Your money may not be able to buy you love, but can it reliably buy you political office?
We all know that money is one of the biggest factors in an election. As a result, candidates from both parties find themselves courting those who have money (corporate PACs, mostly) to finance their campaigns. But in recent elections there has been an increasing phenomenon which was only rarely seen before--the self-funded candidate. These are wealthy individuals who use large amounts of their own personal money to finance their run for office, sometimes paying for their entire campaign themselves.
So what's the track record of this electoral strategy?
Between 75-98% of all Congressional races in the last 15 years have been won by the candidate who raises the most money. (https://www.opensecrets.org/...). That would seem to make an open-and-shut case that money trumps, and those with the most money (whether their own or from corporate donors), win.
But it's not that simple.
First, there is a question of cause and effect. Yes, those who raise the most money, win, overwhelmingly. But do those candidates win because they spend the most money, or do they end up raising the most money because donors already see them as having the best chance of winning? It's a chicken-and-egg question that has never really been answered--and it deserves a diary all its own.
Here, we will discuss another aspect of the "money buys elections" debate: the self-funded candidates, who throw a monkey wrench into the works because they generally lose, and the more they spend, the more likely they are to lose.
Let's start with some data and figures. (First, though, a caveat: there is no consistent definition of a "self-funder"--Opensecrets.org and a few others define a self-funder as anyone who provides more than 50% of their own campaign funds, while other groups or studies define it as anyone who self-finances a significant part of their campaign funds, or who contribute more than a set amount of money. Another inconsistency comes from those who differentiate between minor crank and third-party candidates who finance their own quixotic campaigns, and those who include only self-funders from the two major parties. So there is considerable variation in many of these figures from study to study and from group to group.)
In 2008, an analysis found that there were 49 self-funded candidates for Congress from both parties. Only 24 of them won their party's primary, and of those, only 7 won their election. (http://www.opensecrets.org/...).
A 2010 study found that only 11% of self-financed candidates in state races from 2000-2009 won their race. Overall, 8% of all candidates for state legislatures were self-funded, and 15% of all candidates for Governor or Lt-Governor. During that time, self-funders spent a total of $925.1 million of their own money, accounting for about 12% of all money raised by all candidates. Only 8% of the self-funded candidates actually self-financed a majority of their spending, and only 11% of them won. Overall, about 16% of all self-funders became the top fundraisers in their race and outspent their opponent--but they only won 55% of the time. (By contrast, top fundraisers who were NOT self-funded, won 87% of their races.) The self-funders who did best were incumbents: self-funded incumbents won 73% of their races--but even there, the self-funders did worse than non-self-funding incumbents, who won 92% of their races. Among non-incumbents, self-funders won 9% of their races when running for open seats, but only 4% of their races when running against an incumbent. As for party affiliation, it seemed not to matter: self-funded Republicans won 12% of their races, and self-funded Democrats won 11%. (http://classic.followthemoney.org/...).
In 2010, one study found that there were 58 candidates for federal office who were self-funded. Only 11 of them won (and one of those was running against another self-funder). Of the 32 Federal candidates who self-funded at over $1 million, just four of them won, and of the 8 of these self-funders who spent at least $3.5 million of their own money, only one of them won their race. (http://www.opensecrets.org/...).
In another report, of the 159 self-funders in Federal races from 2002-2010, 23 of them won. Of those 23 who won, 9 received over half their contributions from other sources (these would, by some definitions, not be "self-funders"): of those 136 self-funders who lost, 109 had self-funded more than half of their contributions. (http://www.news-press.com/...).
And in another report, from 2010 to 2014, 54% of self-funders who financed over $500,000 of their campaigns, won their primary, but only 22% went on to win their elections. (http://www.nationaljournal.com/...)
I wanted to keep an eye on the biggest self-funders running in 2014 to see if they did any better collectively than their predecessors. And here were the results:
(Name, District, Amount Self-Funded, Result)
House Candidates
MacArthur, Thomas (R)(New Jersey District 03) $5,000,000 WON
Clawson, Curt (R)(Florida District 19) $4,017,543 WON
Mitchell, Paul (R)(Michigan District 04) $3,561,290 LOST
Trott, Dave (R)(Michigan District 11) $3,423,402 WON
Eldridge, Sean (D)(New York District 19) $2,840,000 LOST
Demos, George (R)(New York District 01) $2,500,000 LOST
Ose, Doug (R)(California District 07) $1,766,000 WON
Sanchez, Tom (D)(Texas District 33) $1,475,000 LOST
Streusand, Ben (R)(Texas District 36) $1,331,030 LOST
Greenberg, Mark (R)(Connecticut District 05) $1,277,930 LOST
Senate Candidates
Alameel, David (D)(Texas Senate) $5,624,561 LOST
Jacobs, Mark (R)(Iowa Senate) $3,978,037 LOST
Perdue, David (R)(Georgia Senate) $3,705,127 WON
Land, Terri Lynn (R)(Michigan Senate) $3,550,000 LOST
Dinsdale, Sid (R)(Nebraska Senate) $2,198,203 LOST
Orman, Greg (I)(Kansas Senate) $2,034,431 LOST
Flinn, George Shea (R)(Tennessee Senate) $1,805,250 LOST
Oberweis, James D (R)(Illinois Senate) $1,556,400 LOST
Ball, Gordon (D)(Tennessee Senate) $1,424,588 LOST
Weh, Allen (R)(New Mexico Senate) $1,285,809 LOST
(https://www.opensecrets.org/...).
