Imagine campaigns without dialing for dollars
When many of the Democrats running for president announced that they would not accept any donations from political action committees, it was one of those things that sounds like a principled sacrifice but doesn’t have much practical impact. After all, PACs aren’t allowed to give more than $5,000 to any one candidate, and they’ve been supplanted as major sources of outside money by super PACs and 501(c)(4)s.
But now one candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has gone a step farther:
“Senator Elizabeth Warren has a message for political donors seeking to schmooze with her at glitzy fund-raisers: No thanks.
“The presidential candidate, who has already sworn off campaign donations from PACs and support from SuperPACs, announced to her supporters in an e-mail Monday morning that she has decided to distance herself further from big money in politics by rejecting the high-dollar fund-raisers that help power both Democratic and Republican campaigns.
“Warren’s move will likely put pressure on other Democrats who are facing the daunting task of raising millions of dollars to get them through the primary while also appealing to a base increasingly suspicious of special interests and the influence of monied donors.
“‘Candidates for public office in America spend way too much time with wealthy donors,’ Warren wrote. ‘For every time you see a presidential candidate talking with voters at a town hall, rally, or local diner, those same candidates are spending three or four or five times as long with wealthy donors – on the phone, or in conference rooms at hedge fund offices, or at fancy receptions and intimate dinners – all behind closed doors.’”
Just to be clear, if you still want to write Warren a $2,700 check, she’ll accept it. There just won’t be a reception at which she’ll shake your hand, look deep into your eyes, and tell you how much she values your input on what she should do as president. She has also said she won’t be calling up donors individually to ask for donations, the chore known as “dialing for dollars,” which is loathed by every politician.
Her campaign advisers are portraying this as a step she’s taking to align her own practices with her message about the pernicious influence of money in politics; they say that they know she won’t be the most well-funded candidate anyway. Which might or might not be true, but the fact that she could even contemplate this move shows how the fundraising landscape for candidates has changed.
You have to give some credit for that to Bernie Sanders and his 2016 campaign. He showed not that you could run a campaign with mostly small donations – that had been done before – but that in the right circumstances you could do so and still raise enormous amounts of money. In 2016 he raised a spectacular $228 million, mostly in small donations. Then two years later, Beto O’Rourke, in what may be an even more remarkable feat, raised $79 million for a single Senate race by tapping into Democratic enthusiasm around the country.
It’s that enthusiasm, fueled by anger at Donald Trump, that no doubt helped convince Warren that it might be possible to finance a presidential campaign without having to get on the phone or hold big-dollar meet-and-greets. Democrats are so fired up about this campaign that there could be a few billion dollars out there waiting to be tapped with an effective digital operation. Since Warren’s campaign is built on the idea of economic and political reform, it will be good for her to say that unlike her opponents she’s not getting in rooms with a bunch of wealthy people to hear what they have to say before they write her checks.
She may also have come to a realization that the way campaign spending has exploded in recent years, we’ve reached a point where campaigns almost have more money than they can use. There may be some second-tier candidates who will struggle for funding and wish they had more, but among the leading contenders, money will follow success, not the other way around. If eschewing donor butt-kissing means Warren raises $100 million instead of $150 million, that’s not what will make the difference between being the Democratic nominee and not being the Democratic nominee. There’s a point at which buying a bunch more air time on Iowa TV stations just isn’t going to help. And let’s not forget that in 2016, Hillary Clinton spent nearly twice as much as Donald Trump (of course, he had some extra help).
The only trouble is that campaigns like Sanders’, O’Rourke’s, and Warren’s are still the exception, not the norm. Most candidates and members of Congress are going to have to dial for dollars and go to the fundraising dinners if they’re going to raise enough to be competitive. That means they’ll have to spend a lot of time being solicitous toward rich people and talking to them about what those rich people think is important. That can seriously warp your view of the world, no matter what good intentions you start out with.
Of course, if we had a robust system of public financing – which we could manage with a relatively modest investment, relative to the gains to be had from an uncorrupted political class – none of that would be necessary. Perhaps more candidates will do what Warren is doing and we’ll at least begin to consider what a different system might look like.