DEMOCRACY???
    Nullification of:
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    Election Fixing EZ
    Bobby Kennedy's Book
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    Buying Candidates
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    The Revolving Door?
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Nullification of: DEMOCRACY???

Research and Investigative Reporting

The Color of Money: The 2004 Presidential Race

Paybacks: How the White House and Congress are Neglecting Our Health Care Because of Their Corporate Contributors

Color of Money

Paybacks: Policies, Patrons, and Personnel

Clean Money Comparisons

Revitalizing Democracy

Buy Now, Save Later

Hard Facts on Hard Money

The Money Trail: Automotive Industry Campaign Contributions

Mothers, Money, and Politics: How Campaign Money Affects Issues Mothers Care About

Paying - and Polluting - More at the Gas Pump

Whoever Wins, They Win: Double-Giving in the Presidential Campaign

Golden Leashes

The Color of Money: The 2004 Presidential Race

"The Color of Money: The 2004 Presidential Race" shows that during the primary season, only 10% of the large individual contributions (more than $200) flowing to the Bush and Kerry campaigns, as well as most of the other major Democratic candidates for the presidency, came from neighborhoods where people of color are the majority. See where the money flowed in your neighborhood by clicking here.

Paybacks: The How the White House and Congress are Neglecting Our Health Care Because of Their Corporate Contributors
Health care related interests have poured more than $163 million into federal political campaigns and party coffers since 1999 and have reaped huge policy paybacks that are harmful to ordinary people’s health, according to a new investigative report by Public Campaign, PAYBACKS: How the White House and Congress are Neglecting Our Health Care Because of Their Corporate Contributors. More...

Color of Money
Campaign money -- not votes -- is now the currency of our democracy, determining who runs for office, who wins, and who has the ear of elected officials. The candidate who raises the most campaign cash, more often than not, goes on to win the election.

Where does that money come from? The great amounts of cash come from neighborhoods where wealthy, non-Hispanic white populations dominate. Neighborhoods where African Americans and Latinos live are particularly underrepresented in terms of campaign dollars.

The Color of Money Project is devoted to illustrating this unfortunate fact--how a tiny elite group of privileged donors is more equal than others, and how there are direct consequences for people’s lives, from the wages they earn and the taxes they pay, to the quality of the schools their children attend and the air they breathe. We will demonstrate how Clean Money/Clean Elections campaign finance reform restores the American ideal of one person, one vote, and helps knock down barriers to participation in our
democracy. Learn more by going to www.ColorOfMoney.org

Paybacks: Policies, Patrons, and Personnel
Study shows strong correlation between big corporate contributions to the Bush-Cheney campaign and Republican National Committee (RNC) and Bush administration energy policy paybacks that benefit these special interests. More...

Clean Money Comparisons
The purpose of Clean Money Comparisons is to provide a resource for both citizens and legislators who want to go beyond the usual piecemeal campaign finance reform and instead draft comprehensive “Clean Money/Clean Elections” legislation based on the principle that public elections should be publicly financed. This revised edition includes descriptions of the key provisions of Public Campaign's Clean Money/Clean Elections “Model Bill” and Clean Money/Clean Elections legislation that has been introduced in nine states, one city, and the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. More...

Revitalizing Democracy
"Revitalizing Democracy," new 48-page report just out from the Money and Politics Implementation Project and Northeast Action [click here to get the full text in pdf format] takes a detailed look at the workings of Clean Elections in Maine, Arizona and Vermont, and the results are inspiring.

Click here to download the executive summary

Click here to download the entire study (located on NorthEast Action's website)

Buy Now, Save Later
Released in November 2001 and a joint project of Public Campaign and Citizens for Tax Justice, the study examines campaign contribution records of top tax avoiding companies — 41 corporations that enjoyed more than $55 billion in tax breaks between 1996 and 1998, including 23 companies that received tax rebates in 1998. This short list of profitable tax-avoiders — essentially, the companies that are the best at working the system to avoid paying taxes — includes many household names, companies such as General Electric, Microsoft, and Walt Disney. More...

