Why Did Democrats Abandon Campaign Finance Reform?
Soaring fundraising totals have led Democrats to drop one of their most popular messages from the 2018 midterms.
One of the most influential Democratic PACs of the 2018 midterms was End Citizens United, an upstart campaign finance reform group that ended up driving one of the core Democratic messages of the cycle. ECU’s mission was to get Democratic candidates to sign a pledge committing to various anti-corruption measures, the most immediately significant of which was a promise not to accept corporate PAC money to fund their campaigns. Since corporate groups rarely take a chance on non-incumbents, the pledge was an ingenious tactic for Democratic challengers. They could credibly take up a popular anti-corruption message (made even more resonant by the ongoing stories about the Trump campaign and administration) without actually alienating many donors. ECU and the flood of small-dollar contributions they drove would more than make up the difference for any corporate money that challengers left on the table.
ECU’s strategy turned out to be a hit. Smart Democratic candidates made anti-corruption a core message in their campaigns, running populist ads blasting their Republican opponents for doing the bidding of their corporate donors. By the fall of 2018, anti-corruption was one of the dominant themes of Democratic campaigns, backed up with millions of dollars in ad spending.
After the 2018 election, Democrats carried the anti-corruption message through the 2020 primaries. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders made it a centerpiece of their campaigns, and Pete Buttigieg introduced himself as the candidate championing a slate of “democracy reforms” that included reversing the Citizens United decision. Even Joe Biden put out an anti-corruption plan early in his campaign.
Then, just as quickly as campaign finance reform shot to the top of the Democratic agenda, it vanished. Despite the success of Democrats running on getting money out of politics, years-long outrage at Citizens United on the left, and enduring cross-partisan popularity of anti-corruption measures, all of this momentum amounted to exactly zero change in our campaign finance system.1
It’s not exactly a mystery why nothing happened. At the same time Democratic candidates elevated anti-corruption and campaign finance reform to the top of their message boxes, they were benefiting from wealthy donors moving to the left due to education polarization and perfecting a system of funding campaigns with small online donations that not only worked within the rules established under Citizens United, but worked so well that it allowed them to outcompete Republicans. That Democrats would consistently outspend Republicans across multiple cycles would be literally unbelievable to anyone working in politics circa 2010. The magnitude of this surprising turn of events sapped the momentum of any substantive campaign finance reform efforts. After all, Democrats won trifecta control of the federal government in a post-Citizens United world. Something had to be working, so why rock the boat?
But the Obama-era liberals who were gravely concerned about money in politics are still right. Whether by buying face time with candidates or buying public commitments to their personal policy agendas, donors distort the policy preferences of elected officials. This isn’t a secret; purchasing vastly more political power than the average voter is something they brag about openly. As Betsy DeVos once wrote, “my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party…I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues.”
The world of unrestricted campaign spending and all of its attendant corruption that the campaign finance reformers feared (and their antagonists on the right cheered) has pretty much come to pass as they predicted. On top of the ideological influence of extremist donors, the amount of time members of Congress have to spend raising money prevents them from doing their jobs effectively. And the sheer amount of political ads we’re subjected to thanks to unlimited campaign spending is frying our brains.
It doesn’t take much effort these days to form a Super PAC, wire a few million dollars, and start running ads in support of your favorite candidates. Red boxes allow you to peek behind the firewall separating your independent groups from the campaigns you support, making it easy to illegally coordinate with candidates and their teams. Rich right-wing ideologues like the Kochs, Adelsons, and Uihleins have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to do exactly this to great effect, pushing the Republican Party to the right through primary challenges to achieve their ideological goals.
The recent influx of newly polarized wealthy liberals has been the saving grace for Democrats’ campaign accounts, allowing them to compete on relatively equal footing on the fundraising front in ways unimaginable before our current realignment. But the outsized influence of rich donors is no less a problem on the left. The people who cut checks to PACs, attend fundraisers for party committees, or regularly donate via ActBlue are more ideological and further left on social issues than Democratic voters as a whole. Their outsized influence is contributing to polarization and, to the extent they’re influencing the politicians they donate to, often driving them to take damaging unpopular positions. The campaign finance reformers are undeniably correct when they say we’d be better off if elected officials weren’t forced to hang out in the Hamptons raising money all summer.
