Some inconvenient facts surfaced in yesterday’s Pennsylvania primaries. I will let the good folks from the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (available by subscription only) tell the tale.
Over a dozen Pennsylvania legislators lost party primaries yesterday in the biggest bloodbath in 40 years. Among the casualties were the top two GOP leaders in the state senate. “We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania,” concluded Senate President Bob Jubilirer, who lost his bid for a ninth four-year term in a landslide. Because of the public mood, he says, his election “frankly just was not winnable.”
“The pay raise was the fuse that lit this whole explosion we are beginning to see,” former Lt. Gov. Mark Singel told reporters. Indeed, as an act of legislative chutzpah the pay raise had few equals. Last July, the GOP-controlled legislature, in cahoots with Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, raised legislative salaries by between 16% and 54% without public debate, notice or review. They passed the raise in a 2 a.m. vote and evaded a constitutional ban on midterm pay raises by pocketing much of the increase immediately as “unvouchered expenses.”
Voters furious with the “Harrisburg Hogs” forced the legislature to repeal the raise with only a single dissenting vote. In the resulting turmoil, 61 challengers filed to run against incumbents in their party primaries — the highest number in a quarter century.
The incumbents fought back. Mr. Jubilirer and his allies raised nearly $1.5 million to defend his seat, versus the $200,000 that challenger John Eichelberger was able to collect. Similarly, Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill outspent his challenger, Mike Folmer, by some ten to one. It didn’t help. Both leaders wound up winning only 36% of the vote, a crushing defeat.
So for whom are these facts inconvenient? Proponents of campaign finance reform, that’s who. State controls on campaign finance are premised (or at least sold) on the idea that money distorts elections, that without state controls elections will be bought by the candidate with the most money, that the gentle hand of the state is needed to ensure a level playing field and a fair outcome.
Yet here we see well-connected machine politicians, who raised between 8 and 10 times as much as their opponents, turned out. Not the outcome one would expect from the campaign finance reformers, is it?
Damn bottom-up facts. So inconvenient to grand top-down theories.
Anyone ever disputes this with you, point them at the GOP primary win of Fred Tuttle in Vermont. Fred, star of the indy movie “Man with a Plan” (about a retired Vermont farmer who runs for congress in order to get congressional health benefits for his ailing wife), ran for US Senate for real, a few years after the movie and its sequels ran. He got into the primary race because a wealthy New Yorker moved to Vt a year prior just to run for Senate. Irked, and with a campaign budget of something like $18.65 (plus a lot of left over movie promo materials emblazoned with the slogan “Spread Fred”), he defeated the opponent, who had spent over a million bucks on his race.
It isn’t really as simple as that though surely. From your description these people had their noses even deeper in the trough than usual. Most elections are not – at least to most people – taking place in such circumstances.
I reckon banning all spending would be a better idea – make them talk to people face to face if they want to be elected.
Blogger Mark Harris who is 21 won an upset victory in that election. His blog is savethegop.com
Via Alarmingnews
“Banning all spending”. Right. In a country which supposedly has freedom of speech. And where only the incumbents would have any public prominence. Why have primaries at all then? Just rubberstamp the incumbents.
Campaign Finance reform = Incumbent Protection reform. Nice to see it didn’t work this time. They earned their state nickname … Keystone state.
Campaign Finance reform = Incumbent Protection reform. Nice to see it didn’t work this time. They earned their state nickname … Keystone state.
ian said:
Not really. Here in Wisconsin a half a dozen or so of our state legislative leaders ‘copped a plea’ and got jail time. One arrogant idiot who was far from the worst offender decided to fight instead. A couple of days ago he was sentenced to 14(?) months in the state prison, several years of probation, and several years forbidden to go to the capital building.
The reason for that last stipulation is that one of the other (convicted on plea) legislative leaders was out on work release during the days and spending nights in jail. His day job? A lobbiest at the capital!!
The system is broken nationwide and at all levels. And it’s not just the election system that’s broken. It’s the ‘two party’ oligarchy of republicrats and demicans.
The crimes those guys were convicted of? Shaking down contributors for campaign donations in exchange for favorable votes on legislation.
These four pleaded guilty. The one that got prison instead of jail was a republican. The Capital Times
Why have primaries at all
Strange as it may seem this is not the only way to select a candidate.
Of course with “campaign finance reform” it would have been MORE difficult for challengers to raise money.
This (First Amendment smashing) “reform” is really an incumbents charter (as Uain states above).
We need something with constitutional force to forbid special privileges for any political party. A good start would be to require that any condition (i.e. petition signatures) that applies to any party, applies to all parties.
I heard a couple years back that it took as many petition signatures for a non democan/republicrat to get on the ballot in Florida as in about six major nations in Europe combined. Yet the “two” parties got a free ride.
I use “scare” quotes on “two party” because they are just different faces of the same pork and power party.
I heard a couple years back that it took as many petition signatures for a non democan/republicrat to get on the ballot in Florida as in about six major nations in Europe combined. Yet the “two” parties got a free ride.
I don’t understand. Are you saying that you need to pass some state set test in order to stand in an election that varies with the party you want to represent?
