Tolman’s 2002 primary spending figures are skewed because he fought for Clean Elections money and won it — Tolman certainly ran a grassroots campaign too. Here’s what he said about this year’s spending, and what another former candidate said about “mobilizing millionaires” versus “mobilizing members”:
“We have a situation where the Democratic Party is mobilizing its millionaires instead of mobilizing its members,” said Scott Harshbarger, the 1998 Democratic gubernatorial nominee and a former national president of Common Cause who has fought hard for federal campaign finance reform. “It is a sad commentary if you need to be independently wealthy to break into the system.”
“What I learned in ’02 is that while people recognize the need to get money out of politics, it is no one’s number one issue.” said Warren Tolman, who ran a Clean Elections campaign for governor in 2002, hobbled by delays in providing him funds. “Over and over, I heard, ‘I know that after the primary he’ll have enough money to take on Healey dollar for dollar,’ ” Tolman said. “Chris is a good guy, but that’s a shame if that’s what this campaign comes down to.”
Until last year, I’d have argued for limiting campaign spending. Then last year I ran for office — and now I’d argue for public campaign financing. I spent way too much time during my campaign on fundraising — time that SHOULD have been spent talking to voters and talking about issues. Public campaign financing means grassroots campaigns can focus on issues and voters, instead of focusing on fundraising. I’ve come to agree with one of the grassroots candidates:
“This is not the kind of politics that is consistent with the core values of the Democratic Party,” Bonifaz said. “This is why so many people do not participate in the political process. This level of money in politics drowns out the voices of people at the most grassroots levelâ¦. This is further proof that we need to have a fully-funded public finance system with spending limits. “
Source: Bonifaz Campaign press release, June 9, “Bonifaz Criticizes 3Gs”
This year’s grassroots candidates will now have to focus heavily on fundraising, to keep up with the candidates who opted out of the public limits. That hurts the grassroots candidates. The system in general helps incumbents and helps candidates with large personal fortunes. I think helping grassroots candidates is better for democracy than helping incumbents and wealthy candidates.
— Jesse Gordon, convention delegate supporting Deval Patrick, Andrea Silbert, and John Bonifaz; former technology Director for Robert Reich for Governor; and former candidate for Cambridge City Council
In today’s Globe:
“Governor’s race may set a record – Gabrieli, others likely to spur spending pace”
How much did you spend in your race for Cambridge City Council, and how much did other candidates spend (especially other non-incumbents). I’m always interested in how campaign spending influences local and legislative races. My feeling is that as long as you raise/spend enough to get your message out, it doesn’t really matter if you’re outspent. But it would be nice to have more data on that. OCPF puts out an analysis every two years on the legislative races, but I don’t know what the facts are on the city/town level.
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Seems to me that incumbents, since they are usually better known, shouldn’t actually need to spend as much… not that that stops them! But I think that the biggest determining factor in whether a challenger can beat an incumbent is what he/she spends, not if he/she spends more than the incumbent.
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I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.
The fact is that incumbents raise and spend more for several reasons. One is to intimidate others from challenging them. Somebody without personal wealth will think more than twice against going up against someone with a $50,000 campaign account. Another is to build support within the community of elected officials. The more money they have, the more they can give to other campaigns, the more friends they have. Another is to build and maintain support within the district. A big campaign chest gives them the opportunity to spend money on Little League, the Girl Scouts, whatever.
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So all of these things have an impact on a challenger without the connections to the contribution pipeline that the incumbent did. The only way you overcome these built-in advantages of incumbency is with a seriously kick-ass field organization and lots of money to get your name out there. It’s a hell of a challenge, and explains why Massachusetts has the second-to-worst record for contested races in the country.
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For more information on what to do about it, go to http://www.massvoters.com.
I was on Jesse Gordon’s campaign, and ran the election day get out the vote effort. I don’t remember how much we spent – I do remember the incumbents outspent us. We did have a kick-ass field operation, but of the over 3,000 people who voted for Jesse as one of their top 6 choices, only 626 voted for him #1. We ended up working very hard to turn out a lot of other candidates’ #1 voters, and our field operation may be what got challenger Craig Kelley elected (and incumbent David Maher bumped).
