Pass a Lean CEP Fix Bill

by: mattw

Fri Mar 05, 2010 at 23:10:51 PM EST

1. The first is the idea that current statewide candidates need some special assistance to qualify, as the target contribution amounts are somehow unrealistically high. Senator Slossberg gave voice to this view in the news this week.
   
2. The second is the idea that the grant amounts should be reduced; that they're large enough to constitute a "windfall" that would give more money to candidates than they could realistically raise on their own. This is a popular idea among incumbent legislators, as there's a certain charm to promoting yourself as a "fiscal conservative" while simultaneously diminishing the ability of prospective opponents to promote themselves.

I think very little of both of these ideas. Not only are they bad ideas on their own, they both threaten to inject 2010 politics into the bill, which is totally what someone would do if they wanted to destroy the program.

But rather than just call these ideas dumb and counterproductive, I've made some graphs to illustrate exactly why these ideas are dumb and counterproductive.  

Q: Are the Qualifying Requirements Unrealistically High?

A: No. All three major-party gubernatorial candidates in 2006 would have qualified if there was a $100 limit in place at the time.

Someone laughed at me the other day when I described the SEEC as providing a high-quality level of customer service. The joke, of course, is that advice takes a long time to emerge from their office (when it emerges at all), but only the state DEP surpasses the SEEC in making useful data available in easy-to-access electronic formats. Check out those awesome spreadsheets! If you want them, download the CSV files, since Excel chokes on files with more than 64k records.

What getting the data from 2006 allows you to do is, by adjusting the contributions to a maximum of $100 each, to simulate how Governor Rell, Mayor DeStefano, and Mayor Malloy would have fared as declared candidates with a $100 maximum contribution amount, as well as see if (and when) they would have raised the required $250,000 / 2500 contributions to qualify for public financing. The assumption (a reasonable one, I think) is that anyone that gave $2000 could be just as (if not more) easily persuaded to write a check for $100.

As it turns out, each of the three candidates easily surpassed the 2500 contributors that would be required to qualify for the CEP grant:

• Governor Rell, who declared her candidacy in October 2005 (13 months before the election), received 10,771 contributions by the start of 2007, 5327 of which were received by the date of her nomination. Of those pre-convention contributions, 5116 were from Connecticut donors.
• Mayor Malloy, who declared his candidacy in February 2004 (33 months before the election), received 8165 contributions by the start of 2007, 4049 of which were received by the date of his endorsement at the 2006 Democratic Convention. Of those pre-convention contributions, 3366 were from Connecticut donors.
• Mayor DeStefano, who declared his candidacy in March 2004 (32 months before the election), received 11,195 contributions by the start of 2007, 7537 of which were received by the date of the Democratic Convention. Of those pre-convention contributions, 6794 were from Connecticut donors.

Here is an awesome graph to illustrate this point. The point where the line crosses the x-axis shows the date on which a committee obtained 2500 contributions. The point where the line crosses the y-axis shows how many contributions the committee had on the day of the convention (which is the earliest one can qualify for a public grant under the rules of the CEP):

Further, each of these candidates would have raised well over the $250,000 qualifying threshold if the maximum contribution limit was $100:

• Governor Rell would have raised over $870,000 in contributions if the maximum contribution in 2006 was $100. Under the current rules for declared candidates, she would have qualified on 3/1/06, having raised $251,426 from 3193 donors. Her fundraising would have been complete four months and two weeks after it began.
• Mayor Malloy would have raised over $718,000 in contributions if the maximum contribution in 2006 was $100. Under the current rules for declared candidates, he would have qualified on 12/13/05, having raised $250,492 from 2667 donors. His fundraising would have been complete 22 months and one week after it began. This time also includes a period of over six months when Malloy effectively suspended his Gubernatorial fundraising efforts, so his qualifying time represents about 16 total months of fundraising.
• Mayor DeStefano would have raised over $981,000 in contributions if the maximum contribution in 2006 was $100. Under the current rules for declared candidates, he would have qualified on 2/28/05, having raised $251,106 from 2643 donors. His fundraising would have been complete just under one year after it began.

Here is another awesome graph, showing when these guys would have qualified with $250,000 in contributions of $100 or less:

Well in advance of the 2006 conventions is when they would have qualified.

Now, Rell would have qualified in 4 months, but maybe that'd be tough to do if you weren't an incumbent. You could say that Rell sort of screwed the Republican candidates a little by deciding not to run just 6 months before the 2010 conventions. But not really: just look at this advice from Larry Cafero to his caucus in April 2009:

State Rep. Lawrence Cafero, R-142, minority leader, will file paperwork to form an exploratory committee this week that will open the opportunity of running for a range of state offices from governor to secretary of state.

Cafero said he is simply "leading by example" after suggesting other representatives do the same, taking advantage of the current system. After filing the proper paperwork Cafero, who was elected to serve the 142nd House District in 1992, will be allowed to take campaign donations.

"I have been in politics for quite some time and I want see what is out there," said Cafero who was elected to his ninth term this past November.

Cafero said he fully expects Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell to run again and said he fully supports her and Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele but would not completely eliminate the possibility of running for the state's top spot.

The system is set up to allow candidates who want to run statewide to get the ball rolling before the incumbents drop out, and it's not like the Republicans were ignorant of that fact. From the example of 2006, it looks like it takes 4-16 months of sustained effort to qualify for a Gubernatorial grant.