Hard Facts On Hard Money
Released in March 2001, the report gives an overview of hard money: what it is, who gives it, and how political fundraising might be affected if hard money limits were increased. It updates the Public Campaign report Hard Facts: Hard Money in the 2000 Elections (October 2000) which was based largely on data from the first 18 months of the 2000 election cycle. In this report, 2000 election cycle data includes contributions from January 1, 1999 through December 31, 2000, the full election cycle, as reported to the Federal Elections Commission. More...

Hard Facts: Hard Money in the 2000 Elections
Washington, DC...For every one soft dollar raised by national political parties in the 2000 federal elections, nearly five hard dollars have been raised by parties and federal candidates: $256 million in party soft money versus $1.3 billion in hard, according to a new report by Public Campaign, Hard Facts: Hard Money in the 2000 Elections. More...

The Money Trail: Automotive Industry Campaign Contributions
More than 100 people are dead and more than 400 injured in accidents involving Firestone tires on Ford Explorers. News of these tragic deaths is horrifying enough - but what is worse is learning that perhaps they could have been prevented.

The federal agency charged with overseeing auto safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been ground down by a Congress fueled by campaign contributions from the automotive industry, which has given candidates and parties more than $55 million since 1990, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics. More...

Mothers, Money, and Politics: How Campaign Money Affects Issues Mothers Care About
The report explores the systemic problems that lead to poor treatment of women’s concerns in politics. Women make up 51 percent of the population, yet only 12 percent of the Members of Congress are women. More...

Paying - and Polluting - More at the Gas Pump
An analysis showing that senators who voted last fall to stall new fuel efficiency standards for light trucks - a category which includes popular SUVs and minivans - received more than twice the campaign contributions, on average, from the auto lobby as senators who did not. More...

Whoever Wins, They Win: Double-Giving in the Presidential Campaign
An analysis double-giving in the presidential campaigns showing that forty-seven companies and organizations that appear on the donor list of three or more presidential candidates gave at least $50,000 overall. Forty-five of these companies are playing the entire field, showing up on all four of the front-runners’ donor lists. More...

Golden Leashes
The Golden Leash is a symbol of the ties between special interest money and elected officials. It is awarded to Members of Congress who demonstrate egregious conduct in the quid pro quo practice of dollar democracy. More...

Jane Smith, Director of Administration and Finance
Jane has an extensive background in banking, administration and management. This experience is supplemented by broad skills in customer relationship and...

Vital Stats: Commentary

Cost of Winning
House
Senate
Where the Money Comes From
Candidate Self-Financing
PACs
Political Parties
Independent Expenditures

Vital Stats Home Page

The Cost of Winning

Tables and Graphs:

Graph: Cost of Winning House Elections

Graph: Cost of Winning Senate Elections

Table: The Cost of Winning an Election, 1980-2000

Table: House Campaign Expenditures, 1980-2000

Senate Spending Remains Constant: Senate spending has stayed remarkably constant. The average Senate winner spent $7.4 million in 2000. However, excluding the "outliers" Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York who spent $60 and $30 million, respectively, the spending was $4.9 million. The $4.9 million figure is relatively unchanged, in inflation-controlled dollars, from the levels that have prevailed since 1986.

House Spending Increases: The cost of winning a House election was 25% higher in 2000 than in 1998. (Controlling for inflation, the cost of winning rose by 17%.)

House four-year cycles: surge, level off, surge: The increase in spending by House winners in 2000 continues a pattern that has lasted for several cycles. Since 1992, spending by House candidates has surged during presidential election years, leveled off during the midterm, and then surged again.

In 1992, winners spent 31% more than in 1990 (24% more in constant dollars). In 1996 they spent 27% more than in 1994 (20% more in constant dollars). This is consistent with the surge between 1998 and 2000.

There are at least two possible explanations for the surge in spending during presidential years: it takes more effort for congressional candidates to be heard when the media's attention is absorbed by the presidential race, and communications may cost more when there is a greater demand by political advertisers for relatively scare air time.

A small amount of each cycle's gain was lost in the midterms. In constant dollars, spending went down slightly between 1988 and 1990, between 1992 and 1994 and between 1996 and 1998.

