Trade groups more effective, study shows
beginning of a new trend is far too soon to say, but polls show there is wider discontent about the perceived influence of big money in U.S. politics and a growing gulf between the country’s very rich and very poor.
These nascent rumblings — along with evidence that the super-rich are inefficient political spenders — raise questions about how effective billionaires will be in the 2016 elections.
Some voters in Philadelphia, for example, were turned off by the billionaires backing a top candidate in the city’s May 19 mayoral race. And a Silicon Valley startup, Crowdpac, is hoping to bank on public ire against big political spenders to attract small donations to its new for-profit election campaign crowdfunding platform.
“There’s growing public awareness about rich people trying to buy elections, and that makes the task of winning all the more difficult,” said Darrell West, author of “Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust” and the director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution think tank.
Potential big donors dispute the notion they are trying to buy elections and say they are simply using their positions to try to influence the future of the country in a positive way.
“I do believe — and I’ve told my kids this — that I can do more for them by giving money to the right presidential candidate in 2016 than by leaving them double that amount in my will,” said David Walsh, a retired investor living in Jackson, Wyo., who would not disclose his net worth but has given several multimillion-dollar gifts to charitable causes and said he planned to donate heavily to candidates in 2016.
Miami car dealership mogul Norman Braman has been outspoken about backing his longtime protégé Rubio; financial investor Foster Friess was in the audience cheering Santorum on when he announced his presidential bid two weeks ago; and Bob Mercer, the founder of a New York hedge fund, has been identified as supporting Cruz. The billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch have publicly vowed to spend nearly $900 million influencing races in 2016.
The Democrats have billionaire supporters too — most prominent among them is former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. Billionaires George Soros, Alice Walton and Marc Benioff made small donations in 2014 to an outside spending group, Ready for Hillary PAC, backing Hillary Clinton, now the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary contest.
Studies of the 2012 and 2014 elections by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks political spending, show most groups backed by billionaires had less success swaying election outcomes than groups controlled by trade organizations or professional political strategists. The Sunlight study does not offer any explanation for this difference.
Steyer, who backed Democrats through his Nextgen Climate Action Committee, spent $79 million in the 2014 congressional elections, $17.9 million of which was directed toward influencing specific races. Sunlight found Steyer had a 32 percent success rate on the $17.9 million spent.
For some, failure was total. Evidence from news reports shows that Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson spent more than $100 million in 2012 in donations to trade groups, political action committees and candidates, only to watch virtually all his chosen candidates — including presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney — lose.
Other groups have seen more success. The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity saw a 95 percent success rate in 2014.