Tuesday’s elections in New Jersey, New York City and Chapel Hill, N.C featured candidates running with taxpayer subsidies against self-financed candidates or those who accepted voluntary contributions. Defining success as accepting a taxpayer handout and not getting blown out — or winning narrowly, pro-regulation groups are touting these taxpayer financed campaigns as an unvarnished success.
The actual results of Tuesday’s elections are much more complicated, and no election offered evidence that voters rewarded a candidate for accepting taxpayer subsidies. That didn’t stop Americans for Campaign Reform (ACR) from issuing a confident press release touting the New York and New Jersey elections as a “Win for Public Funding, a Loss for Big Money.”
Groups like ACR and other pro-regulation organizations like Common Cause and Public Campaign Action Fund seize on any minor development, no matter how tortured the causal link, to push for taxpayer financed campaigns at the congressional level.
Lets examine the evidence…
New Jersey
In the Garden State, former U.S. attorney Chris Christie, a Republican, defeated incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine by a narrow margin: 49-45 percent with 6 percent for independent Chris Daggett.
According to the Americans for Campaign Reform release:
… Corzine, spending $25.9 million of his own funds for a career total of more than $130 million in self-funding, lost to [Christie], in spite of an enormous spending advantage. More than half of Mr. Christie’s $10.9 million spending came in the form of public funding under New Jersey’s voluntary public funding program.
“Take away the $5.5 million in public funding Christie received, and there is simply no contest. Without that funding, the challenger would not have been able to communicate his message to the voters,” said Dan Weeks, president of Americans for Campaign Reform.
According to N.J. records, Christie received $7.3 million in public funds in the general election, but what’s $1.8 million among friends? Even if that press release represented an accurate analysis of the race, there’s absolutely no evidence that voters cared about Corzine’s lack of participation in taxpayer financing or held Christie in higher regard because he accepted taxpayer funds. The statement that Christie could not have communicated his message with voters without taxpayer financing is also highly dubious (there’s no reason to believe Christie could not have raised more private contributions in the absence of taxpayer funding) and flat-out false at the same time. ACR forgot, or willfully omitted, the fact that campaign spending does not exist in a vacuum between the candidates.
As the Associated Press reported, “Corzine outspent Christie by about $12 million, though national Republican groups not bound by New Jersey’s campaign finance limits bought advertising time for Christie.” The Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American also rejected Weeks’ flimsy contentions.
Exit polls in New Jersey made no mention of the impact of the issue of campaign finance on the race, but in the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, it seems fair to conclude that voters in New Jersey cared more about property taxes and other local issues than taxpayer financed campaigns.
Also, Daggett took taxpayer funds, $1,019,512.04, to be exact, and performed well below expectations based on recent polling. ACR conveniently left that out of their release. Wonder why…
New York City
Incumbent New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, an independent-minded billionaire running on the Republican ticket, spent about $100 million in his 51-46 victory over Democratic candidate William Thompson, Jr.
In ACR’s release, they undercut their own case for taxpayer financing by noting that the amount received by Thompson, $6 million, was “insufficient to run a winning campaign in media-intensive New York City.” Weeks, who could probably spin a Yankees World Series win as a victory for the Mets, nonetheless called this a victory for taxpayer financing, as voters “had a modicum of choice in the race for mayor.”
As in New Jersey, taxpayer funding advocates attributed Bloomberg’s close margin to his profligate campaign spending, but it’s impossible to isolate that issue. Voters around the country were in an anti-incumbent mood, and many New Yorkers resented Bloomberg’s role in changing the city’s term limits law, which residents voted for in 1993 and 1996, to allow him to run for a third term (45 percent of voters said it made them less likely to vote for Bloomberg).