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Partly, this happened because we never really figured out the right way to do voter targetting and identification for an IRV race (there’s so little literature, research, or experience on that to go on), and especially, how to train our canvassers to really only identify #1 voters. But another part is that of the nearly 1800 voters we’d identified as supporters by election day, our message was not convincing enough to get most of them to pick Jesse as their #1 vote. And therein lies another advantage of incumbency…
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In 2004, the Cambridge City Council grumbled about, but did little to prevent, a catastrophically unfair change in the proterty tax assessment model used by the city. Which some people saw their taxes go down that year, hundreds of Cambridge homeowners saw their property taxes double or triple (or worse) with no warning, and many of them were forced to sell and leave. Jesse made this the centerpiece of his campaign, until shortly before the election, the council passed a simplistic multimillion dollar across the board tax cut with much fanfare (using money Jesse had said was available, that the city had denied all spring and summer was actually available… until they used it). The flat across the board cut did nothing to fix the unfairness of the previous year’s reassessment, which on average fell most heavily on the least wealthy homeowners. But they were able to, at least temporarily, defuse voters’ motivation to elect Jesse to deal with the tax problem, because hey, the city had just announced they were cutting property taxes by millions!
That sounds really tough, and not for the faint hearted. It’s so much easier just to skip the field campaign and spend lots of money on advertising! : ).
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When you were id’ing voters, did you ask for their commitment to vote for him as #1, or just, will you vote for him?
I tried to always remember to ask about their #1 vote and to train all of our volunteers to do that same, and to train everyone we had training volunteers (including Jesse) to do so… it’s hard. Even getting people to ask “will you vote for [candidate]” is a bit hard. If a voter tells a canvasser “yes I’ll vote for him” and doesn’t specify #1 or #2 – especially if they volunteer the information before the canvasser asks the specific question – it’s easy to forget to ask “will that be your #1 vote?” And volunteers also want to mark down supporters as supporters. Someone who says “I love Jesse, I hope he gets elected, I’m definitely voting for him #2!” should be ID’ed as “voting for someone else”… but that goes against the grain.
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The further complication is that we had an explicit ally, Sam Seidel, and we figured we were trying to get one or the other of them elected, that getting both of them elected was unattainable. So do we try to ID people who are planning to vote Sam Seidel #1 and Jesse Gordon #2, to GOTV them on election day as well? What about people whose #1 vote was going to someone we knew couldn’t win (of the 18 candidates running, there were 9 incumbents, 3 credible challengers, and 6 who had no chance) – their #2 vote was as good as a #1 vote.
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Basically, we don’t yet know the right ways to do field in a propotional single transferrable vote system. It’ll take more practice and experience and research to figure it out.
I just ran for Framingham School Committee in the past spring elections and I actually outspent my 6 opponents, and the one that I lost to I outspent him 3-1. The race boiled down to community support — I was 20 years old at the time (I’ve since turned 21) and had only been active in local politics for about a year, when I won a micro-election for Town Meeting also against 6 people.
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My point is that my money was the only reason I was competative. I had won the primary by outspending 4-1 and really made people nervous for the other, more established candidate. My problem was that since I am in school full time and work full time I depended on money for mail etc. to beat any sort of ground game. Even on the local level money is very important. And although the races are nonpartisan it was a very clearly and decisive me the young progressive vs. the esablishment conservative.
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Money Spent:
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Wes Ritchie: Spent about $4,000 (+$400 in kind)
Opponent: Spent about $1,300
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Difference: I raised and spent $2,700+ more
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Vote Total:
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Wes Ritchie: 2,068
Opponent: 2,165
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Difference: I lost by 95 votes
To reply to several comments: I list below my campaign’s expenditures, and all of my opponents’. The ones marked (i) were incumbents running for re-election in 2005; those marked (c) were challengers. I outspent one incumbent, and the challenger who won outspent me and two incumbents.
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My point wasn’t about how MUCH a candidate spends, but more about how EASY it is for some candidates to spend money while it is much harder for others. That’s the essential definition of a failure of a ‘level playing field.” Candidates who are wealthy, or who are incumbents, have a much easier time raising money. Public campaign financing would level the playing field by making it relatively easier for challengers and non-wealthy candidates to raise money.
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In the Cambridge City Council race, out of 16 candidates, the 7 top fundraisers were incumbents, and the bottom 5 were challengers. I think that reflects the fundraising power of incumbency much more than it reflects the quality of each campaign. The sitting mayor (Sullivan) raised the most money, not because he ran the most attractive campaign, but because people want to contribute to the mayor, because the mayor has power. That’s true for all of the incumbents — people contribute in part because the incumbents have power. And that hurts challengers, and that hurts democracy.
