I think most people agree that Presidential elections depend, to a remarkable degree, on which candidate can raise the most money. Similarly, I also think it uncontroversial to say that the amount of influence corporate donors and lobbyists have over presidential and senatorial elections (and the subsequent behaviour of presidents and senators) is unsettling. To combat this, I’ve come up with a three point campaign finance reform plan.
100% of all presidential, senatorial, and congressional elections will be publicly funded. If you’re running for president, you get 100 million dollars. If you’re running for congress or the senate, you get $10 million. It’s up to you to make that money stretch. Candidates will be forbidden from accepting so much as one red cent of private money. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Wall Street bank or a little old lady with a spare five bucks. You can’t donate directly to the campaign war chest.
All private PAC’s must disclose 100% of their private donors on their website. Donors do not have the right to give anonymously. These PAC’s cannot donate directly to the candidates they support.
Corporations and unions are completely forbidden from making donations of any size during any election cycle, for any reason whatsoever, effectively overturning the Citizens United decision.
So someone running for statewide office in California gets the same amount of money as someone running for Congress in Topeka, KS? That doesn’t seem fair. The guy in Topeka can run HUGE amounts of TV ads, the candidate in California probably couldn’t run any – the cost of paying people to work the campaign all over a very large state, and the cost of direct mail and polling would leave no money for TV in expensive markets, especially if outside groups aren’t allowed to run ads as surrogates. Why is that fair?
Also, how would you decide who gets the $10 million? If there are 50 candidates for the Florida Senate seat, do they all get $10 million? Or just the Democrat and Republican?
Yes. Provided you are a private citizen and you do not accept any donations from any business or union. If you are donating toward an attack ad campaign run by a PAC, the PAC must disclose your identity and the size of your donation on their website.
Good question. I hadn’t thought about that, and don’t really have an answer atm. Public funding such as I suggest would open the floodgates for an enormous amount of senatorial candidates. Obviously there needs to be some sort of limitation on who can run, otherwise there would be a massive and impractical deluge of candidates for each race, each wanting $10 million dollars of public money. How would you limit the number of candidates?
Good point. How about the amount of tax money you get is made proportional to the size of the electorate in your state?
Also, I believe that one reason that elections are so expensive is because there is a kind of economic feedback loop between candidates and press outlets. The more money candidates are able to raise, the more TV and radio stations can afford to charge, which in turn increases the amount of money the candidates need to raise, and so on…If there is a federally mandated limit on campaign spending in place, wouldn’t that reduce the price of coverage somewhat?
Sorry, but you aren’t right on this one. You’re making it out like campaigns have so much money that they are eager to pay higher advertising rates on TV, leading to advertising “bubbles.” That isn’t the case. In fact, campaigns try to economize the cost of TV buys by putting in early orders for essentially “blocks” of advertising time. This allows campaigns to get, in essence, a bulk discount.
I can assure you that media professionals who work for campaigns know the cost of advertising like a used car salesman knows how much he can get for that 2006 Civic you’re trying to sell him.
If 50 guys run for senate, and one guy buys two 30sec, your plan says the station has to give away 2.5 hours worth of ad space (assuming 20min of ads per hour). Do they at least get to decide when they air those commercials or would you like to dictate that too?
Pretty much anytime you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you are wrong.
Here, you’d have to amend the Constitution. You’d also be passing out lots of 100 Million Dollar Presidential Election rations. I know I’d be running…as would pretty much everyone else that is tired of working for a living.
You know, we used to have a system in place where media were required to donate air time to candidates’ ads in return for their FCC broadcast licenses … why don’t we just revive that, enlarging the amount of money that candidates may use to keep pace with modern economic conditions? Why reinvent the wheel?
You can’t really control for disparity in campaign financing ability between interest groups without changing either disparity in the economy or the fundamental system of election.
Ergo I propose that we level all incomes or that we abandon the popular vote in favor of choosing candidates in a double-blind qualification.
But for a less radical take, [del]the OP’s is pretty good.[/del] sh1bu1 and Evil Captor had better ideas.
It would be difficult to get traction for that idea, since TV and radio receive the 100s of millions of dollars from Repub and Dem candidates. The networks would scream about the lack of free speech that candidates should have. You would prevent them from having all the ads they could afford.to run.
By “publicly funded” I assume you mean by tax renvenue. Why in the world should I, as a taxpayer, fund the political campaign of a candidate that I don’t agree with?
I’m aware that there currently exists a public financing plan, but including my tax money in it is optional. With your system, it would most likely be mandatory because of the amount of money needed. That is just flat our wrong, imho.
Where’s the vetting process?