Public Financing for Campaigns

Hello and welcome to King County Conversations, I’m Bob Ferguson and I represent District 1 on the King County Council.

The topic I want to chat with you today about is public campaign financing, which is an issue that’s come up before the County Council recently because in the 2008 Washington State Legislative session, the Washington State Legislature adopted legislation that allows local jurisdictions, counties and cities, for example, to enact public campaign financing systems. One important component of these financing systems is that before they are approved, the proposal must go before the voters for voter approval. So, myself and Councilmember Dow Constantine, who is one of colleagues here on the County Council, co-sponsored legislation some time ago to ask our county staff to research different public campaign finance systems throughout the United States.

So, for example, Arizona, the state of Maine, and the city of Portland Oregon, currently have Public Campaign Finance systems in place. We’re asking our staff to do research on those systems, to see which systems might do well in King County, to inquire about the costs for such a systems, and to see what the reasons to do it or not to do it might be.

As a general matter, I do support public campaign financing and that’s why I support this legislation, and I’m looking forward to having it heard before the County Council and to have county staff research this legislation. I know the city of Seattle is also looking at putting a proposal before the voters possibly as early as this November of 2008, but it also could take another year or so before it reaches the voters.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit down with Craig Salins, who is the Executive Director of Washington Public Campaigns, he’s an individual who is very involved with this issue, has a lot of expertise, and I had a chance to chat with him on this important topic.

(Beginning of the Conversation between Bob and Craig Salins)

(Bob) I’m aware that states like Arizona, Maine, cities like Portland have some form of public financing. Can you just talk through some of the examples of what the requirements are to get public financing and how much one receives.

(Craig) Essentially the attempt behind public financing is to level the financial playing field for good candidates that would be good in office but may not necessarily have a lot of personal wealth or may not want to spend a lot of time dialing for dollars. First of all, it is optional, not candidate is required to do this. But any jurisdiction, whether it is a state or a locality, would set up a program where there is a public fund that has to be financed somehow. Candidates that then want to apply for or become what we would call a voter owned elections candidate, or in some states it’s called the clean elections act, ate required to show that they would be a viable candidate by collecting a set number of signatures from voters in their district and that number varies on what state is it or what city it is.

(Bob). It could be a fairly large number, it could be 500 for example, and the idea is to show a certain amount of support for that candidate.

(Craig) Exactly, each signature backed by an established amount of money and in nearly every state it’s 5 dollars.

(Bob) So it’s a very nominal amount, but at least it’s something, someone has to reach into their pocket and pull out a 5 dollar bill to say “hey I support this person going forward.”

(Craig) For example, in Maine, where the legislative districts are very small the number of required signatures is only 150. In Arizona, where the Governor can run on public financing the number of signatures required to qualify is 4000. But in each case backed by 5 dollars. Those signatures and those 5 dollar contributions are then turned into the commission for validation.

(Bob) In other words, like we have, if you have an initiative you’re trying to place on the ballot you have to have signatures that are authorized by the appropriate authority to make sure they’re real people who live in the district.

(Craig) Exactly. Once the candidate is certified they are then given a check, literally a sum of money, not just the 5 dollars, but a predetermined amount of money that is sufficient to run a primary campaign. And, how much that money is, is determined by the local law.

(Bob) Taking that to King County, say the King County Council. I’ve seen races where candidates have raised over $300,000 and when I ran in 2003 I raised just about 100,000.

Is the idea that you would look at competitive races in the history and pick a certain amount that we think allows them to run a competitive race and in the case of the County Council that could be $100,000 for example.

(Craig) The considerations, the boundaries if you will, when considering how much money; what does it cost for a candidate to truly get their message out and be viable that way. They don’t necessarily have to spend more than another candidate, but it has to be enough money to get your message out.

(Bob) In my case when I raised $100,000. I obviously got my message out, but I probably could have got my message out for a little bit less than that. Those that have campaign finance, do those jurisdictions struggle at all at determining what is the amount that equals a competitive campaign?

(Craig) Every year. I think there’s two are three factors that are key. One is, how much money should be necessary to get your message out. That’s called the base allotment, the primary allotment. Making sure the primary allotment is enough so that candidates will chose to use the program, that they won’t feel that they’re handicapped by going into this program by being under funded. And, that there’s enough money to get their message out whether they know how much money that should be, we should estimate show much it should be. The other factor, though, is not over shooting with too much money, such that the voters then say, “whoa, this is a Cadillac that we just can’t afford.”

One other very important feature that people should know about, that is built into these programs to keep the financial playing field level is what is sometimes nicknamed rescue funds, fair fight funds, matching funds. The way it works is this. If a publicly financed candidate is outspent by an opponent who is running privately. Once the privately funded candidate goes beyond the initial allotment of the publicly funded candidate, the public person gets dollar for dollar matching funds to keep up with the private spending up to a capped amount. So the idea here is to provide enough money for every candidate to basically get the message out and if all candidates are running on private financing, that’s the level. And so you have to make sure it’s enough money to get the message out. Then if nobody is running private and overspending that, then the net effect is that is how we control campaign costs at a reasonable level.