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Making challengers raise all their own money is a form of incumbency protection. I did what I had to do, for fundraising, but had I been able to spend more time talking to voters, I may have done better at the polls. I believe the reason that incumbents vote against public campaign financing is because they recognize that it empowers challengers and disempowers incumbents.
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As Cos pointed out, in this particular campaign there was another very expensive use of incumbency power, directed primarily at my campaign. I spent 6 months saying that the city’s tax structure inappropriately damaged neighborhood housing, and was unnecessarily unfair to small-scale homeowners and renters. The incumbents spent 6 months saying that my idea for spending $8 million from our budget surplus on this issue was wrong-minded and fiscally irresponsible — and then they unanimously passed an $8 million tax cut from our budget surplus.
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I had to spend my own money getting the word out about the tax structure’s negative effects on Cambridge housing. The incumbents, once they decided to partially implement my plan instead of attack it, spent taxpayers’ money to send out color glossy brochures to every resident in Cambridge, three times, in the two months prior to Election Day. Just the taxpayer-funded expense of mailing those three brochures outspent my entire campaign budget — and every incumbents’ name appeared prominently in each of the brochures. And then there was the $8 million, too, which was a pretty solid blow against my campaign message, when people received a tax cut in their mailbox a few weeks before the election. Challengers should not have to try to survive in a playing-field as un-level as that.
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On the topic of openness of reporting and OCPF (the state’s campaign finance office):
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Actually, my campaign expenses were more like $40K, but I use the figures above for consistent comparison with other campaigns. One should not assume that OCPF accurately reports campaign expenses — my campaign is just one example.
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When I worked for the Reich for Governor campaign, we studied the OCPF reports very carefully indeed. We keyed in the original reports from the candidates themselves, with a staff of 4 volunteers, because we found that the OCPF reports had limited accuracy. After our massive volunteer effort, we discovered that only about 1/3 of all donations appeared on the OCPF reports — mostly missing the smallest ones.
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I’m all for open campaign finance reporting — but the OCPF data, like in my campaign, is good for comparison, but not even close to 100% accurate.
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— Jesse Gordon
(The tax issue is described in detail at my campaign website)
I don’t know how others feel about this, but I think given what has happened to public financing, we need to revisit the individual contribution limits.
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By limiting individuals to $500 per year/per candidate, it seems to me that we encourage the excessive self-financing (to some extent). I know this doesn’t apply to someone like Birmingham, but it certainly advantages incumbents in incredible fashion. How much easier would it be for Patrick or others to raise money if the individual limit was higher? Personally I don’t think that $1000 would buy much more influence than $500.
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To me, the real issue is transparency in the process. I am an OCPF website junky, but I think that the reporting system could be changed to make it easier for the average user. Also, they could work things to make it more obvious where donations were coming from. For instance, the employees and spouses of employees of company x have donated y sum of money to candidate z. Such reporting would truly reveal where influence comes from.
For many of the reasons I talked about in my post on money and politics, I think sending campaign spending skyrocketing through getting rid of contribution limits would move us in the wrong direction. Perhaps a slightly smaller set of people would be “priced out of politics”, but the dividing line between those who are and those who aren’t would grow even more extreme. Also, the money race would be even more corrupting, and more distorting, of the democratic process, and our collective decisionmaking would become even less democratic and less healthy than it is now.
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But yes, it would allow people like Reilly to come somewhat closer to competing with people like Gabrieli.
I’m with you, Dan, but more radical in my thinking.
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If there’s excellent transparency, if we know who’s giving what to whom instantly, and if we restrict giving to individuals only, why is $10,000 going to be more corrupting than $1,000? I just don’t believe that. Some one has to prove that direct, transparent hard money from individuals, not PACs, unions or corporations, is “corrupting.” I just don’t see it.
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The reason people and companies “pay-to-play” is exactly because so much political money in needed to fund a campaign and because it has become so hard to raise. The entire process is now dominated by professional campaign funding pipelines run by a small group of entrenched professional and semi-professional “movers and shakers” who do the money raising and aggregating. It’s the same group (for both sides) year after year.
