Amidst all of the energy and fervor around the 2008 elections, one thing remained the same: money wins elections. Once again, the candidates with the most money were able to take home victory in not just the Presidential race (Obama outspent McCain two-to-one) but in Senate and Congressional races around the country. The Center for Responsible Politics released numbers last week demonstrating that no matter how much enthusiasm a candidate might have, it all comes down to money in the end.
As CRP's Executive Director Sheila Krumholz revealed, in 9 out of 10 contests the best-funded candidates won their races. This matches a trend that is familiar to those tracking the connection between money and politics:
Continuing a trend seen election cycle after election cycle, the biggest spender was victorious in 397 of 426 decided House races and 30 of 32 settled Senate races. On Election Day 2006, top spenders won 94 percent of House races and 73 percent of Senate races. In 2004, 98 percent of House seats went to the biggest spender, as did 88 percent of Senate seats.
Despite Congressional approval ratings dangling in the single digits, 95% of House incumbents won re-election and 93% of Senate incumbents were welcomed back by voters. How did they do it? Money.
These financial shackles that require massive amounts of money just to mount a viable candidacy for the House or Senate are dangerous in two ways:
(1) it keeps out regular Americans from ever being able to run for office because they can't raise enough money to stay competitive.
(2) it in debts winning candidates to their benefactors. As Krumholz says, "The politicians who were just elected potentially owe their campaign contributors billions of dollars for helping them win." How they repay them is part of the problem.
Here are some figures to chew on:
- average cost of winning a House seat in 2008: $1.1 million
- average cost of winning a Senate seat in 2008: $6.5 million.
- 1 in 4: number of House seats where incumbent faced no financial opposition.
- CRP's estimated total cost of U.S. elections this year: $5.3 billion making it the most expensive election in American history.
- 93%: House races where top-spender won.
- 94%: Senate races where top-spender won.
My first reaction to this was, "What could we fund with $5.3 billion?" Healthcare? A more efficient and stringent regulatory system? Education? But then I realized, Johnson & Johnson spent $5.1 billion on selling the world soaps, shampoos and toothpastes in just the third quarter of 2008. McDonald's spent more than $689 million selling the world hamburgers and french fries in 2006. And Proctor and Gamble spent over $7.9 billion selling the world laundry detergent, Pampers, batteries and Pringles. After seeing those numbers, am I really that upset that we spend $5 billion "selling" tomorrow's democracy to the people? I don't know.
Do you feel we spend too much on electing our leaders or not enough?
The folks at MAPLight.org issued a report today titled 'Remote Control,' which shows the geographic origin, down to zip code, of campaign contributions for all members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The most surprising finding? Legislators raised about four out of every five dollars in campaign funds from outside of where their constituents live.
According to the research, members of the House of Representatives raised $700 million in campaign funds from 2005-2007. A whopping $551 million of these funds, or 79%, came from out-of-district. $146 million of these funds, or 21%, came from in-district. The remaining $3 million of campaign funds (0.5%) could not be definitively located as in-district or out-of-district. From the report:
"With out-of-district fundraising at a staggering 80%, the problem is not with a few individual House members. This report provides evidence that our campaign finance system is broken," said Daniel Newman, MAPLight.org's co-founder and executive director. "To win an election, a House candidate has to raise an average of $1.3 million in campaign funds--that's $2,500 every working day for an entire two year term. With such a herculean fundraising effort required, what time and attention do Representatives have left to address the interests of the voters they represent?"
My interest has been peaked of late. What is the fate of publicly funded campaigns given the "Obama phenomenon?" A recent NPR article Did Obama Kill Public Campaign Finance? asks the question, "Is something rotten in the state of public financing for presidential campaigns?"
The article continues:
Sen. John McCain, one of the most vocal proponents of campaign finance reform, is being hoisted by his own petard by choosing to accept federal funding for his general election campaign. Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama, the choice of the Democratic Party — the very party that cried out for finance reform in the wake of the Watergate scandal — has chosen to bypass public funds and, as a result, is pummeling McCain in the fundraising arena.
Irony alert: The Republican standard-bearer is using federal grants, while the Democrat extols the free-market virtues of individual campaign donations.
