The false promise of taxpayer-funded campaigns
If you’re like most people, there’s at least one politician you absolutely can’t stand. But if a new measure is approved, you may soon be financing his or her re-election campaign.
An initiative will come before Denver voters this November that, if approved, would establish public financing of city elections for candidates who choose to abide by certain rules. For the first $50 qualifying candidates receive, the taxpayer (that’s you!) would chip in an additional $450.
The program would cost taxpayers $8 million per election cycle. In other words, $8 million that could support education or road repairs would instead be spent stuffing mailboxes with mailers and spamming the airwaves with campaign ads.
Supporters say the program would help a more diverse range of candidates become competitive in elections. In fact, the program would simply entrench the status quo and give incumbent politicians an undue advantage.
That’s because anyone challenging an incumbent would face strict per-donor contribution limits. The measure would lower contribution limits by up to twothirds; for mayoral candidates, the existing per-donor limit of $3,000 would be slashed to $1,000. But contribution limits are halved again for candidates seeking public funds. Mayoral candidates receiving matching funds would face contribution limits of just $500.
Incumbents also face contribution limits, but they enjoy several advantages over challengers by virtue of their official position. Before spending a penny on advertising, incumbents are relatively well-known to the electorate, and they can use their elected office as a bully pulpit to speak out on issues and communicate with voters. Challengers must spend a lot of money to achieve a similar level of name recognition and voter outreach, and contribution limits make their job significantly harder.
In this way, contribution limits kill competition and solidify the status quo — the opposite of what the initiative’s supporters are promising.
We need only to look at public financing of campaigns in other cities to confirm that such schemes rarely help the little guy.
New York City’s 30-year-old matching funds program closely resembles the new proposal in Denver, giving candidates up to $6 in taxpayer funds for every dollar they raise. The program has proven effective at lining politicians’ pockets, but it hasn’t made elections any more competitive.
A 2004 report by the New York City Campaign Finance Board admitted that “the pro- gram’s requirements, instead of helping to ‘level the playing field,’ appear to have contributed to greater disparities between office holders’ and challengers’ campaign finances and . . . the Public Fund has helped to finance possibly unnecessary campaign expenses and uncompetitive campaigns.”
Seattle recently adopted publicly funded campaigns as well. Voters in the last election were given $100 in “Democracy Vouchers” to support qualified candidates of their choice. Using familiar rhetoric, supporters claimed the program would enable “more candidates, including women, young people and people of color, to run viable campaigns against big money candidates.”
What it really did was cushion the spending advantage of incumbents and establishment politicians. Incumbent City Attorney Pete Holmes and Councilwoman M. Lorena González collected $339,325 in voucher cash between them, propelling them to easy victories. Their lesser-known opponents either did not qualify for the vouchers or received a far smaller share.
When put into practice, public financing of political campaigns never lives up to its promise. Not only is it a waste of public money, but it forces taxpayers to fund candidates and political messages they disagree with — a scheme fundamentally at odds with the freedom of speech.
This November, Denver voters should recall the words of Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”