The drumbeat of outrage began as soon as former Wall Street executive Jon Corzine declared victory in the New Jersey Democratic Senate primary earlier this month.
"It's no exaggeration to say that Corzine bought" the nomination by using $35 million of his own money for the campaign, a Newsday editorial said.
"It is no longer a democracy but a plutocracy," declared Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog group.
"Is there any end to the madness of money and politics?" asked the Capital Times of Madison, Wis.
Whatever's wrong with the combustion of money and politics these days, self-financed spenders aren't at the top of the list. Lavish personal spending certainly elicits "the-sky-is-falling" cries from campaign finance reform advocates and newspaper editorial writers. But all this noise obscures a simple fact: Self-financers usually don't win. When they do, it isn't their money alone that puts them in office.
The disconnect between rhetoric and reality has important consequences for both policy and politics. The misperception that the rich can buy seats in Congress distorts campaign finance debate and scares away worthy competitors. And the media's tendency to focus on sheer spending levels takes space away from more substantive issues. Corzine is probably glad reporters and pundits alike focused on his wealth--which, according to the polls, voters didn't count against him--instead of his liberal positions or his refusal to debate Jim Florio, his Democratic rival.
So what is the reality? I've studied campaign finance data and the results of hundreds of elections, and it's clear that the self-financed dollar does not pack the punch of a dollar raised from contributors. In the last five election cycles (1990 to 1998), 38 non-incumbent Senate candidates self-financed $1 million or more. Only six (16 percent) captured seats. But of the 155 non-incumbents who raised $1 million or more in contributions, 49 were winners (32 percent). Of the top 10 self-financers since 1990--all of whom generously gave (or lent) their campaigns more than $4 million--only two, Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.), made it to the Senate.
Because Corzine spent so much, won so big and did it so recently, it's easy to forget that the biggest self-financers often fall flat on their wallets. Republican Michael Huffington plowed $28.3 million of his own money into the 1994 California Senate race--and lost to the incumbent, Democrat Dianne Feinstein. In the 1996 Virginia campaign, Democrat Mark Warner self-financed $10 million in a failed bid to oust Republican Sen. John Warner.
Even candidates who didn't have to face incumbents couldn't convert their wealth into wins: Republican Darrell Issa came away from the 1998 California Senate primary with $9.4 million less in the bank and a narrow loss to state Treasurer Matt Fong. Democrat Charles Owen gave his campaign $6.6 million, but lost the 1998 Kentucky Senate primary to a candidate with a better known public record, Rep. Scotty Baesler.
A million dollars can go a lot farther in House elections, but self-financers tend to lose there, too. In the last five House election cycles, only 21 percent of non-incumbents who self-financed more than $1 million won seats. That seems like a respectable percentage, but it pales by comparison to the 67 percent success rate posted by non-incumbents who raised more than $1 million. This year, million-dollar self-financers have already flamed out in Illinois, Texas and California.
I'm not suggesting that money doesn't matter, but self-financed money matters a lot less than the talking heads suggest. Many members of Congress are millionaires, but most of them won without using personal checks to pay for the expensive TV ads that have become mainstays of the modern campaign. The wealthy men--and a handful of women--who tried to self-finance their way to Washington usually self-destructed en route. So where did they go wrong? Let me suggest two answers.
First, most self-financers have remarkably skimpy public credentials. Self-financing neutralizes two advantages experienced politicians enjoy when they run for higher office--name recognition and a base of past contributors. Rich candidates can buy the former and don't need the latter. But wealth cannot buy a new resume, and election results suggest that voters distinguish between a candidate with a proven public record and one with business earnings or a large inheritance.
Huffington's dad made a bundle in the oil business, and Charles Owen made his money in cable TV. Are these really qualifications for serving in the Senate? Voters in California and Kentucky didn't seem to think so. In contrast, many self-financers who have succeeded politically have been able to tout experience in public life, if not in public office: Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles had a history of civic involvement, and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) was known as the man who saved the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks for his hometown.
Self-financers' second biggest problem is that they fail to recognize the importance of strong ground support for the air war. They simply do not spend enough time engaging the electorate face to face. And liberated from the demands of dialing for dollars, they forgo a basic form of voter contact. Indeed, when I worked as a fundraiser for state and local campaigns, I learned firsthand that fundraising adds political--not just financial--value to a campaign. A candidate who writes his campaign a check for $100,000 adds $100,000 to his campaign coffers, and nothing to his vote tally. But a candidate who has to solicit contributions gains both the money and, typically, the support of hundreds of voters.
Campaigns are hard to win without a network of political supporters from other organizations. Corzine is one of the few self-financers who seems to understand this; he used some of his millions to create such a network. Skeptics liken this to laying Astroturf instead of cultivating grass roots, but the difference may be insignificant. Take the case of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. In 1994, the neophyte Spitzer self-financed about $4 million and placed last among the four candidates in the Democratic primary. Four years later, in a remarkable turnaround, he won the nomination and the general election after he contributed to Democratic officials and organizations across the state. I was involved in an opposing primary campaign, and our team was impressed that Spitzer had learned enough from his first foray to make shrewd adjustments in his second.
The hysteria about self-financing has created a self-fulfilling prophecy. The perception that a millionaire can buy victory exerts a chilling effect on electoral competition, discouraging would-be candidates from entering the fray. Former airline executive Al Checchi's early promise to spend "whatever it takes" to win the California Democratic gubernatorial nomination helped keep several prominent politicians out of the race. Checchi invested nearly $40 million in his campaign, but after his negative ads drove down Rep. Jane Harman's poll ratings and his own, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis cruised to victory. In New Jersey this year, Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. opted out of the Senate contest after Corzine announced his candidacy. Pallone should have hung in there--he might have been the Gray Davis of 2000.
The chilling effect is not isolated to a few cases. I have found an unmistakable pattern in four cycles of House primaries--the richer the candidate, the fewer the opponents. All else being equal, non-incumbents who self-financed $1 million averaged about two fewer opponents with experience in a lower office than those who kept their personal funds in the bank. In some cases, weakened competition gave self-financers a bigger advantage than their personal spending actually did.
An extreme case like Jon Corzine naturally attracts attention. But as a single, atypical example, it hardly offers definitive evidence that rich guys are imperiling democracy by buying up the seats in government. We should not let the spectacle in New Jersey distract us from the true dynamics of money, especially personal money, in campaigns. Potential candidates, take note: Don't be discouraged by the prospect of taking on a multimillionaire with an open checkbook. The lesson of New Coke applies to candidates as well as colas--a massive advertising budget can't sell an unappealing product.
Jennifer Steen is a member of the Scholars Network of the Citizens' Research Foundation, a campaign finance research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
