Do Voters Care Where the Money Comes From?
It’s a sad fact that voter registration numbers demonstrate that the general public does not believe who gets elected matters much. Captains of industry, on the other hand, are well aware that who we elect does make a difference. As a result, money will always find its way into politics, campaign finance laws notwithstanding.
One example is the recent effort by the Sacramento developer Angelo Tsakopoulos to help the campaign of his long-time protégé, Phil Angelides. As reported by the LA Times:
A Sacramento developer and his daughter reported Friday that they were spending $5 million on television advertising to promote Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, a move that gives a lift to his cash-strapped campaign but opens the candidate to new questions about his close ties to the builder.
The spending by Angelo K. Tsakopoulos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis comes at a time when polls show Angelides, the state treasurer, has fallen behind his June primary rival, state Controller Steve Westly.
It also comes amid financial troubles for the Angelides campaign, due partly to his rapid spending in the early stages of the race, which left him short of the cash he needs now to compete with Westly in the crucial arena of television advertising.
While Westly has drawn on the millions of dollars he made as a dot-com executive to run a steady stream of television ads, Angelides has not had a spot on the air for the last three weeks.
Tsakopoulos has long been the No. 1 source of campaign money for Angelides, a former Sacramento developer who got his start in real estate working for Tsakopoulos.
While I have always thought that campaign finance is the root of all evil in the United States, I don’t know how I would fix it. Many idealists hold out public financing as the solution, but the First Amendment ensures that private money will find its way back in. My experience in “clean election” Arizona in 2002 reinforced my belief that public financing may have the noble result of getting more candidates to participate, but it does little to keep corporations and consultants with clever lawyers from creating “independent” expenditures that wreak havoc with the spirit of public financing. The San Antonio Express-News recently described the experience in Maine:
In Maine, which has a two-year state budget of some $6 billion, a total of more than $2.7 million was spent on clean-election legislative races in 2004. In 2002, the state spent nearly $1.9 million on legislative races and $1.2 million on gubernatorial campaigns. Seventy-eight percent of its lawmakers were elected as clean candidates.
At the same time, according to the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, independent expenditures are higher than they were before the clean-elections law took effect.
Independent expenditures more than quadrupled in Maine, and now equal 19 percent to 20 percent of public spending. Such expenditures totaled more than $529,000 in 2004 and more than $595,000 in 2002, when there was a governor’s race. Before 2002, an agency official estimated independent expenditures at perhaps $130,000.
“The Clean Election Act has done nothing to take the money out of politics,” said [Maine campaign consultant Roy] Lenardson. “With a nudge, nudge and wink, wink, someone could be spending $40,000 or $50,000 behind the scenes to boost your campaign.”
At the opposite extreme from public financing is the idea of unlimited contributions but full disclosure. The theory behind that concept is that if, say, Microsoft wants to spend a billion dollars to buy an election, at least all the voters will know that Microsoft is spending a billion dollars to push a candidate and so will factor that information into their voting decision.
As convinced as I am that campaign finance is the bane of American democracy, I’m skeptical both of unlimited contributions/full disclosure and, as currently proposed, public financing. Still, the Tsakopoulos effort will be an interesting if imperfect test. Angelides had gone dark - his commercials were not on the air. Meanwhile, his opponent was blanketing every media market with ads. Any consultant would have expected a drop in the Angelides poll numbers, which is exactly what happened.
Now, thanks to Tsakopoulos, voters are going to be seeing TV ads about Angelides again. However, the news media will be simultaneously informing these voters that the ads are courtesy of the Tsakopoulos family. Will Angelides numbers go back up? Will voters say this a free country and if I had $5 million to spend on a candidate I really cared about, I would do it, too? Or will the media coverage negate the effect of being on the air? Again, it’s an imperfect test. But I’m looking forward to the next set of poll results.