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This is all complicated by regualtions … creating 527’s, 501(c)3’s and all the FEC’s alphabet soup. It’s impossible to oversee and police, and much energy is expended to develop work-arounds. Result: lobbyists like Jack Abramoff, and Congressmen Jefferson and Duke Cunningham.
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Furthermore, all this “reform” has concentrated campaign dollars. Mcuh is sourced from George Soros, from Harold Ickes’s American Majority Fund (a 501(c)4) and whatever Paul Begala’s working on. These are legal schemes which increase campaign funding opacity. It’s also antithecitcal to the grassroots style you cherish.
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The progressive solution is to suggest funding elections publically. This is a terrible concept for many reasons, but the trump card is that I insist NONE OF MY MONEY be used by Barney Frank or Deval Patrick. I don’t believe what they believe, and so I do not want to help fund their campaigns.
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Maybe I’m all wrong, but I think it’ll be a very hard sell (maybe not in deep blue MA) to convince the public that we should let politicians control the funding of … politicians.
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In the meantime, one only has to look at who’s running — the same pols over and over, year after year — to get the notion that the only people now running for office are the usual suspects (i.e., long time political insiders who have spent years accumulating war chests) or wealthy self-funders.
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Up, or eliminate, the limits.
To publicly fund elections in 1996 (Arizona and Maine) and 1998 (in Massachusetts). And politicians have nothing to do with how the system operates — the money goes to an independent state agency that only gives money to those who qualify by self-operating criteria — there’s no discretion. I understand the argument that you don’t want your taxpayer money funding elections for people you don’t support — I feel the same way — but the same could be said for, say, the roads. I don’t particularly like my roads being used by Fred Phelps or his group of jackasses. I don’t like my airwaves (public property by the way) being used by f—tards like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson. I don’t like my armed forces being used to invade and occupy Iraq. But I understood that society is community, and for all of it to work, I have to contribute to parts of it I don’t particularly like. How, exactly, is the election system any different? It isn’t. It’s a system for distributing a public good — democracy — that is increasingly broken because good candidates are being crowded out and bad incumbents are reigning unchallenged. I’m willing to hold my nose and allow the ten dollars of my tax dollars that would fund a public financing system, 5 cents of which will go to a couple of Republicans (or Tom Reilly), just so we can fix that greater evil. Just a thought.
They’re just people trying to get others to come together to donate more money than they otherwise could.
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A max donation to one person is $500, but to get around that they create PACs which can donate even more… so essentially the same people donate money sometimes even dozens of times. Throw in the fact that some PACs like the Swift Boaters and MoveOn have no pesonal limits and individuals can donate millions to them…
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I’m sorry, but your understanding of campaign financing is a little niave and I’m glad most people would disagree.
WHY – now that legislative reporting is mandated to be on-line – do we cling to the antique paper filing schedile?
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I hav two candidates who didn’t organize until 2006, and THEIR reports won’t be on line until days befiore the Primary!
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Why don’t we have MONTHLY filing? We have the software, we have the info, we have the OCPF staff – why is the info withheld from the public?
Wait, maybe it’s because it’s late and I’m a little sleep deprived, but something doesn’t add up.
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2002 gov. candidate Total spending Spending per vote
Warren Tolman $4.1M $31
Tom Birmingham $4.6M $26
Shannon O’Brien $4.4M $18
Robert Reich $1.7M $9
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How could Tom Birmingham spend $4.6 million and $26/vote, but Tolman spend .5 million less and $5 more per vote?
Warren Tolman spent $4.1 million and got 132,157 votes.
Tom Birmingham spent $4.6 million and got 179,703 votes.
Looked at in terms of votes/money, Birmingham’s campaign was more efficient.
Didn’t catch that.
If I run for office and spend one penny and vote for myself (and maybe get a few more votes too for whatever reason), I would have run an INCREDIBLY “efficient” campaign, right?
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One can probably assume that each successive vote a candidate gets would cost more… law of diminishing returns. So campaigns, as they become more successful getting votes, would become less and less “efficient.”
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So then, how is this measure helpful?
It would be pretty stupid to judge a campaign entirely by this measure. It is just a useful indicator, as Jesse Gordon used it: to show how much money was spent per vote. In combination with other things we know about the campaigns, it can help us look at what sort of campaign it was.