One could argue that Obama's campaign is 'publicly funded,' after all, he and the DNC have forgone Lobby and PAC money and the majority of his campaign contributions come from small donations made by lots of people. However, the "Obama phenomenon" does not take into account an average person seeking office. This is where public funding would level the playing field so that ordinary citizens could run for office. Obama's 'star quality' and fund raising ability, plus the current political climate, cloud the argument for killing public funding.
McCain opted in to public funds, thus agreeing to cap out at $84 million for his campaign. The RNC supplements his allocated funds by raising money and they do take Lobby and PAC money. Neither candidate, in my opinion, represents 'clean money.'
No matter which candidate wins the White House, both will be faced with determining the fate of public campaign financing, in fact, both have an obligation. At Change Congress, we would also argue that the issue needs to go beyond Presidential and on to Congressional elections -- a more difficult battle.
A smart conversation took place on KQED's Forum with Scott Shafer. I encourage you all to have listen and weigh in on the conversation through our comments section. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics is on the panel and directs people to the OpenSecrets site so you can follow the money yourself. You can listen in below:
According to Rasmussen, the American public is ready to hit the Congressional "Reset" button. In a recent poll 59% of voters said they would like to "throw them [Congress] all out and start over again." Only 17% felt that they should keep their jobs. This is a frightening statistic, especially for the 440 members of Congress who are up for re-election in a mere 29 days. Oh, and it gets better:
Only half (49%) believe that the current Congress is better than individuals selected at random from the phone book. Thirty-three percent (33%) believe a randomly selected group of Americans could do a better job and 19% are not sure.
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So, hey, you wanna run for Congress? The hardest part is getting your foot (Ferragamo or not) in the door.
More than 90% of Congress will most likely (barring a revolution) retain their positions as the people that speak for us this November 4th. The power of incumbency is tough to beat, especially when gerrymandering allows members of Congress to effectively pick their own voters, not the other way around. Mix in some high name recognition, full staffs funded by tax-payer dollars, easy access to news coverage and an unmatched money machine, and suddenly running for office is reserved for those who are either very wealthy or very crazy (read "courageous"). Seriously, we have a better chance at winning scratch-off tickets than winning a seat for Congress.
As the article notes, the nation's founders believed that Congress should (and would) have a 50% turnover rate, and indeed, for the first 150 years the House of Representatives experienced exactly that. But ever since the 1940's Congress' turnover has been dropping to what it is today, somewhere in the single-digits.
Combine this with the back-to-back approval rating of 9% and you have to admit, it's not a good year to be a member of Congress.
The Sunlight Foundation
launched a campaign earlier this year to encourage members of Congress to change their rules around internet use and include the ability to “Tweet.”
Twitter,
a way to inform people in 140 characters or less of an important topic or event taking place in real time, is now being used by our members of Congress. This gives you the ability to track what your Congressperson is doing at any given moment. This is your chance to hold Congress accountable! To find out which members of Congress are “tweeting” you can upload the widget here.
Monica caught this story in The Hill today about the public backlash against the proposed $700 billion federal bailout of the banking industry. We've got excerpts below, but the story can pretty much be summed up in three words: people are angry.
As Kelly Williams and Laura MacCleery write:
It has been a long time since there has been such an outpouring of voter outrage on Capitol Hill. Although partisans are busily pointing fingers across the aisle about the defeat of the hurried, behind-the-scenes bailout deal in the House on Monday, the failures are so fundamental that it is increasingly clear that Washington will never be the same again. The bailout is stirring an intensely populist backlash across the political spectrum, and that much anger will not dissipate anytime soon.
They go on to present a scathing picture of how lobbyist and PAC money influences politics--and how that kind of money got us into this mess in the first place:
Wall Street routinely doles out large campaign contributions to members of Congress. In the current election cycle, the financial services sector (which includes insurance and real sector), contributed more money to candidates for Congress, the presidency and political parties than did any other sector, totaling $339.6 million from 2007 through today. Both chambers’ banking committees also benefit handsomely. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, PACs and employees of the securities and investment industry are the second largest source of cash for members of the Senate Banking committee. During the 2008 election cycle, these contributors raised $11.7 million for the 21 members of that Committee. Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) received about $4.3 million since 2003, or half of all contributions to his campaign coffers.
Does campaign cash influence legislation and regulation? When Congress last debated regulation (or rather, de-regulation) of the financial industry in 1999, a study by the Center for Responsive Politics showed that members of Congress who supported the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act received twice as much money from commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies as those who opposed the measure. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was the product of many years of lobbying by the financial industry and allowed for the loosening of bank regulations that had been in place since the Great Depression.