The UK requirements for standing as an MP are fairly simple:
Candidates must be proposed and seconded by two electors and eight others (called assentors) who are also electors. These electors must be on the register of parliamentary electors for the constituency where the candidate wishes to stand.
A person may only stand as a candidate for a party if the nomination paper is submitted with a certificate authorising their candidature issued by, or on behalf of, the nominating officer of a registered political party. Otherwise their nomination paper either gives the description ‘Independent’ or it gives no description whatsoever.
Candidates also have to put down a deposit of £500 – returnable in most cases.
Candidates must deposit £500 with the (A)RO when nomination papers are delivered. Candidates who poll less than one-twentieth of the total votes cast forfeit their deposit. Other deposits are returned.
Midwesterner:
We in NH are pursuing a lawsuit to this effect, as in the 2004 elections, the big parties sabotaged our presidential petitioning to the point of stealing petitions from town offices where they’d been certified, in order to prevent statewide certification by the Sect of States office. So we’re pissed and we’re going all the way, and we have some excellent arguments.
I agree that voters pissed off enough will vote the incumbents out, but the tolerance or rather apathy of the voters tends to have a very high threshold before this will happen, just look at the Democrats had for a hold on Congress for 60 years.
Most low budget candidates who succeed do so only because some media editor/publisher has taken a hankering to them, or more likely is pissed at the incumbent for not getting special favors, and decides to give lots of free publicity to the challenger. This rarely happens, the media creates its own idea of who is a “real candidate” irrespective of what even local laws are for getting on the ballot, as do groups that organize candidate debates. They blacked out Michael Badnarik nationwide in 2004, even when he got arrested attempting to serve a summons on GOP politicos, they refused to cover the story.
So electoral reform isn’t the only needed reform, getting libbers to put their capital into creating liberty oriented mass media outlets is also necessary, run by people who don’t condemn or talk down to those who are not died in the wool Big L’s.
Ian:
In some US states, there’s a threshold where if a candidate gets a certain minimum percentage or number of votes, that candidate’s party gets automatic ballot access for the next election cycle; parties that can’t get that number of votes have to go the petition route to get on the ballot.
If memory serves, here in New York it’s 50,000 votes in any statewide race.
The laws for suppression of independant candidates are clever, devious and different in every state.
Of the four states for which data was provided on wikipedia, only Minnesota had fair laws. Curious, Minnesota is the state that made such national news electing a third party candidate. Jesse Ventura’s veiws had a lot of overlap with libertarians. Some people actually consider him a little ‘L’ libertarian.
What right has the state to say that people representing political parties should be given preferential treatment in the electoral process?
What right has the state to say that people will be ‘confused’ by multiple candidates?
I’m amazed that people in the USA are willing to put up with this – but of course once the law is in place it is almost impossible to shift.
God help us if such proposals arise in the UK because then we are really sunk.
Mike (& ian),
Mike, I wish you your compatriots success in your efforts. What I hope is that it or some other case can do is to establish a supreme court precident. Maybe the court can be so good as to show us exactly where in the US Constitution it says we have the right of free association except in matters of politics. Like ian, I still haven’t figured that one out.
That wiki article about ballot access and history of balloting in the US was most enlightening. Seems to me the SCOTUS has some very serious thinking to do.
I always thought it would be fun to (instead of counting raw votes) calculate each candidate’s score by dividing their votes by the amount of money they spent on their campaign.
Outspent me 5 to 1? Great! Hope you got more than 5x my number of votes ;-).
You could also introduce an incumbent factor whereby we multiply the incumbent’s total expenditures by 1.1 (or some other empirically derived value).
Obviously, someone might try to win by spending only a very, very little amount of money – but – if that person won, you’d have elected someone who can spend money extremely efficiently – would that be so bad?
Let me see if I follow Mr. Dean here… in most races, a candidate that substantially outspends his opponent ends up winning. But here we have a case where the candidates that spent more $$ most certainly did NOT win. In fact, if you check around, you can find multiple cases where this has happened. Therefore, the very *notion* that a potent fiscal advantage makes victory highly likely is wrong.
Whew, what a relief!
Seriously, don’t you have to ignore the bulk of statistical data to come to this conclusion? Hell, if you want to argue that, from a libertarian perspective, buying an election isn’t necessarily that bad a thing, then fine, I’m with you. But the way you’ve posed this just now doesn’t seem very scientific.
“…in most races, a candidate that substantially outspends his opponent ends up winning. But here we have a case where the candidates that spent more $$ most certainly did NOT win.”
In the old bookies’ saying: David killed Goliath… but that’s not the way to bet.
The near-truism is that without a burning issue to unite people (as in the example Robert provided), the guy with the larger amount of funding will win.
Sad, but that’s the way the biscuit breaks.
All things being equal, more money will beat less money. Sure.
However, the presence of non-trivial counter-examples (such as the primaries in PA) to the belief that money controls elections stands as a refutation of one of the core premises used to undermine free speech via “campaign finance” control.
read this first
http://american-platform.com/america/2008/10/11/inconvenient-facts/