Open Secrets Report: Outside Groups Are Spending More Than Some Congressional Candidates

The influence of outside money is growing at an alarming rate. Outside money refers to money that is spent on behalf of a candidate, instead of donating directly to them. If that seems confusing, just imagine you had a million dollars you wanted to spend in order to get your favorite candidate elected to Congress. Remember, the Congressional campaign contribution limit is $2,700.  To get around that limit you could simply spend your million dollars on mailers and commercials promoting your candidate. As long as you don’t give the money directly to the campaign or coordinate with the candidate’s campaign directly, you aren’t breaking any laws. This is a routine way that special interest groups get around campaign finance laws to influence elections, and the amount of outside money spent has increased drastically over the last ten years.

The Center for Responsible Politics (opensecrets.org) recently published a report showing that in 27 Congressional races the amount of outside money spent was more than the actual campaigns themselves spent. This report is the latest evidence of just how much power special interest groups have in American politics. Click here to read the Open Secrets article in its entirety.

If you found value in this update please consider becoming a member of Clean Slate Now so that we can continue to work towards an equitable political system where people, not special interest groups, hold the most power.

Jon Biggerstaff

Executive Director, Clean Slate Now

How To Buy An Election With Dark Money

How To Buy An Election With Dark Money

Every day more and more voters become aware of the huge role money plays in our elections.  According to a Washington Post article, the candidate with the most money wins 91% of the time.  After all, if people are financing elections with their donations it makes sense that the candidate with the most donations would get the most votes.

The problem with this line of thinking is that people aren’t the only ones financing elections. For example, if we add up all the individual contributions (that is money donated by living, breathing people) to Colorado political candidates going back to 2010 we get a total of around $53 million, but donations from various interest groups combined with dark money spending total around $66 million.

Take a moment to consider what this means. If the better-financed candidate wins 9 times out of 10, and individual donors make up a comparatively small portion of fundraising, who is really deciding who wins elections?

The simple truth is that interest groups are able to target elections in which they can have the biggest impact and spend the money necessary to bring about whatever outcome they desire. This is what we mean when we talk about “buying elections”, it’s not hyperbole.

To illustrate just how simple it is to buy an election if you have the money, I’m going to lay out the process step by step. One of the most common ways to buy an election these days is with dark money. Dark money refers to the untraceable funds we often run into when we investigate the money behind a political effort. But how exactly do you use untraceable funds to buy an election? Let’s walk through the process.

Step 1 – What’s Your issue?

Let’s pretend you want to make it illegal to leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. In your opinion, the people who refuse to secure their shopping carts properly are the cause of countless dings, dents, and scratches as their abandoned carts inevitably careen into the helpless cars of the parking lot. Your legislators have refused to pass a law to address this issue, so you’re taking matters into your own hands.

Step 2 – Get a Pile of Money

This step is the simplest to understand, but the hardest to attain. However, if you consider that the top 10% of Americans hold 80% of the wealth, you can see that this is not a problem for a small number of wealthy Americans.  It is also not a problem for corporations who often have tons of cash laying around. If you’re like me, you’re not in possession of shareholder money or a part of the wealthy elite…and the parking lot protectors of America don’t have a huge fundraising base…so we’ll just pretend you win the lottery and suddenly have a pile of money, $500,000 to be exact. A half a million bucks isn’t chump change, but it’s not Koch Brothers money either. You will need to be strategic with how you spend it.

Step 2 – Find the Elections with the Best Bang for Your Buck

You could try to elect a candidate for Congress who would sponsor your shopping cart law, but then your $500,000 wouldn’t have as much of an impact. Why not look at local elections? Sure they aren’t as sexy, but they are much more accessible. A typical winning campaign for a State House of Representatives seat costs around $125,000. It’s a bargain! You can bankroll 4 of these puppies.

Step 3 – Locate the Candidates

You find 4 candidates running for different State House Districts and set up meetings. During these meetings you will voice your strong desire for a shopping cart law. Candidates are smart and know before they meet you just how much money you have to spend. Given the money you have to offer,  it won’t be long before you find 4 candidates who wholeheartedly agree that we need shopping cart legislation, and we need it now.

Step 4 – Go Dark

Great, you found your parking lot friendly politicians, but there’s a problem. Colorado law only allows you to donate $400 per candidate per election cycle. That’s not going to do any good. How are you going to ensure your 4 politicians win if you can only give them a measly $400 each? Do you really have the same amount of influence as anyone who can scrape together $400? That just seems too fair to be true…and it is. So how do you get around these pesky campaign finance laws?

