New campaign financing regulations may already be a failure - National Affairs

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2003 by Patrick Basham

THE ADDITION of Pres. Bush's signature to the campaign finance bill passed by Congress amounted to an antidemocratic triple play for advocates of heightened regulation of political activity. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) will make future campaigns less competitive, strengthen the mainstream media's grip on political discourse, and run roughshod over the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech. In practice, this will turn into an outright victory for incumbency protection.

The ban on soft money (large and largely unregulated) donations to the national parties, the increase in hard money (small, regulated, direct contributions to candidates), and the severe limitations placed on independent political advertising collectively constitute the most-significant changes to campaign finance law since the post-Watergate regulations of 1974. However, what exactly will this reformist utopia look like? What will political life be like now that the BCRA has poked a stake in the heart of the "nexus of corruption" (the phrase used by Trevor Potter, general counsel of the Campaign and Media Legal Center, to describe the preoccupation of advocates of campaign finance reform) at the Federal level? As described by proregulation Sen. Carl M. Levin (D.-Mich.), the political campaign of the future will be better because "the political landscape ... will be filled with more people and less influence, more contributors and smaller contributions, more democracy and less elitism."

The ban on soft money will have an anticompetitive impact on future electoral outcomes. Everyone (except, perhaps, members of Congress) favors more-competitive elections. After all, in recent elections, 98% of incumbent members of the House successfully sought reelection. Of 435 Congressional districts, only a few dozen experience truly competitive races. According to proregulation political columnist Albert R. Hunt, "The appalling lack of competition in Congressional elections is another void in the system." In the long term, most analysts and electoral participants agree that this state of affairs is clearly incompatible with a healthy political system.

Yet, the ban on soft money fundraising by the national parties will make elections significantly more uncompetitive. Both major parties currently use it to increase the competitiveness of individual Congressional races. Without those partisan resources pouting into targeted districts, fewer incumbents will be threatened by serious challengers, reducing political competition even more.

Current Federal law bans the use of corporate- or union-donated soft money for advertisements that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate for Federal office. The new restrictions on independent advertising will further hamper the efforts of the average challenger. Overall, independent advertising campaigns funded by groups representing business, labor, or single-issue interests are disproportionately critical of incumbents. Generally, those groups advertise their frustrations with the voting record of particular elected officials, warning their respective memberships (and other potentially sympathetic segments of the electorate) about the likelihood of "more of the same," if a given incumbent receives another electoral endorsement.

Because the cumulative effect of the loss of soft money and constraints on independent advertising will be to stifle political competition, even fewer candidates will step forward to challenge incumbents in the first place, thereby reducing political choice.

Campaign finance regulators decry public apathy, especially as reflected in low levels of voter turnout on Election Day. As Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) asked, "Is it good enough that in every election the amount of [campaign] money spent goes up and the number of people voting goes down?" According to Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.), the principal force behind the campaign finance law, the new regulations will "help to restore the public's faith in government."

Campaign finance regulators assert that the traditionally low levels of voter turnout in presidential and midterm elections are attributable, in part, to campaign advertising that is allegedly too negative in tone and too personal in nature. Hence the need, it is argued, to ban the soft money contributions that, for instance, pay for party advertising campaigns that are disproportionately critical of incumbents.

What is ignored in this debate is the fact that the parties do much more with their soft money revenue than simply fund negative advertising campaigns. They also use it to register voters and conduct get-out-the-vote efforts, especially among minorities. The inevitable reduction in financial transfers from the national to the state puny organizations will handicap voter identification and mobilization efforts at the local level. The best-available research concludes that, because it costs a party organization $15-20 to identify a new voter and then get him or her to the polls on Election Day, the Federal soft money ban, which will decrease party organizational expenditures by about 20%, will reduce voter turnout by approximately two percent.