More Money
Almost all the politicians, professors and journalists who took a look at all that money the Democratic candidates for governor reported raising last week concurred that the big bucks presaged a more competitive race next year, and therefore a longer and more expensive election season ahead
They were sort of right.
Yes, the early start and generous donations to Democrats do indicate that Gov. Jim Douglas (assuming he seeks a fifth term) faces a sterner test than he did in his last three cake-walk re-elections.
But you know what? Even if he didn’t, the 2010 governor’s race would be longer and more expensive.
Nothing can be done about this trend, meaning there is no point in decrying it, as some of the more foolish politicians and commentators did. Vermont in many ways is different from most of the rest of the country; money has not been as major a factor in elections here as in the bigger states.
But no state is an island, and Vermont can not remain immune from reality. Even here, money helps win elections, and every year it has become more important.
That’s why more of it gets spent every year, competitive race or no.
In 2006, Douglas spent $828,038 to whump Democrat Scudder Parker, who spent $633,847, according to the account of followthemoney.org, which compiles state and local campaign finance statistics. Last year, Douglas spent $1,232,216 to beat Democrat Gaye Symington (who spent $485,000) and independent Anthony Pollina (only $250,000).
Nor was it just the governor’s race that got more expensive. In 2006, all Vermont candidates for statewide office and the Legislature spent $3.5 million. Last year they spent $4.9 million.
In almost every case, the candidate who spent more got elected
So all a candidate has to do is spend more money to win the election?
No, as proven right here in 2006, the year big-money politics really came to Vermont when Republican Rich Tarrant spent $7,315,854 (much of it his own), only to lose the U.S. Senate race by a large margin to Bernie Sanders.
But Tarrant, who had never before run for office, turned out to be a very rich man but a very poor candidate. He hired a crew of outside “expert” political consultants who didn’t understand Vermont and launched a series of television commercials featuring harsh personal attacks on Sanders. They backfired. But that only proves that spending a lot of money stupidly can’t guarantee victory. Had Tarrant combined big spending with political smarts, he would have come closer.
He still probably wouldn’t have won. But that’s because Sanders raised and spent a lot of money, too. Because Tarrant was spending so much, Sanders went all out to raise money from all around the country. He ended up with $5,544,466, still quite a bit less than Tarrant, but he didn’t need as much; he was already well-known and popular. Besides, 2006 was a bad year for Republicans all over the country.
The lesson of that campaign was that while a candidate doesn’t necessarily need more money than his opponent to win, he needs enough. Enough to pay a top-flight staff, organize a get-out-the-vote operation, and (especially) to buy enough television advertising to get his message across.
‘Enough,’ in most cases, means ‘a lot.’
And sometimes, more money can mean victory. It may have meant victory for Douglas in his first race for governor, in 2002.
The late polls that year showed that then-Lt. Gov. Doug Racine (now a Democratic state senator and running for governor again) had a small lead over Douglas. When Douglas won, the conventional wisdom was that the pollsters had goofed.
They may have gotten a bum rap. Racine’s lead was small and the polls showed quite a few voters still undecided a few days before the election. It’s just as likely that, for three reasons, almost all of them broke to Douglas.
Reason one was that there was a nationwide (remember, no state is an island) swing to the GOP in the final days of the campaign. Reason two was that Racine wasn’t really saying anything except that he was a decent, enlightened fellow, and it was his turn. Decent and enlightened he seems to be, but it’s never a candidate’s turn. He has to convince the voters.
Douglas was saying something. He was saying, “Jim = Jobs.” Not true, as it turned out; even before the Recession, private-sector job growth under Douglas was anemic. But perhaps effective.
Reason three may have been money. Douglas had more if it, and he kept spending it on radio and TV ads and automated phone calls to voters right through election day. Racine couldn’t compete.
This gets a bit delicate. The obvious suggestion is that voters – yes, even Vermont voters — who were undecided, even some leaning toward candidate A, can be persuaded to vote for candidate B by a few 30-second or 60-second ads repeating a meaningless slogan. Are the American people sheep?
No. Sheep don’t make political decisions. But people are persuadable. “Men are convertible,” Emerson said. He meant they could become better, including more rational. But conversion can go either way, and there are a lot of people spending a lot of money to “convert” folks to buy products, hold opinions, and support or oppose candidates.
Advertising works. If it didn’t, businesses wouldn’t be spending at least $150 billion a year in the U.S. alone to convince consumers to buy their brand. Nor would politicians and interest groups have spent more than $2.6 billion trying to convince voters to support their causes and candidates last year, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.
All that money doesn’t persuade most voters. Partisans, ideologues, and well-informed independents know who they’re going to vote for and why. But many – maybe most – swing voters aren’t all that well informed. They tend to decide on the basis of personality more than policy. They are the one who are the targets of most of the political ads.
Which is where most of the campaign money goes. Candidates also hire workers, pay for targeted mailings (often to raise more money), finance their travels from town to town to make speeches. But in almost every competitive race, a substantial majority of the money goes for advertising – on radio and over the Internet, but mostly on television, because those commercials are both more expensive and more effective.
What this means is that in many close races the pivotal voters are the least informed, the least interested, the most receptive to hucksterism which can be meaningless if not downright dishonest. There are no truth-in-advertising laws for campaign ads. That would be unconstitutional. So the candidate with the biggest bankroll – and the fewest scruples – has a big advantage.
It is considered impolitic to discuss this phenomenon because it demeans the American people – or at least a sizeable subset thereof. Obviously, politicians never want to suggest that the American people are anything but wonderful, and for some reason most commentators have gone along. Perhaps for good reason. Suggesting that at least some of the American people are clods is probably not effective marketing.
But impolitic or not, it is true. Some American voters are clods. Some American elections are effectively determined by the flightiest, the most ignorant, even the most mean-spirited segment of the electorate. After all, is it not the couch-potato who is most vulnerable to the distorting appeal of the clever commercial?
Furthermore, big spending and flashy (and perhaps dishonest) advertising could play a part in next year’s Democratic primary, even though primary voters tend to be well-informed, and most of them are at least comparably partisan.
But there is not much ideological difference among the prospective Democratic candidates, all of whom are centrist liberals. The campaign, then, could get personal and divisive, just the kind beloved by political consultants who write and produce campaign ads.
And don’t suppose that centrist liberals are any less inclined to create misleading or dishonest campaign ads than anyone else. That’s why it was important that Secretary of State Deb Markowitz is raising the most money, but also that Racine seems to be raising enough to counter any attacks on him that her campaign decides to put on the air.
No assumption here that things are going to get nasty. After all, this is Vermont, where that kind of politics hasn’t worked.
But don’t think it can’t. All that money is going to be used, most of it on television, for good or for ill.
Tags: Campaign Finance
