He’s right. Too often elections can be decided by the highest bidder. This has made running a political campaign more expensive than ever.
“When adjusting for inflation, nine of the 10 most expensive non-special election House races ever occurred in the 2018 election cycle,” an OpenSecrets analysis found in January. “Eight of the top 10 most expensive Senate races occurred after Citizens United with inflation factored in.” In 2016, political ad spending totaled $6.25 billion, up $2 billion from 2012. Ad spending in 2020 is projected to reach nearly $10 billion.
Into this financial arms race candidate Bloomberg thundered, pouring more than half a billion dollars into advertising and millions more to hire thousands of campaign staffers across over 125 field offices. He has also spent in more unorthodox ways, the New York Times reports, “hiring 500 people — at $2,500 a month — to spend 20 to 30 hours a week recruiting their friends and family to write supportive posts” online.
As Jeet Heer writes in the Nation, “Bloomberg is creating a model for running for president, one in which a rich man can simply buy a political party with the same ease he acquires a mansion or a yacht.” This oligarchical strategy threatens to turn a contest of ideals into an auction and further undermine the legitimacy of our democratic process.
Bloomberg’s investment, likely more than that of any other candidate in history, has propelled him, without winning a single delegate in any of the first four states, to third in national polling, behind only former vice president Joe Biden and front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Bloomberg’s strategy should be viewed not as a success but as a symptom of our broken campaign finance system. The barrier to running for office is high and moving higher. This trend has consequences for the health of our representative democracy.
In Georgia’s 7th Congressional District, for instance, activist Nabilah Islam had to cancel her health insurance and put $30,000 of student loans into forbearance to afford to mount a campaign. If that’s what it takes to run for office, it’s not surprising that some 40 percent of senators and representatives are millionaires.
A Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows that during the 2018 midterm elections, white candidates raised more money than candidates of color and black women raised less than any other group measured. Little surprise, then, that the 116th Congress is 76 percent male and 78 percent white.
The barrier to entry for candidates unwilling or unable to court big-money donors is high but not insurmountable. Small-donor networks can have formidable power and can free candidates from the preferences of entrenched interests.
Nearly 1.4 million Americans helped Sanders raise money last year, and his fundraising through January topped $134 million, with contributions averaging about $18. Sanders raked in $46.5 million in February, his campaign announced this weekend, from more than 2.2 million donations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has adopted a similar small-donor strategy, raising some $93 million through January with help from 892,000 individual donors — though she recently stopped openly rejecting support from super PACs and is benefiting from a $9 million Super Tuesday ad buy from Persist PAC.
These small-donor bases are important resources not only for the candidates who assembled them but also for future candidates who could benefit from and build on them. Sanders has repeatedly thrown the weight of his donor base behind insurgent progressives. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently formed Courage to Change PAC “to make early investments in progressive challengers that can even the playing field,” with the requirement that endorsed candidates must, like the PAC, refuse all corporate donations.
In the short term, such efforts are necessary and important. Access to small-donor networks should be shared, and PACs should be used only to help boost candidates over the financial barrier that people like Bloomberg have helped raise. In the long term, these efforts will not be sufficient. The barrier needs to not just be lowered but leveled.
Last March, the House of Representatives passed the For the People Act of 2019. If enacted, it would represent a major step forward for voting rights, government ethics and comprehensive campaign finance reform. The legislation requires super PACs to disclose their donors, empowers the Federal Election Commission to proactively protect election finance laws and takes the first step toward repealing Citizens United.
For nearly a year, H.R. 1 has been languishing on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) desk.
Billionaires don’t often tell us they’ve bought our elections. But when they do, or almost do, we should listen — and act.
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