Fortunately for you, politically active nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors AND they can receive unlimited funds from anywhere. You pay an attorney a few hundred bucks to open up a 501(c)4 and dump the $500,000 in there. You can open it in, say, New York and name it “ Shopping Carts Are Dangerous”. Not only are you almost ready to spend, but no one will be able to see that it was us who is doing the spending!

Step 5 – Go Darker

You’ve covered our trail, but you still have the pesky $400 limit to deal with. No worries, there’s an easy fix. All you have to do is open an “independent expenditure committee” with the Colorado Secretary of State. You have to name and register it too, so you can call it the “No Runaway Carts” committee. Now you can transfer the whole $500,000 into it, and all anyone can see is that there’s an Independent Expenditure Committee called “No Runaway Carts” with $500,000 in it, which came from a New York non-profit called “Shopping Carts Are Dangerous”. From there the trail goes cold. You’ve officially joined the dark side.

Step 6 – Spend, Spend, Spend

There’s just one last hurdle. Current law not only limits contributions to candidates from people to $400, but it outright prohibits independent expenditure committees from donating to directly candidates. However, and this is a BIG however, independent expenditure committees CAN spend money on behalf of, or in opposition to, candidates as long as they don’t coordinate directly with the candidate. In other words, if a candidate wants to buy a commercial for $20,000 you aren’t allowed to give them $20,000 for it, and you’re not allowed to call them and ask them if they want you to buy a commercial for them. You are allowed to simply buy the commercial. 

If this seems like a roadblock for your spending, it really isn’t. If you spend $125,000 on commercials, mailers, and other advertisements for each of our 4 politicians they will have a huge advantage over their opponents. You can even attack their opponents directly, this way you get a negative message out and your politicians can say they had nothing to do with it. With your $500,000 you can buy all the things that cost the most money during an election, as long as you don’t directly coordinate with the candidate. When it comes down to influencing the outcome of an election, the prohibition on coordinating with candidates is not a big hurdle.

With any luck, all 4 of your candidates will win. With bad luck, 3 of the 4 will win. Either way, when they are sworn in you’ll be there to remind them just how important parking lot safety is, and if necessary, remind them just how important your help was in getting them elected.  You can even draft their first bill for them about parking lot safety.

Conclusion

There you have it, you’re the proud new owner of 4 elected officials. While I’ve tried to keep this topic as light as possible, it’s important to realize that these dark money groups really do hold an enormous amount of sway over our politicians and real people suffer for it. You may have never heard the term “independent expenditure committee” before, but you probably have heard of super-PACs. They are the same thing. They are both the mechanism used to inject large quantities of untraceable money into our political system in order to rig an election.

In our example, the 4 politicians you met with ended up having a tremendous advantage. This advantage was cemented the moment you decided to spend money on their behalf. That decision is what decided the elections. As much as we like to think that debates and policy positions matter, they often don’t. Many, if not most, elections in this country are decided in the fundraising meetings that happen before the first door is ever knocked or the first flyer is ever mailed. That is what we mean when we talk about buying an election.

Since 2010, over $43 million in dark money has flooded into Colorado Elections. There are currently 60 active independent expenditure committees operating in Colorado.

If you found this information valuable please consider becoming a member of Clean Slate Now so that we can continue our work to reduce the destructive influence of special interest money in politics.

Reliance on PAC Money Grows among Representatives, but So Does The Number Abstaining

The latest campaign reports from the 2016 Election are now in, so we took a look at the reports for the incoming 115th Congress – focusing on the House of Representatives.  That’s where special interest groups and their political action committees (PACs) have the greatest influence.

Click here to see the list of every Representative in the 115th Congress, how much they raised through the election, and how much of that came from PACs.

Overall, there are three key changes from the 114th Congress to the 115th:

• In the 115th Congress, 6 Representatives (4 Democrats and 2 Republicans) won office without taking any PAC money.  In the 114th Congress, there were only 4 Representatives who won without PAC money (3 Democrats and 1 Republican).
• Overall fundraising has increased.  So far, the average Representative raised $1.688 million dollars.  That’s up from $1.631 million for the 114th Congress – and the total for the 115th Congress does not include any money raised in December, when PACs and special interest tend to lavish members with money before their first votes.
• Despite the jump in the number of Representatives swearing off all PAC money, the average incoming Representative now relies even more on PAC money than they did coming into the 114th Congress.  This election cycle, the average Representative received 48% of their campaign funds from special interest PACs, up from 47% in the last Congress.  That number might climb even further once the final reports come in at the end of January.

If you find value in this information and would like to support Clean Slate Now, please become a member with a recurring $5 monthly contribution. With your support, we will be able to continue our efforts to reform our political system.