It remains to be seen whether this pattern will hold, producing a decline between 2000 and 2002. As of March 31, 2001, it looks as if it will. [2002 Cycle 15 month fundraising data]

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Expenditures of House Incumbents and Challengers by Election Outcome, 1980-2000

Table: Expenditures for Open House Seats

Spending by Incumbents, Challengers and Open-Seat Candidates

To understand campaign finance patterns, it is useful to separate competitive from non-competitive races. For our purposes, a competitive race is one in which the challenger gets 40 percent or more of the vote. Incumbents typically raise and spend more money than challengers, no matter who wins. Yet the picture is dramatically different between competitive and non-competitive races.

Competition: Senate challengers with less than 40% of the vote raised only about one-fifth as much as the incumbents who beat them. This ratio is almost identical to the one for comparable House races. The difference is that fewer Senate races end up with this easy a win for the incumbent.

68% of Senate incumbents who ran in 2000 won with 60% or more of the vote. This was a higher percentage than in any year since 2000, but lower than the 82 percent of House incumbents who won with 60% of more in 2000.
In the years since 1980, the percentage of Senate incumbents winning with 60% or more have ranged from a low of 38% in 1994 and 40% in 1980 to highs of 64% in 1998 and 78% in 2000.
In House elections, the comparable percentages have ranged from a low of 69% in 1994 to a high of 88% in 1988.

Competitive Races

Competitive Races - Where the Money Is: The most important number you need to know to predict whether a race will be competitive is not the size of the incumbent's bankroll but the challenger's. Incumbents also spend more as the level of competition goes up. Incumbents who win close races spend more than incumbents who win easily. Incumbents who lost in 2000 spent almost twice as much as did incumbents who won close races and four times as much as safe incumbents. Competitive House challengers in 2000 who won 40% of the vote or more spent almost six times as much as House challengers who lost by large margins.

Tables & Charts

Table: Expenditures of House Incumbents and Challengers by Election Outcome, 1980-2000

Table: Expenditures for Open House Seats

Winning Challengers - Big Spenders, But Still Outspent: Even Challengers who win typically do not spent as much as the incumbents they beat. In 2000, the winning challengers spent about three-quarters as much as the losing incumbents. In fact, since 1974, the average total spent by winning challengers has never exceeded spending by the typical losing incumbent.

In the half-dozen contests in 2000 in which the incumbent lost, the defeated incumbents spent an average of $2.5 million while the successful challengers spent $2.0 million. Both of those numbers were up by more than 85% over the comparable ones from 1998. It appears that more money was being focused more tightly in 2000 on only a handful of races.

Dramatic Increase in Competitive Race Spending: In raw dollars, the amount of money spent in competitive races has been increasing dramatically. In races won by the incumbent with less than 60% of the two-party vote, the incumbents spent 40% more in 2000 than in 1998; challengers spend one-third more in 2000 than in 1998 in the same set of races.

Competitive Open Seats: There was also a dramatic cost increase in the amount spent in competitive contents in races with no incumbent. In these open-seat races decided by a twenty-point margin or less, the winners spent 50% more than their counterparts of 1998 ($1.5 million compared to $1.1 million) while the losers nearly doubled the pace of two years before ($1.4 million compared to $760,000.) The typical winner in all House open-seat races spent one-third more than the typical House open-seat winner of 1998.

Uncompetitive Races
Almost one-fourth of all incumbents were either unopposed or did not face a major-party general election challenger who filed a disclosure report with the Federal Election Commission. (Disclosure is only required for candidates who raise or spend at least $5,000.) General election challengers who filed with the FEC, but failed to get 40% of the vote, raised less than one-fourth of the amount raised by incumbents who won by 60% or more.

Senate

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Senate Campaign Expenditures, 1990-2000

Table: Expenditures of Senate Incumbents and Challengers by Election Outcome, 1980-2000

Table: Expenditures for Open Senate Seats by Election Outcome, 1986-2000.

Competitive Races

The six winning challengers in 2000 spent more than the incumbents they defeated, on average. This was only the third time in the past eleven cycles that winning challengers spent more than defeated incumbents.

In close Senate races, the challengers in close races raised almost four times as much as the challengers who could not get 40% of the vote.

Open Seat Races: All five of the open seat Senate races in 2000 were close. Three of the candidates spent much more than any previous Senate had ever spent: the successful Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) as well as the defeated Rick Lazio (R-NY).

