easily hoodwinked news media: veracity itself is obscured from the eyes of the public.
A 527 group is a type of American tax-exempt organization named after a section of the United States tax code. A 527 group is created primarily to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office. Although candidate committees and political action committees are also created under Section 527, the term is generally used to refer to political organizations that are not regulated by the Federal Election Commission or by a state elections commission, and are not subject to the same contribution limits as PACs.
In 2003, 527 groups spent more than $430 million over a 3-year period to influence elections and policy debates across the country. These shadowy political organizations provide a convenient way around a recent federal ban on soft money—unlimited contributions to political parties—because they remain almost totally free from fundraising restrictions while engaging in election-related activity such as issue adds, voter drives, political research, and contributions to state and local candidates.
Outside groups have been proliferating and spending more and more lavishly in American politics. According to the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 1995-1996 more than two dozen groups—political parties, labor unions, trade associations, business and ideological organizations—spent between $135 million and $150 million on issue advocacy ads. By the 2000 election cycle, there were at least 130 groups sponsoring 1,100 unique issue advocacy ads, at a cost of more than $500 million.
Jimmy Carter said, “The entire election process, including the nomination of candidates, is predicated to a major degree on how much money they can raise. And that involves appealing in most cases, to special-interest groups who hope they can get a favor after the election is over. The criterion for success in American politics now—the Democratic or Republican Party—is extreme wealth or access to major wealth. And we are the only democratic nation in the world, in the western world, with which that blight or cancer is affecting our system.”
230 years ago there was a revolution because there was taxation without representation. The country went through eight years of war but they didn't fix it. I'm being taxed and the person who's supposed to be representing me is representing the wealthy people that contribute to the campaign. We're getting closer and closer to living under a plutocracy (government by the wealthy); the more money that goes into the determination of an elected office, the more favors that have to be repaid after the office is won, and the more marketing that the politician can pay for during the campaign, in other words, the more money a campaign has, the more corrupt it is. My parents both grew up in Cuba, and in Cuba people in politics were looked down upon because it was known that everyone in politics was corrupt. By not getting involved in politics the Cubans who lived in Cuba prior to 1959 were negligent, and that negligence enabled the corruption in the government to spiral out of control which eventually lead to the implosion of the political system, and that in turn resulted in the nationalization of their homes and businesses. Americans can't afford to allow corruption in our political system to continue unabated. We can't afford to miss any opportunity to vote for a person with integrity over a politician who is more concerned with keeping themselves in power than just about anything else. We must vote every chance we get and do it in an informed way.