Even if the system of Super PACs and independent expenditures Democrats erected to take advantage of the post-Citizens United system has been effective, their small dollar operation has some serious flaws. Chief among these is its inefficiency. Every year, donors send tens of millions of dollars to long shot candidates with appealing ads who have no chance of winning. While federal candidates running against unpopular Republicans rake in cash, swing-district state legislature races go underfunded. Candidates in marquee races have no problem raising enough money to compete effectively, but the online fundraising revolution of the past few cycles has distributed money towards candidates who go viral over candidates who could actually use the extra cash.
In failing to implement any campaign finance reform, Democrats have also let the Federal Election Commission atrophy to the point of uselessness. The FEC’s peculiar structure, in which a majority of the commission has to vote in favor of taking enforcement action, prevents it from moving swiftly and holding violators accountable. Since the FEC is currently split between three Republicans, two Democrats, and an independent, deadlocked votes are all the more common. Refusing to reform the FEC has largely served to benefit Republicans like Ted Cruz, who recently won a Supreme Court case allowing donors to pay back candidates’ campaign debt by directly depositing unlimited sums in the personal bank accounts of elected officials, and who coincidentally said basic reforms to the FEC would be terrible. If Ron DeSantis is able to skirt the law to use the $100 million he’s raised under Florida’s lax campaign finance rules to support his presidential campaign, it’ll be because the FEC set a precedent of allowing candidates to do so when they deadlocked on a similar case this year. This is to say nothing of the outright scams the commission has failed to stop in recent years.
If nothing else, anti-corruption is a winning message for Democrats that they would be mistaken to give up. A Gallup poll from 2019 found just a fifth of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s campaign finance laws. Voters overwhelmingly believe that Congress is corrupt and politicians do favors for their donors. Support for stronger campaign finance laws is widespread and cuts across party lines. If Democrats are looking to take votes on popular issues that divide Republicans and unite a majority of voters, campaign finance reform is a winning issue.
But the real upside to campaign finance reform is its downstream effects. States that enact stricter campaign finance laws have more social welfare spending and redistributionist policies. An electoral system that allots political influence in proportion to bank account balances is never one that will be conducive to a political program for the working class base of the Democratic Party. One only needs to look at the group of Democrats elected on a wave of online donations and backed by groups like ECU in 2018 recently opposing a popular corporate tax increase for proof of this.2
As we saw in the last few weeks, the Democratic Party’s reliance on individual small dollar donors incentivizes some really gross behavior to milk people for as much money as possible. Democrats raising $80 million by campaigning on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade is, in a sense, a positive development. They now have more resources to win elections and prevent Republicans from amassing the power necessary to ban abortion nationwide. But in a larger sense it’s obscene. In a just world of publicly financed campaigns, spending caps, and no independent expenditures, that $80 million could go towards helping the millions of people who just had their rights stripped away, not towards meeting Nancy Pelosi’s monthly fundraising goal.
Despite what the ticker on ActBlue’s website might suggest, our current campaign finance system was explicitly designed to advantage the Republican Party. Eventually the system as it stands today will have its intended effect. Republicans like Ted Cruz and John Roberts are doing everything they can to ensure that happens. And therein lies the fatal flaw in Democrats deferring to rather than upending the post-Citizens United campaign finance system: their tactics are unsustainable. While college-educated Americans make for a great donor class, they’re an electorally ruinous coalition of voters. And eventually the emotionally manipulative emails, incessant texts and phone calls, and bizarre gimmicks Democrats have come to rely on will start yielding diminishing returns. The right only needs a handful of committed ideological billionaires to sustain their political movement. The left isn’t as fortunate. Treating voters like ATMs while ignoring their demands is no way to build a mass political movement. How much longer can Democrats expect to fund their campaigns by begging for money from people who are growing increasingly convinced the political system is corrupt? We shouldn’t wait around to find out.
To the extent that the ECU pledge was just a cynical ploy to force an electorally advantageous issue to the forefront of the 2018 campaign in order to boost Democratic candidates is up for debate. I think there’s a fair argument to be made that few Democrats (especially the incumbents) were ever that serious about making campaign finance reform a priority, and of course, an actual constitutional amendment was always out of the question. The one piece of anti-corruption legislation Democrats might pass, a bill to ban members and their families from trading stock, faced outright opposition from Nancy Pelosi and (perhaps because of this) has mostly stalled out.
Campaign finance reform is obviously not a panacea for all that ails our undemocratic political system. But it seems hard to imagine that Democrats members of Congress would be so fired up about preserving state and local tax deductions that benefit wealthy homeowners if their careers didn’t depend on going to cocktail parties and talking on the phone with those people for hours every week.
Hot Take: Because it was unilateral disarmament... and multilateral disarmament like RCV was off the table.