Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

Money or Votes?

I’m sure that many people have noticed that the stories about the presidential election race (the actual election is, of course, more than a year away) are handicapping the candidates by the amount of money they raise. Candidates who raise more money are doing better. The Democrats are beating the Republicans because they are raising more money. The candidates send out pleas for money saying “let’s show them we’re the best! give us all your money!”

Presumably the money all gets spent on television advertising. And I suppose some of it gets spent on salaries. It seems like this is basically a transfer of funds from the involved electorate to the television stations and political consultants.

It seems that the candidate who raises the most money does usually win. But there is at least some element of correlation rather than causation there: the candidate who raises the most money does tend to be most popular.

Spending all that money on political candidates is a colossal waste of time and money. It’s not good for democracy either, as it tips the scales toward the wealthier donors who are more able to afford donations.

We need to somehow make campaigns shorter and much less expensive. Requiring television stations to donate time to all candidates, with some fixed compensation from the government, would be a good start. Much stricter campaign finance laws are a necessity; since the Supreme Court consistently strikes these down on first amendment grounds, we may need a constitutional amendment. An amendment is obviously insanely heavyweight, but what else can we do? We have to break the cycle somehow.

In the meantime, I personally am declaring a moratorium on donating money to any political candidate. I encourage everybody to join me. Give the candidate of your choice your time, your proselytizing, and your vote. Just don’t give them your money. This is not a left-right partisan issue. It’s a democracy issue.

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Ian Lance Taylor

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6 responses to “Money or Votes?”

  1. fche Avatar
    fche

    >Spending all that money on political candidates is a colossal waste of time and money.

    Yes, but it’s someone else’s time and money.

    > It’s not good for democracy either, as it tips the scales toward the wealthier donors who are more able to afford donations.

    How’s that exactly? Your prior paragraph said that it may well be correlation rather than causation there. There are plenty of rich people on both (?) sides of the political spectrum – don’t they roughly balance out?

    > We need to somehow make campaigns shorter and much less expensive.

    The people running can decide whence they wish all the spotlight; the people donating money can decide how much to give. You can, as you suggest, opt out, and no one would blame you.

    > Requiring television stations to donate time to all candidates, with some fixed compensation from the government, would be a good start.

    But the press is not an organ of the government.

    > Much stricter campaign finance laws are a necessity; since the Supreme Court consistently strikes these down on first amendment grounds, we may need a constitutional amendment.

    Free speech is OK, as long as it is not political? It will take a clever lawyer to find a phrasing of that.

    > An amendment is obviously insanely heavyweight, but what else can we do? We have to break the cycle somehow.

    Or, heap disdain on those candidates making too much noise too soon, and help elect those who campaign in a more appealing manner.

  2. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    Thanks for the note.

    How’s that exactly? Your prior paragraph said that it may well be correlation rather than causation there. There are plenty of rich people on both (?) sides of the political spectrum – don’t they roughly balance out?

    If you view the political spectrum as a line running from left to right, then it’s true that there are rich people on both sides. But the political spectrum is more complicated than that. The effect of tipping the scales toward wealthier donors is that all candidates, from all parts of the spectrum, focus on the issues of the wealthy. So while it balances left to right, it doesn’t balance top to bottom. This is not a dominating effect, since in the end candidates have to win votes. But I don’t think it’s good even as a minor effect.

    The problem I see with your other comments is a standard dilemma of choice. If people gain something by making campaigns more expensive, and if candidates who get more money tend to win, then there is no plausible way for individuals to change the system. Even a mass movement would tend to fail, as the incentives to break rank would be too strong. It’s a case where many people could agree that the system should be changed, and yet be unable to change it individually. These kinds of problems require a systematic solution.

    A good book on these sorts of dilemmas of choice is No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, by Tom Slee.

  3. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    I have resolved only to give (national-issue) money to organizations that apply pressure to make representatives more representative. E.g., MoveOn. When the Senate voted to condemn MoveOn, I gave them $25. When the House did too, I gave another $75.

    Arguably one’s contributions (of whatever sort) are best spent, in the long run, seeding local candidates who may later graduate to national office. We generally only get to choose from among those, so we should front-load that population with tolerable choices. I think that must mean seeding choice local candidates in other locales. That seems to mean, in turn, supporting organizations that identify and support them, because I am not equipped to do so directly.

  4. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    Thanks for the note.

    I understand your point of view. The more I think about the whole topic,though, the stranger it seems that money is so central to the political process. For some reason I haven’t been able to wrap my mind around it. The whole point of elections in our system is to select intelligent people, with whom we generally agree, to study shared issues and make sensible decisions. Putting so much money into the election amounts to agreed corruption. Maybe the way to think about it is to consider the system a way of controlling and tracking the inevitable corruption.

  5. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    The bulk of the money seems to end up in the hands of TV networks. A national election amounts to a large transfer of funds from both corporate and personal accounts to the accounts of broadcasters, resting only momentarily in the hands of candidates. A candidate entrusted with a smaller portion of the handover ends up with less exposure to the bulk of sheeplike voters whose noses seem to count most in the totals. This is particularly so in rural areas where people have less opportunity to meet and influence others face to face.

    Fox Network is a clever ploy to opt out of the system, offering exposure directly to one group of candidates without need to transfer (and track) money to the candidates and then wait for them to hand it back.

    Not contributing money to your candicate means the other candidates have more. Thus, contributing less than the average is equivalent to contributing more than the average to the candidate who happens to be collecting more. As Douglas Adams wrote, “The people hate the lizards, and the lizards rule the people … if they didn’t vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in”. Compare, too, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

    The lizards, around, here, must be the parties. To effect real change the parties must be taken over from within. That makes the primaries the important races, because those determine who the parties really are.

  6. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    If it’s really true that maximizing expenditures maximizes votes, then I think it’s essential to drain the money out of the system. Have the government pay the TV stations directly. I don’t see any real prospect of change from changing the parties; I don’t see how that will change the system, since the system will naturally co-opt most participants. The system has to be blown up.

    It is possible that shifting media tastes will blow up the system to some extent. When people can easily skip commercials, then blanketing the airwaves with commercials accomplishes nothing.

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