Yesterday, Markos took the opportunity of another stupid WSJ editorial to raise the issue of campaign finance reform. He's repeatedly argued that we should stop tinkering, and do some kind of major reform.
So, here's an idea that I've had brewing in my head for a while.
Let's create a voluntary campaign finance reform that does the following:
In each congressional district, after the primary, any major-party candidate could voluntarily choose to forgo all private financing - and instead receive a single check of $1 million in public funds for their general election campaign. If their opponent raised more than that, they'd get matching funds on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Some notes on the jump...
- To be sure, this would leave in place the problem of private financing of primary campaigns -- but if you try and deal with that, you get into the problem of deciding which campaigns are legit. Baby steps.
- And yes, you'd have the problem of independent expenditures - but that's an existing problem with the current system. This idea doesn't make that worse (and might make it better - see below.) Again, baby steps.
- You might notice I'm not talking about U.S. Senate campaigns. We could get there soon enough; but you'd need some way of adjusting the amounts based on population - and media markets. (NC and NJ have roughly the same population, but NJ is much more expensive due to the NYC and Philly media markets.) Say it with me: Baby steps.
- We'd define major-party as any party that got over 20% of the vote in any of the three previous biennial elections in that congressional district, or in the statewide total in the last gubernatorial or presidential election. Minor parties could "earn" their way to funding.
- No, campaigns wouldn't be allowed to bank money after the election - nor would they be allowed to transfer it to other campaigns. There's already some good FEC rules about what spending is appropriate, so no worries about wacky sure-loser challengers running off to Maui with the money.
Enough of the disclaimers -- what would this mean?
- We remove the fundraising burden from congressional candidates in the general election. This frees up huge amounts of time to do what candidates should be doing -- talking to voters. (Not to mention what incumbents should be doing -- their day job.)
- Sure, a million bucks is less than most of the top-tier congressional campaigns spend these days. But what would you choose? A single million-dollar check on the day after the primary - or months and months of dialing for dollars 20 hours a week?
- Even if the top-tiers all opt out, that still puts a million dollars in the hands of lots and lots of second- and third- and fourth- tier campaigns. That's bound to make a bunch of districts competitive that wouldn't otherwise get there. (In 2004, the average incumbent raised $1.1 million while the average challenger raised $277,000. Source: opensecrets.org.)
- And more competitive seats will make the independent expenditure guys crazy - more competitive seats means it's tougher to game the system and target particular seats. As I said, independent expenditures are a fact of life - and this won't fix that; but it's a big move in the right direction.
- The dollar-for-dollar match is critical, since it wipes out the incentive for campaigns to "go private" and raise $3 or $4 million bucks. Why raise more money when your opponent will just get a check to match?
Yeah, you'd probably get a bunch of people out there screaming about "giving taxpayer dollars to politicians" - but that's why we make it voluntary. If a candidate wants to go the "traditional" route, fine.
If both major-party candidates in all 435 seats opted for public financing, we'd only be talking about $870 million every two years. That's less than the cost of four days in Iraq; or put another way, about a buck-fifty per American per year.
Not a bad price to pay to buy back the time of our incumbents and challengers -- get 'em talking to voters, rather than dialing for dollars.