Campaign Finance Debates and Strategies

>> Audience 1: All right, thank you again for this talk. As somebody who's planning on campaigning for the next couple years in the central Valley, this has been definitely enlightening. My main question, I suppose, is centered around the individual donors and party question.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah.

>> Audience 1: What evidence is there to show that a conglomerate of individual donors with contrasting partisan policy positions is necessarily worse than a PAC that has very strong partisan leaning?

Because my initial thoughts when I heard this presentation were, while small donors may likely have stronger political convictions and have combined contribution power. I would think an aggregate, at least across the state of California, they would sort of average out to be politically neutral as opposed to certain packs.

I may be playing devil's advocate here, but I wanna know if a conglomerate, a combination of small donors is equal to a partisan leaning pack, even though that's contrary to the evidence you presented.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So yeah, so thanks for that question. So and I wanna kind of just differentiate a couple of things.

So there are party packs which are kind of the central, you could say, whether it's the centralized state party or the centralized national party. So the evidence suggests parties wanna win and retain power. So if they think moving in and nominating a moderate is better and they're more electorally on average they'll do it, right?

So you're talking about, I am assuming here, kind of a group that's not affiliated with the official party, is that?

>> Audience 1: Yeah.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, that's not a centralized party and may simply hold certain beliefs. Again, the evidence right now is that sort of super PACs tend to complement, that they're sort of awash almost with the kind of rest of the spending, let's say.

In theory, a super PAC, right? I mean, Karl Rove has a super PAC. I would call that probably a very winning oriented super PAC, right? I mean super PAC, right? Someone has to be organizing the super PAC and has to hope that it's gonna keep going. But you could have a super PAC that is kind of, we want policy X, and if our party's not gonna push policy X, then we're gonna sit it out.

And honestly that looks, the New Jersey teachers unions kind of look a little like that. I mean, they're not like, we're not gonna support this Democrat because, they're kind of pro charter school or something. So we're gonna just, we're not really worried about, they're worried about their issues.

I think that that's why there's a little bit of this washing out with, cuz super PACs kind of. Some of them are more the Karl Rove type and some of them are more these issue types, the more you have kind of individuals, though, who are. Even the New Jersey teachers union privately will sometimes cut deals, so whereas individuals, it's hard, they're not organized.

So I would say on average it would still push but the evidence is that it kind of washes, they wash out as a grip.

>> Audience 2: Spent last year studying in France during the election cycle there. And as I'm sure you're aware, they have some very interesting campaign finance laws, including a cap on candidates spending in presidential elections.

And while obviously the scale in the US comparatively to France is much greater, what are your thoughts on overall campaign spending caps? Thank you.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, so those have been declared illegal over and over again by the US Supreme Court. But I mean, you could say we had a regime that was in place and operating where candidates could opt in right to voluntary spending caps.

And some states have those regimes as well for candidates where they'll have them. So I'm gonna kind of operate in that context within kind of the us case law context. Okay, so there's the evidence, actually, some of it by Andy Hall, who's currently a political scientist here and a courtesy fellow at Hoover, has done some research on public financing of state elections.

He suggests actually in that context that it does produce polarization. It's hard not to think that the presidential disclosures had the opposite effect since there was kind of pretty, there was more moderation during that kind of 1980 through 2000 period, though a very small end, as we say in social science.

Not a lot of observations and a lot of other things we're changing in the world. Well, I think one of the benefits of the United States is that we have a lot of different electoral regimes across localities and states. So I kind of buy Andy Hall's finding in a significant way and think it brings up worrisome components of public financing.

But I would actually say, it's kind of good that we have kind of different regimes and we should keep studying them. I realize that's not the answer you fully want, but it does tell you what the evidence has said so far in the United States.

>> Audience 3: Yeah, so thank you for your talk, I really enjoyed it.

I just wanna ask you about the perception of bought elections. Cuz I think that that's important too. I know coming from Missouri in 2022, the Democratic nominee for Senate kind of used her own fortune to basically fund her campaign. It's like $4 million of her own money cuz she was the heiress of the Anheuser Busch fortune.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah.

>> Audience 3: And then whenever she was asked about Citizens United, she said, I believe that all citizens should be united. So that shows how much she knew about politics at that time. And so I think that there is a legitimacy problem that goes along with spending like this.

And I just wanted to know what you find in the data, whether or not they actually do change the outcome of these elections. Do they change the perception of the legitimacy of these elections?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So, yeah, I think that's a really important topic. And actually, I had originally thought I'd devote some time to that in the talk and then realized I was already probably going over.