The typical open seat candidate (i.e. excluding Corzine and Clinton) spent about the same amount as comparable candidates have spent in past years. They also spent about the same amount as candidates in close races with incumbents running.

Non-Competitive Races

In almost all of the years, in the Senate as well as the House, the 60%+ incumbents spent at least four times as much as the losing challengers with less than 40%. In both chambers, in all years, incumbents in close races spent more than incumbents in easy races. As for the House, the major financial difference between the close races and easy ones is not the position of the incumbent, but that of the challengers.

Where the Money Comes From

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Campaign Funding Sources for House and Senate Candidates, 1984-2000

Candidate Self financing

Self financing has emerged as a key trend among challengers (but not incumbents, who rarely have difficulty raising money from donors).

House: About one in every five dollars raised by House challengers in 2000 came from themselves. It has become normal for 15-25% of House challenger funding to be self-financed - about the same amount as challengers get from all PACs combined.

Senate: Democratic Senate challengers and open seat candidates were heavily self-financed in 2000, in part because the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee worked hard to recruit wealthy candidates to run. Over the years, however, the importance of self-financing has fluctuated more erratically for the Senate than the House, being far more important in some years than others. One reason may be that Senate races more readily attract experienced politicians who can raise funds from contributors who had given to their previous races.

PACs

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Number of Registered Political Action Committees, 1974-2000

Table: PAC Contributions to Congressional Candidates, 1978-2000

Table: How PACs Distributed Their Contributions, 1978-2000

PACs: PAC donations to candidates rose 19% from 1998 to 2000. The increase was fairly even across all types of PACs, with the exception of non-connected PACs (see below):

PACs and incumbents: PACs continue to give more to incumbents than challengers, and to House Members more than to Senators. The numbers have stayed remarkably steady: typically more than 40% of the money House members raise comes from PACs, compared to 20-25% for Senators. Overall, more than three-fourths of all PAC contributions went to incumbents.

"Non-connected" PACs: "Non-connected" PACs - a category that includes many issue and ideological organizations - gave 31% more money in 2000 than two years before. These groups accounted for 15% of all PAC contributions in 2000, compared with about 10% in 1990 and 1992. Non connected PACs also give markedly more to challengers than labor union PACs, and corporate PACs - which rarely give more than 5% to challengers.

Corporate & Labor PACs and Partisan Giving Patterns: Corporate and Trade Association PACs favored Republicans by almost two to one. These groups have favored the GOP since 1995. Before then, when the Democrats were in the majority, they gave more to the Democrats. Labor gave about 90% of its contributions to Democrats. About one-third of all labor contributions went to Democratic challengers and open-seat candidates.

Political Parties

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Political Party Contributions and Coordinated Expenditures, 1976-2000.

Table: Soft Money Disbursements by National Party Committees from Non federal Accounts, 1992-2000

Political Parties: Decrease in coordinated hard money spending

Total soft money raised.

Political party contributions and direct, coordinated expenditures for candidates went down between 1998 and 2000.

The explanation was given in research by Diana Dwyre and Robin Kolodny. Both parties were wildly successful in raising and spending "soft money" -- funds that can be raised without contribution limits. Ostensibly, this money is for party building, but is often used for candidate specific issue advertising. However, for parties to spend soft money on issue advertising, they must - under the Federal Election Commission's rules - mix some hard money along with the soft to pay for the ads. Hard money contributions went down, therefore, to be used as matching money that would enable soft money activity.

Independent Expenditures

Tables and Graphs:

Table: Independent Expenditures, House and Senate, 1978-2000

Link: CFI Task Force on Issue Ad Disclosure

Independent expenditure spending has fluctuated erratically, and within narrow ranges, since 1996. By contrast, spending on candidate-specific "issue ads" has gone up dramatically since 1996, reducing both the incentive for, and relative importance of, independent expenditures.

Independent Expenditures are hard money independent advertising, as opposed to soft money-finance issue advertising. More specifically, independent expenditures are defined under the law as expenditures expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate that are not made in coordination with the candidate or candidate's agents. These expenditures may not be limited, under the Supreme Court's First Amendment rulings, but corporations and labor unions may not make these expenditures from the general treasuries, and the committees that these expenditures are covered by contribution limits.

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