Governor Candidates
Rick Scott (R) (Florida)--WON
Neel Kashkari (R) (California)--LOST
Doug Ducey (R) Arizona)--WON
Bruce Rauner--(R) (Illinois)--WON
AJ Balukoff (D) (Idaho)--LOST
Tom Wolf (D) (Pennsylvania)--WON
Walt Havenstein (R) New Hampshire--LOST
Of the top 20 self-funded candidates for Congress (in both primaries and the general), 5 of them won their elections. Of the 7 largest self-funded candidates for Governor in the general elections, 4 of them won. There were also a number of self-funders for Governor who lost in their primaries, and a number of third-party self-funders who lost in their general elections. So even in a Republican-wave year, less than half of the biggest self-funded Republicans won their race. The self-funders did not do any better as a group than they normally do.
So what can we conclude from all this? The lack of consistent data, caused by a lack of consistent definitions of what is a "self-funder", make fine comparisons impossible, but a few broad trends stand out clearly even within the wide variation in figures. So a few tentative general conclusions seem warranted:
1. Self-funding seems to be increasing. Just five or six elections ago, candidates who significantly financed their own campaigns were a rarity. Now, there are a couple dozen in each election year at the Federal level, and hundreds at the state level. For some reason, Governor races seem to draw the highest proportion of self-funding candidates.
2. Self-funding is bipartisan. From 2002 to 2009, of the top ten largest self-funders, five were Republicans, four were Democrats, and one was Independent. In the 2012 elections, there were more Democratic self-funders running for Congress than Republican; in 2014 there were more Republicans self-funding than Democrats. Neither party seems to have a consistently larger disproportionate share of self-funding candidates, and self-funding candidates from both parties tend to win or lose at about the same rates (in one report, since 1990, of all Federal and state candidates, 27% of self-funded Democrats have won their races, and 22% of Republicans have won theirs).
3. The self-funders who are the most likely to win are either those who face no opposition in their election (duhhh) or those who are already incumbent office-holders. Not really surprising--the advantages of incumbency are enormous, and challengers to incumbents rarely win, whether they have lots of money to campaign with or not. Indeed, incumbency may be a good incentive to be self-funding: there is no point wasting party or donator money in races where the outcome is already mostly predetermined. (But even so, self-funded incumbents lose far more often than non-self-funded incumbents do.) It may also be that the flip side is true: if the race is already a lost cause, it may attract self-funders to oppose the incumbent since no donor-funded candidate wants to run anyway when it's pretty sure they will lose.
4. Overall, self-funding has been a losing strategy. The vast majority of self-funders lose. Even if they manage to spend more in total than their opponent does, they still lose at a significantly higher rate (defying the American convention that the candidate who spends the most money, almost always wins the election). There seem to be several possible explanations for that, though not all of them seem to apply in every case. One possibility is public perception--it may be that self-funders, of whichever party, are viewed by the voting public as, bluntly, rich fucks who are trying to skirt democracy and buy the election, and are therefore doomed by voter hostility. Another possibility is that fundraising activities are themselves a form of political campaigning, that raising money forces candidates to talk to people about issues and present plans for action in order to win support--and the ability to do this well also indicates an ability to do successful politicking once in office. A corollary to this is the idea that even if a voter only donates three or ten or twenty bucks to a candidate, that voter is now "invested" personally in that candidate's success, and is far more likely to actively work in that candidate's favor (by phone-banking, GOTV, etc) than a voter who has not donated anything. Self-funders lose out on both of these things--they never make the large-donor connections that come with successful fundraising, and they never have the army of small-donor supporters who are motivated to do the groundwork necessary for the campaign's success. (Despite all the happy talk many campaigns give about being financed by small donors, the brutal reality is that virtually no campaign ever has more than 15-20% of its money come from small donors--the utility of small donors is in their organizational work, not in actual money raised.) A self-funding campaign can buy TV advertising airtime, but it cannot buy voter or volunteer enthusiasm--that comes only from active engagement with voters, including fundraising.
5. The more of one's own money a self-funder spends, and the higher the percentage of the campaign that is self-funded, the more likely the candidate is to lose. This is very interesting, and it may reinforce some of the other factors spelled out above: the higher proportion of the campaign's funding that is self-funded, the more likely that the candidate will be viewed as trying to "buy the election", and the least likely the candidate is to either make all the useful connections and relationships that come from fundraising or to have a corps of volunteer supporters who are actively enthusiastic about the campaign. And therefore the more likely they are to lose.
6. Campaign finance laws combined with the rising tide of outside money may enter into the self-funding phenomenon and may explain some of its increase. Having a self-funding candidate may be viewed as a way to counter outside spending by other groups, or as a way to free up party resources for other races. Since candidates who take public financing for their campaigns have limits and disclosures that privately-financed candidates do not, there may also be an advantage within the campaign in some circumstances to forego the public financing and to self-fund, and to depend on money and ads from outside groups to sway voters in the candidate's favor. The actual election results, however, show that this strategy is rarely successful.
So, are self-funded candidates the wave of the future--a way for wealthy 1% corporado Republicans to buy their way into public office? It does not appear so. Mostly, it appears that writing checks to pay for your own campaign is just a great way to lose.
