Talk is cheap, but expensive attack ads demean democracy

The accepted estimate of the cost of the recent U.S. election campaign, adding up spending by the parties, the candidates — for president, House, and Senate — and their super-PAC surrogates, is $6 billion. It was, by a wide margin, the most expensive campaign in history.

What, in the end, did all that money buy? In the presidential election, two states, Indiana and North Carolina, switched from the Democratic to the Republican column. The Senate likewise underwent a swing of just two seats; the House, three. In short, a whole lot of nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. True, money didn’t seem to buy much in the way of elections: For example, of the 10 candidates backed by Karl Rove’s organizations, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, to the tune of nearly $160 million, just one was elected. But it may well have bought the odd candidate. The roughly $50 million contributed by real estate mogul Sheldon Adelson, first to prop up Newt Gingrich’s primary campaign, then to Mitt Romney’s Restore Our Future super-PAC, would surely have left either man considerably beholden to him, had their campaigns succeeded.

Mostly what this flood of money bought was more of everything we have come to despise about election campaigns — attack ads, one million of them for the presidential campaigns alone; automated “robocalls” and the detailed voter data bases on which they depend; endless polls and push polls; plus the services of legions of strategists, consultants, PR advisers and the like.

Hence the paradox: At a time when communicating with the public has never been cheaper, elections have never cost more. The costs of simply getting a campaign’s message out, whether via campaign websites, mass emails, social media, viral videos and the like, approach zero. The pivotal events of the modern campaign, the television debates, likewise cost the candidates next to nothing. You could print up glossy four-colour platforms for every person in the country for a fraction of what the campaigns actually spend.

The bulk of it, rather, goes to activities that, far from adding to the sum of public knowledge about the candidates and their policies, subtract from it. Candidates will always lie and slander their opponents; parties will always seek to manipulate the public, to reduce the electorate to so many thinly sliced “demographics.” But the more money that pours into these campaigns, the more of this sort of behaviour we will get.

Worse than useless, it’s actively harmful to democracy. Not only does all this spending help to create a toxic political environment, but the immense efforts required to raise funds on this scale are a major distraction and drain on the candidates’ time and attention. All of which is self-evidently true of the U.S., but true as well of our own campaigns, even if they do not cost nearly as much: The differences are of degree, not of kind.

We do not have to do things this way. There is no objective reason why elections could not cost a fraction of what they do now. People who make their living in politics are inclined to talk as if there were a fixed cost to running a campaign. But the truth is the only reason any party “needs” to spend as much as it does is because it fears if it does not the other parties will. Cut off the supply of funds to all of them, and they would all adapt soon enough.

I would not want to go so far as Britain, where parties are forbidden to advertise on television. Neither is the answer to impose draconian curbs on spending by outside groups. Free speech concerns are not to be taken lightly, and the argument that “money is speech” is hard to refute. But even the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, recognized the necessity of regulating contributions to political campaigns, lest the donation come to resemble a bribe. The same reasoning should apply, I would argue, to spending by outside groups, so far as it directly supports or opposes a candidate or party: effectively, it amounts to a contribution.

The answer to the problem of “third-party” spending, then, is neither the near-total bans that have been attempted in this country — and properly rejected by the courts — nor the free-forall that now obtains in the U.S. It is rather to put outside groups on the same footing as the parties: to count contributions to both against an individual donor’s global annual limit, all contributions combined. It could then be left up to the individual how best to project his views into the political arena, within his overall ceiling: The more he contributed to one group, the less he would have left for the others.

Parties and outside groups would likewise be under the same broad constraint, free to spend as much as they could raise from individuals, but no more: no corporate or union donations, and no public funds, whether via explicit subsidy or tax breaks.

It remains only to fix the amount of the individual ceiling. As the foregoing implies, it should be set at a level consistent with a much lower level of total spending than is currently the case. We don’t need to spend nearly as much on campaigns as we do, and we would be much better off if we spent less.

Starve the beast, I say, and politics will be that much less beastly.