Compare spending to registered voters in a particular race. I think that’s a better measure because, that way, you can compare it to one candidate to another in the same race – and you can still see how “efficient” the were with a simple crosstab.
…nor a classification of progressive campaigns. I am tired of hearing progressives complain about a lack of funds that are available to them if they are willing to work hard and be strategic. Was Carl Sciortino’s well-funded campaign not progressive? Did Rebekah Gewirtz “sell out”? No, these candidates were good progressives who got on the phone and made fundraising a priority.
Doesn’t apply to higher offices? In the LG’s race, Andrea Silbert is raising more money than any other candidate except Deb Goldberg, and she’s out-raising Deb if you don’t count self-donations. Andrea has never run for office before, and her opponents are current or past elected officials. That’s how a progressive competes – not by coming up with more creative reasons why the government should give you campaign money.
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(Note: I am not saying all reasons for public campaign finance are bad. I found Cos’ argument in the post he links to worthy. But I certainly object to anyone holding up inept fundraising as a progressive credential.)
No-one is taking the caricatured position you assert here — that somehow you’re more progressive if you can’t raise money. Rather, the point is that candidates should be out talking to voters, not contributors, and competing on the ground of ideas and the needs of their communities, not on the ground of how much money they can raise. Nowhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Rights does it say that only the people with access to money can serve as our representatives, yet that is the unstated restriction today. Also, as I mentioned up-thread, the point is — Massachusetts has the lowest number of contested races in the COUNTRY, save one (I think it’s South Carolina). This means that progressives simply aren’t doing running, except in very few numbers, because of the obstacles to running.
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Voters contribute a portion of their income to paying for roads so that people can get their homes and jobs, why shouldn’t we contribute a portion of our income so that more people can run for office? Arguing that candicates should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps is the same kind of thinking — everybody’s on their own, and it’s their fault their (poor, hungry, uneducated, choose one) — that’s gotten us to the place we’re in now. We pay for the voting booths, we should pay for the campaigns too. Then we can address all of the issues discussed here: contribution limits, spending limits, costs.
It’s simply not true that only people with access to money can run. Running a smart and brave campaign can create access to money where none existed before.
MA has a low number of contested races because we are a one-party state. There are no financial obstacles to running in MA that are not equally present in other states.
I wish we had more contested races too. Under the existing rules, for a progressive to contest, they need to be ready to thing smart about fundraising; and, in the end, to spend a lot of time on the phone. Maybe it’s not ideal, but it’s a lot more productive that complaining about the rules when you’re not in a position to change them.
First, I don’t agree that the fact that we are a one-party state explains the absence of contested races. A one-party state just means that the contest that means anything is the primary, not the general. Second, sure, there are always exceptions to every rule, including some progressives being able to run, but how many PTA presidents, Little League organizers, schoolteachers, nurses, etc. are there who aren’t running because of these obstacles?
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And again, candidates in a democracy shouldn’t be spending time on the phone asking for money, they should be spending time on the phone asking for votes.
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I wish I could remember all of the numbers, but I think the statistics were something like incumbents in Massachusetts typically are able to outraise and outspend challengers two-to-one on the rare occasions where there are contested races. So there are indeed structural obstacles. And finally, some of us were able to change the rules in 1998 when we fought for and won the Clean Elections law, and we’ll do so again.
I think we’re off topic; the main thrust of my original comment was to argue against the correlation between low-funded campaigns and progressive campaigns which was the explicit subject of this post. Indeed, this post remarkably lumped Tom Reilly’s campaign in as a progressive campaign.
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To get back on point: I do not want progressive campaigns to be thought of as low-money campaigns. I do not want low-money campaigns to be thought of as grassroots campaigns. Howard Dean’s campaign was grassroots and broke fundraising records simultaneously.
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Maybe we are focusing on different things; I am focusing on campaigns as run today, and you are talking about a hypothetical future. If so, then it’s certainly fine to talk about improvements. But I would like to say that in the present, correlating “progressive” and “low-money” is a step away from correlating “progressive” and “defeated”, and that is a road to accepting political failure as a way of life. My 2 cents.
I agree with you completely on that basic point. In fact, I’d like to see all progressive campaigns take themselves seriously enough to understand that they have to raise as much money as they can, be as hard hitting as the opposition, and do the grassroots work of identifying each of your number 1’s that it takes to win.