Also, if you’d like to know which PACs are giving to your elected officials, click here to become a monthly member and we will send you regular reports about your own elected officials.

-Mark Mehringer

PAC Fundraising Totals and the 115th Congress – House of Representatives

* New Representatives in the 115th Congress

Following the Money Part 4- Proposition 106 (End of Life Options)

Proposition 106- Access to Medical Aid-In-Dying Medication.

This is the fourth article in a series called “Following the Money” where we examine the money spent in support of and opposition to various ballot measures in Colorado. To read the first three, visit our website www.cleanslatenow.org.

Proposition 106 would amend Colorado’s statutes to allow the following (sourced from the Colorado Blue Book):

1. Allow a terminally ill individual with a prognosis of six months or less to live to request and self-administer medical aid-in-dying medication in order to voluntarily end his or her life;
2. Authorize a physician to prescribe medical aid-in-dying medication to a terminally ill individual under certain conditions.
3. Create criminal penalties for tampering with a person’s request for medical aid-in-dying medication or knowingly coercing a person with a terminal illness to request the medication.

Examining the money behind issues like this one is always interesting because it isn’t immediately obvious who is supporting or opposing it. There aren’t any obvious opposing financial interests as their often are with ballot measures, so who is spending millions in support or opposition for this, and how to do they have so much money to spend in the first place?

First let’s take a look at the No side. The committee dedicated to defeating this ballot measure is called “No Assisted Suicide Colorado.” So far they have raised over $2.6 million and I’ve been seeing their yard signs all over the place. So where is this money coming from? If you’ve been reading these articles you probably know the drill.  Let’s look at their top ten donations:

What is worrying about this top-ten list is that it proves this effort is not, as they say on their website, ” A coalition of disability rights, healthcare, legal, faith-based, and patient advocacy organizations.” These donors alone represent just under 90% of all the funding behind this committee. Religious organizations like these are opposed to proposition 106 on ideological grounds, and they are the ones behind the effort to defeat 106. I suspect that “a coalition of disability rights workers and healthcare industry groups” sounds better than “a coalition of mega churches spending millions of dollars” from a PR perspective. However, it is worth noting that these religious organizations are often funded by small donations collected from their members, so we can hope that some of these millions were raised in that fashion…even if this no-campaign in particular was not.

Now let’s look at the Yes campaign, a committee called “Yes on Colorado End of Life Options.” This side was puzzling for a few reasons. As someone who grew up in the religious south where churches are as ubiquitous as Starbucks, I had a sneaking suspicion some of them might be mobilizing against a ballot measure like 106. I had no clue who was going to be on the Yes side, and the top ten list of donations didn’t help very much:

The Yes On End of Life Options Colorado committee has raised just under $5.7 million so far, the vast majority coming from something called Compassion and Choices Action Network, without knowing more about these groups, this list doesn’t do us much good. When you dig a layer deeper and look at the funding behind Compassion and Choices Action Network, all we can find is that they are funded by the Compassion and Choices Network which is a 501(c)(3) (nonpartisan and nonprofit public charity). We’ve come this far so it would be nice if we could dig another layer deeper and  see where the 501(c)(3) gets its money. The problem is 501(c)(3)’s don’t have to make their donors public.

We can see some information, like their IRS Form 990, which show the total dollar amounts raised, but nothing specific. All I can really say for certain is that the Compassion and Choices 501(c)(3) raised around $16 million last year, and $15 million of that was from “contributions.”  Their mission statement states that they are “…committed to improving care and expanding choice and the end of life.  Across the nation, we work ensure healthcare providers honor and enable patients’ decisions about their care.” 

I’m assuming that the Compassion and Choices 501(c)(3) get their money from donors who believe in their mission and cause, but I have no idea of knowing that for sure because our system doesn’t require that level of transparency. Imagine if a 501(c)(3) was formed and funded exclusively by interests outside America and then supported or opposed candidates and ballot measures. We would have no way of knowing because they could obfuscate the true source using this method of legal layering and ending up with the completely opaque 501(c)(3). We will get into the problems arising from dark money another day.

Even though these are both technically special interest groups, I do think their are some glimmers of democratic equality on both sides of this issue. As I mentioned before, many religious organizations are funded by small donations from their members. It’s also likely that the Compassion and Choices nonprofit’s contributions come from a wide variety of donors who believe in their cause. I only wish or laws required a level of transparency that would make it clear either way.

To stay in the loop on upcoming articles join our mailing list! To check out the source of these numbers, visit the Colorado Secretary of State.

Jon Biggerstaff

Executive Director, Clean Slate Now

[email protected]