In exit polls, 42 percent of voters said Bloomberg’s campaign spending was an “important” factor in their mayoral choice (A greater amount, 48 percent, thought it was not a factor or a minor factor), but there’s no indication of how “important” the issue was compared to policy or personality issues, which were polled separately. Only 10 percent thought Bloomberg’s spending was the most important factor in the race. Half of those people voted for Bloomberg. Bloomberg still had a 70 percent approval rating in the same exit polls. What’s more, some voters could simply be expressing exasperation with how Bloomberg spent his money, not that he didn’t take taxpayer handouts. One voter told the Wall Street Journal‘s John Fund that “Bloomberg TV ads were so omnipresent he felt like he was constantly hearing from Big Brother.”
Not surprisingly, groups like ACR don’t mention the only legitimate response to self-funding candidates: raising or eliminating federal, state and local contribution limits. If Jon Corzine and Mike Bloomberg can spend millions of dollars of their own money on their campaigns, their opponents should be able to pool money from other committed Americans without restriction so they can run competitive campaigns without coercing taxpayers into subsidizing negative ads and bumper stickers.
The Washington Times has a report on 2009 self-funders here, looking forward to the Connecticut Senate Republican primary. A Wall Street Journal item on the same topic is here. FOX News adds their analysis on the impact of money in the 2009 elections.
Chapel Hill, N.C.
Two-term councilor Mark Kleinschmidt, who accepted taxpayer financing, won with a 49 percent plurality in the city’s mayoral race against councilor Matt Czajkowski, who Kleinschmidt praised: “Matt and I agree about a lot more than we disagree about.” Czajkowski, who will continue to serve on the council for two more years, won 47 percent of the vote. The margin between the candidates was only 99 votes.
Only Kleinschmidt and successful city council candidate Penny Rich (seriously, that’s her name), who criticized Czajkowski for “being influenced” by developers, took taxpayer funding. Czajkowski opposed the town’s recently-adopted taxpayer funding program.
“It feels like the voter-owned election program really worked,” Rich told The News & Observer. “We engaged the citizens, and they gave it back.”
What a surprise… A politician who takes free taxpayer money thinks the program works (even though her three new colleagues declined to take a handout with no repercussions). Obviously, there’s no exit poll available for such a local race, but it seems quite ridiculous that Rich can glean specific insights on what the people of Chapel Hill “care about” regarding campaign finance based on a 2 percent margin in the vote for mayor and council results all within a 1.4 percent margin (the top four candidates garnered 15 percent, 14.8 percent, 14.4 percent and 13.6 percent).
By the number of candidates who took taxpayer money, the oft-cited metric of success in other states like Connecticut, this program is virtually a total failure as just one in eight city council candidates took the handout and only one of four mayoral candidates took the money.
Additionally, the Chapel Hill program is almost certainly unconstitutional as it uses a government leveling program to penalize the speech of candidates who opt out by increasing the subsidy to participating candidates with so-called rescue funds. In this case, Kleinschmidt received an additional $5,000 in response to Czajkowsk’s spending (about $28,000 total). A federal judge has preliminarily ruled that a similar taxpayer financing system in Arizona that uses rescue funds is unconstitutional based on the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Davis v. FEC (which invalidated the “Millionaire’s Amendment”).
Chase Foster of the N.C. Policy Watch Blog has a post crowing about the program’s alleged success based on the idea that the 99-vote mayoral victory margin (out of 8,000+ votes) somehow represents a stunning mandate for taxpayer financed campaigns. Brilliant…
More information on Chapel Hill’s taxpayer funding program is here [city of Chapel Hill] and here [North Carolina State Board of Elections].
UPDATE: Stuart Rothenberg weighs in:
Finally, after the results were in, I received e-mails — one from a group favoring public financing of campaigns and another from a candidate running against wealthy opponents — claiming that Corzine’s defeat and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (I) narrow victory constituted a statement about voters’ views of wealthy self-funders.
“Millionaire self-funders beware” is how the Senate campaign of former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) put it. “Voters … are tired of self-financed, Wall Street-connected candidates,” Public Campaign wrote in a press release.
The idea that Corzine lost because he spent so much money or self-funded is laughable. His defeat was a referendum on the past four years and particularly the state’s economy and tax issues. As for Bloomberg, his spending did cause a backlash, but so did his perceived arrogance, especially his efforts to change the law that would have prevented him from seeking a third term.