That said, a program designed to raise small contributions would probably do it faster -- in my experience (which was on the not-party-endorsed side of a primary), 150 contributions per week is just about the maximum rate that a maniacally-paced, all-volunteer fundraising effort can bring in the dough. Mary Glassman is likely chained to the fundraising phone if she wants to qualify for a grant shortly after the May convention. (She also appears to support the concept of a no drama fix bill.)

(For those curious about the other statewide offices, Wyman would have qualified on 8/21/06, and Bysiewicz on 4/5/03 [!]. Nappier would have narrowly missed the final grant date, raising the qualifying amount as of 10/30/06, and Blumenthal would have missed it, raising the required $75k on 11/14/06. No Republicans from 2006 other than Rell would have made it.)

Q: Are the grant amounts a "windfall" that candidates could have never gotten on their own?

A: No. The grants are already much less than the cost of a competitive statewide race, and decreasing the grants would serve no purpose other than protecting incumbents.

You might reasonably think that the cost of running statewide elections has gone up over time -- but if you did think that, you'd only be half right. In truth, only the cost of running competitive statewide elections has gone up. I invite you to examine the USC Gubernatorial Campaign Expenditures Database, hosted at UNC, which helpfully tallies the number of dollars expended in every race for Governor since the late 60s, and the number of votes cast in that race. Dividing one by the other gives a "cost per vote" metric that you can compare over time. Adjusting for inflation, the costs for races where incumbents win, incumbents lose, or where there's no incumbent running look like this:

Check it out: most of the time, when incumbents win, it's not even close. And the cost of races where incumbents win has been remarkably stable. But for a challenger to get their message out and make a real race of it, elections cost at least twice as much per vote today, and that amount is still rising. (The 2006 Senate race cost about $27 per vote, by way of comparison.) Open seats, like this year's Governor's race, cost very nearly double what is spent on an incumbent victory campaign.

Now, the 2006 Governor's race, including all the money raised and spent in the primary and general, cost about $9 a vote. Poor John DeStefano never had a chance -- never mind the Senate race, there just wasn't enough money being spent to arouse the interest of your average voter. If the legislature doesn't change the grant amounts, the amount that we'd expect to see spent this year would be about $7 a vote.* This level of funding is clearly not a "windfall" by the standard set in Underhill's ruling (windfalls – described on page 63 of this document – being grants which "far exceed the historical fundraising and spending levels for major party candidates").

[*Two primaries with two qualifying candidates each would cost the state the same amount as two primaries each with one qualifying candidate and one self-financing candidate if the current 100% supplemental grants were preserved. There are obviously more permutations, but the point here is that even in an ideal situation, the current grants render participating candidates virtual unknowns when running against incumbents.]

Reducing the grant amount might be attractive to legislators looking to burnish their fiscal responsibility credentials, and in a State Rep district, it might not even make much of a difference (as a State Rep candidate could plausibly speak with every voter multiple times over the course of a campaign). But for a statewide race, it does something worse than render the CEP irrelevant -- it renders most of the campaigns irrelevant. Candidates for office are already drowned out by "car crash of the day" news stories and a high-intensity advertising environment: the $5.3 billion spent on all aspects of U.S. political campaigns in 2008 is dwarfed by the $160 billion-plus spent just on American TV advertising each year. Reducing the (already probably insufficient) amounts of these grants does little more than decrease voter engagement.

So what should these cats do?

1. They should not screw with the donation limits or qualifying thresholds. Everybody knew what they were signing up for, and history has shown that credible candidates are more than capable of raising the qualifying dollars. Changing the limits tilts the playing field after the stage was set, which will only serve to lose the bill votes.
2. They also should leave the grant amounts alone. If there's a real sense that the amounts will be considered "windfalls" despite evidence [i.e. the last several decades of U.S. election history] to the contrary, then the grant reductions should be placed behind a "trigger" that only takes effect if the Second Circuit specifically strikes down the existing amounts. (See Sec. 2 of this bill to see what the "trigger" language looks like.) Those who signed up for the program (especially those few that have signed the CEP10 form in blood and are locked in) don't deserve to have the rug yanked out from under them, and doing so would also lose the bill votes.

A lean bill is the only kind of bill that can pass. If legislative supporters of Malloy and Fedele see it as being in their interest to let the fix die because of reduced grant amounts (betting that the Second Circuit will leave it intact through the conventions when those grant applications can be filed), then the bill will die. And if legislative supporters of Lamont or Foley see it as being in their interest to let the fix die because it provides a big boost to the participating candidates, then it will still die. It may be that some Senator with a vested interest in the collapse of the CEP offers up one of these reasonable-sounding proposals: those that support the CEP should keep their eye on the ball and reject them, or, if that's not possible, to make the changes take effect after the 2010 cycle.

Changing the rules to help this one or that one does not help "protect" the program in any sense whatsoever. Doing so would put the fleeting preferences of a particular campaign over the existence of public financing in Connecticut. Making these changes is not just unfair, it would cost the "fix" bill votes, and the bill does not have any votes to spare.

So please urge your legislators, in the name of all that is good and true in the world, to pass a "lean" bill that changes the very least amount possible to pass Constitutional muster. No dramatics, no bonus goodies for their favorite candidates, no "comprehensive" bill — and there's nothing the Lege has mastered so well as not passing comprehensive bills — just a simple and clean fix.