Editor's Note: Other States Have Tackled the Issue of Political Fundraising

NPR Illinois | 91.9 UIS | By Dana Heupel

Published February 1, 2010 at 12:00 AM CST

“Here are two important things in politics: One is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.’’

— Mark Hannah, presidential campaign manager for William McKinley in 1896.

That axiom immerses political candidates in a never-ending whirlpool of fundraising and sometimes prevents potentially qualified challengers from seeking elective office. It also can breed ethical concerns. Witness the plight of Illinois’ last two former governors: George Ryan is in prison; Rod Blagojevich is under indictment — both charged in political fundraising scandals.

A handful of states have tried to tackle some of the problems associated with political fundraising by enacting public financing for campaigns. Although Illinois’ state budget problems make that idea unlikely here anytime soon, there is new evidence, at least in legislative campaigns, that public financing might produce some desirable unintended results.

Laws in Arizona, Connecticut and Maine allow statewide and legislative candidates to voluntarily qualify for public money for campaigns by living up to certain promises: They can only accept small contributions from individuals — none from corporations, unions, political action committees or party funds — and they can only spend what they receive from public funds and individual donors.

As to be expected, the laws in each state differ somewhat from one another, and severe restrictions govern how candidates can spend the public money. Brochures explaining the process can run as high as 100 pages. In Arizona, Connecticut and Maine, state campaigns are fully publicly funded. Hawaii, Minnesota and Wisconsin partially fund state campaigns, as does the federal government for presidential candidates.

Primarily, the intent of public financing is to provide more competition among candidates and to reduce the influence of special interests. Debate on whether it accomplishes those goals is ongoing. But recent research produces evidence that public financing may also produce some desirable unintended consequences, at least in states where campaigns are fully funded by taxpayers.

“I did a survey of candidates in the 2008 elections, and I surveyed all six states where campaigns were publicly funded,” says Michael Miller, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University and soon to be a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield. “What I found was that candidates [in Arizona, Connecticut and Maine] who accept full funding — in other words, they don’t spend any time raising money — those candidates are spending about 10 percentage points more of their weekly time directly engaging the voting public. I don’t see any effects for the programs for Minnesota, Wisconsin and Hawaii,” where candidates get small subsidies but also spend time raising money on their own.

“When you eliminate fundraising from the necessary list of campaign tasks, you really alter candidate activities,” he says.

Miller’s finding that publicly funded candidates spend more time communicating with potential voters raised another question in his mind: “If campaigns are engaging voters directly, are more people voting?”

“In both Maine and Connecticut,” he says, “I find that more people who show up and vote, say, for the president stick around and vote for the state House races where public funding is being used. ... Roll-off is diminished when public funding is present in those down-ticket state races.” Miller says he was unable to analyze voting patterns in Arizona.

“To me, those twin findings really bear on a normative problem in American democracy: representation and voting. So you’ve got kind of a more ‘small-D’ democratic election happening, it seems to me, when public funding is present,” Miller says.

He says public funding also may encourage candidates to run in districts that heavily favor the other party. A Republican candidate in Arizona, for instance, told Miller he harbored no illusion that he would win an election in his heavily Democratic district but said, “I thought it was really important for democracy for my neighbors actually to have a choice.”

“It’s just really refreshing,” Miller says, “after speaking to a lot of politicians, to hear that sort of language.”

“That said,” he allows, “it’s not all roses.” In fully funded states, when opponents of candidates who accept the subsidies go beyond the spending limits, publicly funded candidates “keep getting checks” from the state under a provision called “matching funds.” Opponents who don’t want the publicly funded candidates to get more money “wait until the Saturday or Sunday before the election, have a bunch of ads or mailings ready to go, and just dump them on the electorate. … I’m seeing a seriously altered spending behavior from those traditional candidates.”

Miller is unsure whether the concept of publicly financed state elections will spread soon to other states but says a number of cities, such as Seattle and Portland, are looking into the idea for local elections. He says when he asks voters and taxpayers about the idea during his research, “they say, ‘I don’t know if you get a better government, but I think you err on the side of getting a more representative, responsive government.’ And that, in the mind of a lot of citizens, is worth it.”

Kent Redfield, a professor emeritus at UIS, says a key issue is “having enough money to be competitive. If your grant in a legislative election is not enough for people to feel like they can be competitive, they tend to take a pass on the public money. … You could imagine that in Illinois, sure winners and sure losers would take [the public money], but you’d still have the legislative leaders and the big interest groups bankrolling the competitive elections.”

Redfield says he believes public financing is “a worthy goal” that highlights some basic democratic principles, but he allows that “contributing money can be participation, too,” citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that campaign contributions are constitutionally protected free speech. He says perhaps public funding is best used in judicial elections, where candidates are expected to be noncommittal on political issues.

At any rate, Redfield says, “I would not be optimistic about it happening anytime soon” in Illinois.

“It’s about winning and losing, and money is a resource to determine who wins and loses.”

Dana Heupel can be reached at heupel.dana@uis.edu.