(Bob) So let’s say I’m a citizen out there listening to this and I say to myself, every year when I go to vote, I go through my voters guide and sometimes I see the same people over and over again, which they are absolutely entitled to. But the reality is we see folks who are perennial candidates and who don’t really campaign. They’ll have a statement in the voters guide but there’s not really a campaign going on. They are what is often called perennial candidates and their chance of winning is remote at best. So, how do other jurisdictions that have public financing address that issue.

(Craig) It is another important issue and the way that it is addressed is that the number of signatures a candidate would have to gather backed by 5 dollar donations needs to be a high enough number that so called hobby candidates or perennial candidates say you know, it’s not worth it or they literally try and they don’t make the bar.

(Bob) Or, if they’re able to do it, it shows a viability that is legitimate at that point.

(Craig) Maybe they decide, gosh, maybe I really should run for mayor.

Here’s two other points on that that have come up fairly recently. Most jurisdictions, other states, because this has been in operation for four or five cycles ten years, have charged 5 dollars. The 5 dollars has king of been the currency as Bill Moyers calls it for this. We’re starting to think that ten dollars might make sense. The question would be, anybody that can give 5 can they give 10? We don’t want to make this a rich mans game, let’s be honest. That’s counter to the whole goal. But, maybe that makes it so that people aren’t just going to give you 5 dollars to make you go away. By the time somebody has to give ten bucks, they’re thinking about it.

(Bob) Now I suppose one of the benefits of receiving the public funds is that the candidate spends little time, once they’ve met the threshold gathering signatures and donations, they’re no longer out there having to spend their time dialing for dollars which is a very time consuming process for anyone running for office and rather that time would be spent knocking on doors, talking to voters, going to public meetings and actually engaging with the public which you see less and less of now in elections which seem to be conducted over radio, TV, or mail; and very little of somebody coming by and knocking on your door or coming to your local neighborhood meeting, for example.

(Craig) Exactly, David Sorata, he’s the author of ‘Hostile Takeover,’ he likes to say that in our democracy more and more, elections are no more about who is the best lawmaker, who is the best representative of their constituency, it’s who’s the best fundraiser.

(Bob) So tell me this, talk a half step back, it terms of larger policy considerations of why some jurisdictions use public financing. Part of the reason is that is encourages more competition for office. And for those jurisdictions that have had it, like Arizona and Maine, are those states experiencing the benefits of that.

(Craig) I think there are policy outcomes if that’s what you mean. Maybe the best example, the poster child if you will, is that Maine established there program and the first year it ran was in 2000. After a couple of election cycles, 84% of their state legislature is elected on state public money now. When we had Linda Valentino come out here from there to describe there program, she said this clean elections program is accepted like gravity over there, ‘of course we would do it that way.’ The policy outcome, they were the first state in the nation to really bring down the price of prescription drugs because they could stare down the big pharmaceutical industry.

(Bob) In other words, that industry wasn’t funding the campaigns of folks anymore. Those folks were coming into office on the backs of 5 and 10 dollar donations from a few hundred people in their district and then receiving the funds from the state to run their campaigns free of those influences.

(Craig) And this program does nothing to eliminate lobbyists, we still need lobbyists. They are bringing information which is useful to legislators, useful to council members. What they aren’t bringing is satchels of money and so truly it makes the craft of public policy and lawmaking about that craft and not about money. Ditto in Maine, they stared down the tobacco interests.

(Bob) In those jurisdictions, are they seeing that there’s more people running for office, more competition for offices, more people taking on incumbents, for example.

(Craig) What happened in Maine after a couple of cycles is more people are running so all of a sudden nearly every district had a challenger. In the last election cycle, they have 151 legislative districts, of the 151, 149 had a challenger—a serious challenger not just hobby candidate. But, most of the incumbents won. What’s going on here? What’s going on is, the incumbents who won were forced to, if I may, not be lazy. They had to walk their districts, they also were enabled to walk their districts because they did not have to raise money. The 8 or 10 percent who lost, some people say they should have lost because they stopped really representing their district. So I think that really tells a story and makes a good point that these programs have effectively shifted the attention in elections from money to representation.

(End of the Conversation)

(Bob) Thanks Craig, and thank you for listening to this edition of King County Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about Public Campaign Financing and this particular legislation, you can attend the upcoming town meeting that I’ll be having in my district on Monday, May 19, in Shoreline at 6:30 in the evening. For the details, feel free to call my office at 296 1001 or email me at bob.ferguson@kingcounty.gov.

You can also visit the website for Washington Public Campaigns and their website is www.washclean.org.

Again, I’m Bob Ferguson, thanks for listening.