DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 6

3 October 2024

BIG ELECTION / BIG MONEY

A few weeks back I got the following email from a group called Bold Democrats. It was asking me for money. It was less than subtle: 

We begged you. We pleaded with you. We offered to 200%-MATCH your donation. We’ve emailed you for MONTHS about how CRUCIAL it is to donate to the Save the Senate Fund! BUT NO ONE IS DONATING! We’re not above begging: Please, can you spare just $5 (200%-MATCHED) to BOLD Democrats’ Senate Fund before our deadline in 12 hours!’

This was about the fifth email from Bold Democrats that I received in a week – and they all contained the same emphatic subtextual message: why the hell aren’t you giving us money to keep the Senate Democratic (as the change of one seat could give the Republicans control and could block so much legislation that Harris will try to get through (should she win), or ratify the extreme agenda that Trump is promising to inflict on us should he gets his revenge on all of us by winning The White House again?  Clearly, for a progressive like myself, the idea of a repeat performance of a Trump presidency is beyond vertiginous – but I also find these sorts of guilt-inducing emails cloying and bordering on bad taste. And the fact that, day after day, I was also receiving over three different emails from different Democratic fundraising groups… this began to feel like siege mentality fundraising, along the lines of: we’re going to batter you with all the bad things that are going to happen to you and the country until you agree to cough up some dollars!

I don’t like being coerced into anything – but I have been through too many American presidential elections to be surprised at such tactics. After all the Republicans are simultaneously fueling fears of astronomical taxes and emigrants running mad through the white bread streets of Christian America, while insisting that donating to Trump’s campaign is the only way to (yes, that now-infamous slogan) Make America Great Again. And every few days in the American press there is a report on how much money each candidate has recently raised .At the end of August – around a month after she entered the race (after President Biden declined to run again) – Reuters reported that Harris had raised $540 million in campaign contributions in just a few short weeks.

Yes, you read that figure correctly: $540 million. And Forbes (a magazine which covers finance) reported that, in that same period, Trump raised $150 million less than Harris… which, when totted up, means that, between them, the two candidates garnered $930 million in donations in August alone. 

Welcome to the vertiginous world of US Presidential election financing. And just to make your eyes go wider on this Sunday morning, just consider this staggering fact: according to Issue One (a cross-partisan political reform group based in Washington DC ) the amount spent on the 2020 Presidential campaigns was a staggering $2.74 billion

 “Biden and his allies controlled about 61% of this sum ($1.68 billion), while Trump and his allies controlled about 39% ($1.06 billion)”.

To say that a US presidential campaign is big business is to engage in understatement. Unlike the United Kingdom – where a general election campaign lasts a crisp thirty days – the American election process is as long and torturous as Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Those running for their party’s nomination must first compete for delegates to the party conventions that will choose their presidential candidates. This is decided by a series of primary elections – which means that, before the actual Presidential campaign gets underway, there will be a series of state elections just to be named the nominee… and this takes on average six months (Harris was the exception to this rule, having been co-opted as the Democratic nominee once Biden dropped out).

All of this costs money. Big money. Once the two nominees are chosen then there is the exhausting nonstop three to four months of campaigning across the country that the candidates (and their Vice Presidential picks) must engage in. This too comes with a huge price tag, And that is why presidential campaigns hire serious fundraisers to pull in huge sums of contributions to help their candidate prevail.

American political campaigns have always been about buying votes. As Scripps News noted in a recent posting, the initial attempt to purchase support from the electorate dates back to George Washington himself. Many years before he became the first US President he was running as a candidate in 1755 for  what was then the colonies’  first legislative assembly.  He lost. So the next time the election came around Washington spent about $195 (not an inconsiderable sum in the mid eighteenth century) on punch and hard cider for potential voters. Thanks to him subsidizing many rounds of alcoholic drinks in his legislative district Washington won the election. Thereafter the newly elected state legislature “soon passed a law prohibiting candidates ‘or any persons on their behalf’ from giving voters ‘money, meat, drink, entertainment or provision or any present, gift, reward or entertainment, etc. in order to be elected.’” 

Since the creating of an independent American Republic in 1776 there have been manifold legislations limiting the financing of campaigns – especially to prevent wealthy special interest groups from using their considerable financial clout to sway elections.  And then came a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2010 which upended all the rules on US campaign funding. In Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, the court’s conservative majority ruled that (in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written opinion) limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates the First Amendment right to free speech. What this ruling meant was that (to quote Tim Lau, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice – a nonpartisan law and policy institute):

“As a result [of this ruling] corporations can now spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising if they are not formally “coordinating” with a candidate or political party… The ruling has ushered in massive increases in political spending from outside groups, dramatically expanding the already outsized political influence of wealthy donors, corporations, and special interest groups”.

And it has also generated the rise of the Super PACs (Political Action Committees) who – unlike such pre-2010 ‘committees’ - have carte blanche when it comes to how much money they can raise… and from whomever they please. As Tim Lau also notes:

“Dark money is election-related spending where the source is secret. Citizens United contributed to a major jump in this type of spending, which often comes from nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors… In its decision, the Supreme Court reasoned that unlimited spending by wealthy donors and corporations would not distort the political process, because the public would be able to see who was paying for ads and ‘give proper weight to different speakers and messages.’ But in reality, the voters often cannot know who is actually behind campaign spending”.

But here’s another the Machiavellian twist to the Super PAC story – these ‘committees’ don’t give money directly to the candidate. Instead, they spend it on his/her behalf, thereby further consolidating their immense impact on the election outcome. 

Of course there are Super PACs allied to both parties – but just to show you how they work as election influencers consider this: at the end of September The New York Times reported that the Trump-supporting Super PAC MAGA Inc “is adding $70 million to its television and digital reservations [politico-speak for ads] in the final six weeks of the campaign”.

Just as, only last week, The Washington Post noted that, though Harris is out-raising Trump in campaign donations – and out-spending him in advertising – it hasn’t given her the poll boost she needed. Indeed this election is still (as they say in horse racing) a dead heat… despite the robust size of Harris’s war chest.

And that is both telling… and truly worrying.

(ends)