It's Money After All

I've spent a lot of time in the last seven or eight years on the issue of campaign finance reform. I've written a lot about it, and as a funder, I've helped to build some of the organizations working on reform. But I have a love-hate relationship with the issue -- maybe more hate. It's limited as an explanation of what's wrong with American democracy. It's hard to engage the public around such an intangible, process-oriented issue, and even harder to do it in a way that doesn't deepen their cynicism about government. And even the tiniest steps toward reform, such as the McCain-Feingold limits on soft money, are excruciating, and lead inevitably to disappointment since they change so little. Finally, I'm sympathetic to both the futility argument (private money will always find a way into the system) and the free speech arguments, which is why I'm always focused on reforms that expand the ability of candidates to communicate rather than just restrict money.

And yet, a few months ago, a colleague asked me for advice on a recommendation to a foundation that wanted to find a single main project to respond to the problems of American democracy. Everything could be on the table: election-day voter registration, vote-by-mail, redistricting reform, fusion, anything. Even with everything on the table, I still couldn't come up with a better single solution than generous public financing for candidates. The full public financing models in Arizona and Maine, or the 4:1 matching system of New York City still offer the best hope for vigorous, competitive elections in which all voices can be heard. That's not to the exclusion of other reforms that may help, but on balance, I've concluded it would have the greatest impact.

I was reminded of this by the paper I read today, thanks to Ruy Teixera's Emerging Democratic Majority blog, by Alan Abramowitz and his colleagues at Emory, Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections They attempt to assess the leading arguments for the declining competitiveness of House elections -- the inherent power of incumbency, increasing partisan and cultural polarization (Red and Blue America), and redistricting, and reject all three. More important, they argue, are "sorting," in which Republican/conservative districts are less likely to have anomalous Democratic representatives and vice versa, and the financial disadvantage of challengers. The average amount spent by challengers in moderately competitive races, they find, was $699,000, and only 13% of challengers spent that much.

After the 2000 elections, I found that only one new member of Congress from a competitive district -- that included both successful challengers and open-seat candidates -- had spent less than $1 million.

Several years ago, I heard Senator Mitch McConnell, the arch-foe of all campaign finance reform, argue that parties needed to have the special advantage of soft money because only parties will support challengers. Yet the sad fact is that parties are the most risk-averse. Any candidate who approaches the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with a plan to challenge a not-obviously-vulnerable Republican will get one question: "How much can you raise?' Not, "What can we do to help?" If a candidate isn't independently wealthy or well-connected enough to raise a million, the party puts the race in the second tier. And thus when a seat suddenly moves into play, as when Rep. Jim Greenwood suddenly retired to become a lobbyist last year, the party has done nothing to put its candidate in a stronger position.

Public financing for congressional campaigns is obviously going to be a tough sell, but perhaps as more politicians come to national office with positive impressions of the New York, Arizona, or Maine systems, it will become more plausible. In the meantime, the hundreds of thousands of small donors energized in the last year should begin to think about how to bankroll those promising, marginal congressional challengers, if only to get them to the point where they can get the DCCC's risk-averse attention.

I do have one caveat to the Abramowitz et al paper: I don't find his rejection of the theory that redistricting is a principle cause of the decline of competition to be convincing. The authors theorize that if redistricting reinforces incumbent advantage, one should expect to see a greater decline in competition in the cycle immediately after redistricting, that is, 1982, 1992, or 2002. Since those election cycles tend to be more competitive than cycles in the middle/end of the decades, they conclude that redistrticting is not the major factor in incumbent advantage or partisanship. But redistricting is always going to be a disruptive event. Even if redistricting is done in a way to protect both current incumbents and the party in power, the election immediately after a redistricting is likely to bring some change. There may be new districts, incumbents may be pit against each other, and even safe incumbents may be running in partially unfamiliar territory. In fact, one often sees redistricting plans in which a safe incumbent who gets 75% of the vote actually encourages adding unfriendly territory that might reduce his share of the vote to 58%, but takes it out of another district in order to protect another incumbent of the same party. (In fact, I once heard Rep. Jerry Nadler explain that he had done exactly that, volunteering to add more conservative and very distant Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Gravesend and Bensonhurst to his mostly Upper West Side Manhattan district, creating a bizarre district of two parts separated not just by New York Harbor but also by several miles of land.) Such seats might appear slightly vulnerable in the first election after the redistricting, but then quickly settle down as the incumbent lays claim to them.

So, let's not take redistricting off the table as a factor. But the rest of the Abramowitz paper is very powerful. And it does give Democrats some cause for optimism, in that there are a dozen or more districts in which Republicans represent districts in which they are as out of step as Democrats were in Southern districts a dozen years ago. If the money is there for good challengers, those seats can perhaps be competitive. And in the long run, if we can reduce the financial barrier through good public financing, we can expect more competition in all these races.