Campaign Reform: A Way Forward - U.S. political campaign reform

Washington Monthly, March, 1999 by Paul Taylor

Close the loopholes, provide free air time, and fire the consultants

Throughout the impeachment debate this winter, members of Congress kept paying homage to the "sanctity" and the "solemnity" of elections. As an affirmation of constitutional scripture, their words were apt. As an argument against removing a president, they were powerful. But as a portrait of modern politics, they were hooey.

Elections have lost their pride of place at the center of our democratic life. They are bloated with money, stale with ads, devoid of citizens and impervious to change. No one knows this better--or profits from it more--than members of Congress.

Consider the 1998 mid-term elections. They set all sorts of the wrong kind of records, among them:

A record for non-competitiveness. Of the 401 members of the House who sought reelection last fall, a record 98.3 percent won. They outspent their challengers by an average ratio of five to one, and they piled up an average victory margin of 43 percentage points. Nearly a quarter (23.6 percent) did not have any major party opponent on the general election ballot. In the party primaries, only one member of Congress failed to win renomination--Rep. Jay Kim (R-Calif.)--and he was unable to campaign. A judge had confined him to home detention and put him in an ankle bracelet, his penalty for conviction on a charge of accepting an illegal campaign contribution.

A record for non-participation. Some 115.5 million adults, or 64 percent of the eligible electorate, stayed away from the polling booths last Nov. 3. In absolute numbers, this constituted the largest electoral boycott in history. In percentage terms, it was the smallest turnout since 1942, when lots of would-be voters were busy overseas saving the world.

A recorder non-coverage. The major network television news programs carried 73 percent fewer stories about the 1998 midterm elections than they did about the 1994 midterm, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. And in California, ground zero for television's virtual blackout of electoral politics, local stations devoted less than one third of one percent of their news coverage last fall to the open seat governor's race, according to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. "Those who believe that political coverage basically doesn't exist on local TV news turn out to be right," said Annenberg Associate Dean Martin Kaplan.

A record for political advertising volume. The stations did run ads, ads and more ads, however, in California and all over the country. The Television Bureau of Advertising tallied up $531 million in station revenue from political spots in 1998, the biggest election year haul ever. The money paid for thousands of ads that aired a million-plus times. Quickie quiz: Can you remember even one?

A record for campaign spending. Scholars estimate that the aggregate political spending in the 1997-98 election cycle by candidates, parties, and interest groups was about $4 billion, by far the most ever in a non-presidential campaign year. How was the money raised? Brian Baird, a candidate in an open seat race in Washington's 3rd Congressional District, agreed to let a researcher from American University track his campaign day, minute by minute. In September and October, Baird spent an average of four hours a day, seven days a week, in a rented room in Olympia making cold fundraising calls. He spent one hour a day talking to voters. He won.

If all these records were part of the annual report of a business enterprise, the executive summary would read: spending more to attract fewer customers. That business would be staring at bankruptcy or restructuring. Campaigns face no such market discipline. They are more akin to a state-sanctioned monopoly. Consumer boycotts do not faze the monopolists (i.e., the incumbents) who set the rules of the game. They need worry only about market share, not market size. Rising costs do not faze the monopolists. They simply create new campaign finance loopholes through which to extract more contributions from the monied interests eager to stay in their good graces. Best of all, low-turnout, high-cost campaigns raise barriers to entry for non-incumbents, satisfying the monopolist's first rule of self-preservation: eliminate competition before it materializes.

The public understands these dynamics, but registers disapproval by withdrawing from the game rather than by agitating for change--thereby rewarding the monopolists and perpetuating the cycle. This dropout instinct wasn't always so powerful; for much of the 19th Century our presidential election turnout rates hovered around 75 percent. That was the era of the torchlight parade and the party machine. Politics was more raw then, and more corrupt, but also more participatory. What's changed is the way political information is conveyed. Now, citizens learn about candidates from television; then, they learned about candidates from partisan loyalists, neighbors, rallies, the printed word. The older forms gave citizens a sense that they had a stake in the outcome of campaigns. Television gives citizens a sense that politics is merely an entertainment, to be consumed the way the television's talking heads present it--with a smirk and a swagger.