And it's also, it's complicated in this way. So I think it's a serious issue and it contributes to trust in elections. I think it compounds when there are issues, I'm kind of not to reveal every policy preference. I'm kind of a pro immigration person. But you look at the data and you see, it's kind of the affluent in donors.

Maybe, again, maybe we should kind of cut some sort of deal, like something that doesn't seem like it's angering 65% of the public here. I'm also for representation and kind of thinking through these issues. Even if I understand kind of the economic benefits of a policy, I don't think that's the end of the story.

And there are distributional effects as well. And I think these trust issues are big, and they're big on some of these policies that are out of step and they're big when people believe that elections are being bought. In the end, I think one of the reasons I kind of ended up focusing on the, what's the evidence that the money really matters is that I think there's a lot of misperception and that part of our, we should both be concerned about it.

And that would be one of the reasons, for instance, on some of the policies that individuals would say, yeah, I'm just, I'm concerned about the perception of corruption, and that in and of itself is enough to warrant this policy. And then again, we do wanna be getting the kind of correct information out there.

I will note that in 2000, it was either 2015 or 16, it was before Trump had the nomination. So I'm just trying to certainly officially had it, there were some polls and it was before he was kind of clearly the nominee, I should note, about perceptions of sort of does the government represent people like me?

And is it largely a corrupt government? And they were just shocking. And these were very, this was not some sort of shady polling operation. They were off the charts and I don't think campaign finance is the only factor in that, right? But I think there are other factors as well and so I think those are important issues.

And I do think part of our job here, whether at Hoover, on campus, as people who know better on some of it, I'm not saying there's, but on what some misperceptions are to get those facts out there.

>> Audience 4: Good afternoon? My question is, how do nonpartisan campaigns compared to partisan ones in term of fundraising and donor impact and outcomes?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, that's a personal favorite topic of mine. I've actually written on kind of nonpartisan judicial campaigns where actually these concerns about funding are, if anything even higher, right? Some of you, maybe all of you know that in the US, we have this unusual institution that in many states, judges are elected and many of the state supreme Court officials and many of them are elected with nonpartisan elections.

There's also states like Nebraska that have kind of nonpartisan. Yeah, there we go, shout out for Nebraska. Nonpartisan legislative elections. So the evidence on that is that money in campaigns matters more in nonpartisan races because there's kind of less of a party queue that voters can base their vote on.

So that's on the kind of money mattering issue, it tends to cut in that direction, right? Particularly in the legislative realm, there are other arguable benefits that people think overweigh that in terms of the ways in which legislatures operate internally. And on the courts, it relates, it's not exactly the previous question, it relates a little.

I think that many people think it's unbecoming for judges to run as partisan officials as part of a party and to run in a primary, that it encourages the sense that judges are largely partisans. And so they think there's some benefit to the kind of nonpartisan label on the elect on the ballot.

>> Audience 5: Hello, my name is Mikhail. I'm from the University of Florida and I would love to ask specifically when it comes to the actual personalities of the candidates. I know that you said the reading, does not mention the personalities that kind of make people stick out. Is there any chance you could speak about that?

Is it populism that helps people win elections? And then also a follow up, if I may. If the actual candidates don't raise as much money, what can they do to utilize allocating specific funds in specific areas to take advantage of winning?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, so on the second question, I mean, one of the kind of wide open areas for research is really, and Gary Jacobson mentions it kind of in passing in his review article is kind of the role of social media, right?

Which is often very cheap to reach people. So we see with someone like AOC, right, she's able to get attention, right, not with a really large war chest and in a primary defeat a very long standing member who assumed he was just walking in to the general and walking into office through a savvy social media campaign.

So that would be my initial response on what I would advise someone to do. Your first question on personality, the evidence on personality is that on presidential campaigns, it has some effect more people kind of feel some sort of connection with the presidential candidate, right? They're seeing them a lot in the news, I definitely wouldn't wanna say that's never the case with the Senate candidate or Congressional candidate.

But you're also not being bombarded with them, with their campaign in the same way. And they're also joining a team in a legislature, right? They're not gonna operate as an individual. So the tendencies to populism, I mean, many argue in the political science literature that these tendencies to populism are much higher in presidential systems.

Even than parliamentary systems with a prime minister, for precisely this reason, that even in some place like England, where the prime minister is kind of at the head of the ticket, right? And you kind of know who you're voting for at the same time, the party can just dump them one minute, put up someone new, here you're really voting for an individual and in other presidential systems.

Okay, thanks, Josh. Thanks for your attention.