It has been a hard few months for those of us who admire Charlie Rangel, a Purple Heart and Bronze Star winner for his heroism in Korea, a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, the fourth-longest serving Democrat in the House and one who has used that tenure for the benefit of the people of Harlem and for liberal causes generally.
Problem is, these days, that he has also used that tenure to benefit himself. A brief review of his recent woes is troubling:
He controls four rent-controlled apartments in his Harlem building, paying less than half the market rates, and until recently used one of the units as his campaign headquarters. Some have argued that his landlord's allowing him to have so many reduced-rate apartments violates the limits on gifts to Members, or the ban on in-kind contributions.
Claiming "cultural and language barriers," Rangel owes thousands in back taxes on rental income from a villa he owns at a swank (is there any other kind?) resort in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. He also failed to declare this income on many Congressional disclosure forms.
And the fans of Lawrence Lessig's talk at Netroots Nation will remember: the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College, which will also house his papers and is all well and good -- except for the fact that not only is it being funded via a $1.9M Congressional earmark and two HUD grants, but he is soliciting money for the Center from corporations and business leaders with interests before Ways & Means on Congressional stationery, and as Lessig says, this sort of thing destroys the conditions upon which trust is built as to the basis for his official decisionmaking.
The NYT has called on Cong. Rangel to cede temporarily his Chairmanship of Ways & Means, saying "Committee posts are not bestowed by voters. They are partisan privileges granted by leaders in Congress, and Ms. Pelosi must not cut slack for an ally. If Mr. Rangel refuses a temporary hiatus from his chairmanship, Ms. Pelosi should remove him permanently."
What are we in the Netroots to say about all this? First off, this is not an Al Wynn situation in which primarying the incumbent might bear fruit. As a well-placed NY politico friend put it to me,
Unless Charlie dies or resigns you might as well forget primarying him. He is beloved in his district. He has excellent constituent service. He brought empowerment zones to Harlem, he has brought money; he brought Bill Clinton's office to 125th St. and that brought more money. He is chairman of Ways and Means...and the community knows how much that matters to Harlem.
I should say that unlike Towns or Meeks or Wynn, Charlie is a populist and a progressive... as much as you can be as chair of Ways and Means. He doesn't vote against his community's interests as they do. He is also tireless and everywhere.
Speaking only for myself here, I too think that Cong. Rangel should probably cede his chair while the investigation is ongoing. I am particularly troubled by the last item -- using his leverage as Committee chair to raise funds for a Center being named for himself. It speaks of vanity, arrogance and an abuse of power that are just so unlike the cranky, exuberant, beloved liberal I've gotten to watch over the years.
[I recognize that there's a political tightrope here -- would Rangel stepping down just boost GOP efforts to paint Dems are corrupt, or since they're trying it already does it cauterize the wound? I don't think this is a Mark Foley-level controversy that captivates the public and hurts us generally, so the only question is, what's the right thing to do?]
Beyond that, I think Cong. Rangel at this point would be well-served to continue to honor the maxim of his lawyer, Lanny Davis -- yes, that Lanny Davis -- who subtitled his primer on political spin "Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself." And Rangel's certainly talking, and within the limits of his cantankerousness, admitting fault and demanding full investigations to confirm (he hopes) no wrongdoing. I hope he fully cooperates with every inquiry and every investigation, accepts the consequences and, when it is appropriate, end his distinguished tenure in public service with dignity, good humor and grace.
Over a month ago, Rasmussen released a poll showing Congressional approval ratings at record lows. No other Congress has received poorer ratings. Yesterday morning Rasmussen released yet another 9% approval rating poll showing yet again that Americans are fed-up with the job the people's house is doing.
The continued slump of Congress begs the question, "how low do they go until something changes?" Since we were the ones who elected this Congress, we play an important role in determining whether or not they keep their job.
Could it be the continued scandals that members of Congress are tied to? Maybe its the fact that this Congress has been anemic to getting things done? Or, they have been getting things done in favor of the special interests that fund their campaigns, rather than the people who vote them into office. Whatever the reason it surely isn't partisan since both parties have had control and have failed in gaining the compliments of the American people.
So this is our work ahead. Change Congress is determined to reinvigorate people's trust in the one body of government they are closest to. If we're successful, approval ratings like the ones above could be a distant memory.
