( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – It could be months before the impact of Proposition 211 is seen in Arizona, but experts are already hailing the new law aimed at exposing “dark money” in politics as a model for the rest of the nation.

“Other states have passed laws that aim to address secret spending, but Prop 211 puts Arizona at the forefront of securing voters’ right to know … and Prop 211 is a model for other states to follow,” said Patrick Llewellyn, director of state campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.

But what Llewellyn is calling a model, critics are calling a free speech threat. Opponents went to court last week to block what they call an unconstitutional law that will chill free speech, by exposing donors who want their identities kept secret to “retaliation and harassment” for giving to certain causes.

“Prop 211 is styled the ‘Voters’ Right to Know Act,’ but that is a misnomer,” said the suit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court last Friday by the Goldwater Institute. “Voters only get to know who felt comfortable subjecting themselves to the Act’s identity and financial reporting requirements when communicating their political views; voters do not get to know who the Act silenced. That is backwards.”

Samantha Chow/ Cronkite News

Proposition 211 requires that independent organizations – whether an individual or a group – that spend $50,000 or more in an election cycle to support or oppose a candidate or issue in a statewide race must identify any donors who gave $5,000 or more. The trigger for disclosure in local campaigns, such as city council or school board races, is $25,000.

Currently, those outside groups have to report their spending on a campaign, but not where the money came from – hence the term “dark money.”

“Secret spending in elections is a growing problem and that’s not going away,” Llewellyn said. “So we need real transparency about who’s spending big money on elections to reduce the influence of wealthy special interests, and that’s what Prop 211 provides for Arizona voters.”

Arizona voters apparently agreed, approving Proposition 211 by an overwhelming 72.3% to 27.7%, the widest margin of victory of the 10 statewide ballot questions this fall. Almost 1.74 million people voted for the measure, also known as the Voters’ Right to Know Act, compared to 664,111 who voted against it.

That was a sharp change for the measure, which failed to get enough signatures to make it onto the ballot in two previous tries.

Critics raised concerns before this election that, far from leading to transparency, Proposition 211 could end up silencing voters’ voices by making people hesitant to support issues out of fear of retaliation.

Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club said before the election that the dark money measure is not about “trying to provide information to the voters about what’s going on in our elections. We believe the result will be that this information in elections can be used to target, harass and intimidate people … simply because of the causes and issues they want to support.”

The Free Enterprise Club is one of the plaintiffs in the Goldwater Institute suit, along with the Center for Arizona Policy and two unnamed donors, Does I and II, who have “a history of giving to charitable organizations” with the expectation that their identities will be kept private.

The unnamed donors fear that revealing their identities will subject them to “a risk of ‘serious physical harm,’ and includes economic, reputational, and other forms of harassment and retaliation.” That will cause them to stop giving, the suit says, which will, in turn, harm the Free Enterprise Club and the Center for Arizona Policy.

That is not a fear for Pinny Sheoran, president of the League of Women Voters of Arizona and a strong backer of shining light on dark money transactions.

“By having to declare where the original source of the money is, we may be in a better place to identify money from outside the country or even outside the state,” Sheoran said.

She said she is less concerned about abuse of the law than she is about a possible lack of enforcement. Sheoran said she has not seen any indicator or clear guidelines on how the Citizens Clean Elections Commission – which the proposition names as the enforcing authority – plans to ensure compliance.

“If the Clean Elections Commission is a strong body, then it will be enforced appropriately,” Sheoran said. “If it isn’t, then we have to see what happens, then the citizens will have to take it as the law and bring forward violations.”

Under the new law, anyone who violates the disclosure requirement could be fined at least the amount they failed to report, and potentially as much as three times that amount. That money would be put into a fund that the Clean Elections Commission could use to enforce the law.

It could be some time before the law is tested, with the next round of statewide elections not coming until 2024, when state legislators will be up for reelection. But supporters are optimistic.

Llewellyn said he is hopeful the Clean Elections Commission will find a way to both implement and enforce the law. In the meantime, he will encourage other states lacking campaign finance disclosure laws on dark money to look at the Arizona model.

“The goal of Prop 211 and the goal of campaign finance disclosure is to make sure that voters have the information they need to weigh and evaluate the messages they’re receiving,” Llewellyn said.

“Prop 211 provides Arizona voters with real transparency about who’s spending big money to influence their vote, by ensuring that big political spenders in Arizona disclose where their money is really coming from,” he said.

Hudson writes,

“The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests.”

The report details the way the Emirates takes advantage of the US electoral system, which is peculiarly open to dark-money campaign contributions, to push policies that favor it in Washington.

There are allegations that the Emirates worked behind the scenes to install Donald Trump in the presidency. Trump went on to offer Abu Dhabi access to tens of billions of dollars worth of high-tech US weapons.

The Emirates has also widely cultivated retired US military personnel, which is a problem since these individuals can at any time be recalled to active service and so are not supposed to have shadowy foreign ties.

The Intercept did an exposé on UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba that alleged that he had plied US contacts with alcohol, high-life partying, and women.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) is a panel of intelligence officials and academics that tries to bridge the intelligence community and the policy-making world. Contrary to what is popularly assumed, intelligence agencies typically do not make policy but rather do as the executive branch orders them. Moreover, sometimes intelligence agencies cannot get a hearing with policy-makers, and so the NIC is a conduit to the latter.

Hudson notes that it is highly unusual for such a report to be produced concerning a country friendly to the US. It should, however, be noted that the Emirates has often proven to be a fickle friend. It is not an ally, since the US and the UAE have no treaty obligation to defend one another, unlike NATO. UAE banks have been accused of laundering Iranian money, enabling Tehran to skirt US sanctions. The UAE has also pursued adventures such as the Yemen War, which the Biden administration opposes. The UAE recently voted to cut OPEC quotas, putting up the price of gasoline, after President Biden had asked them to pump more oil.

Informed Comment reported on some of these Emirati influence operations in May 2018, concluding that the Emirates sought to put Trump in the presidency in 2016. I wrote that:

“Another meeting between the Trump campaign and a representative of the leader of the United Arab Emirates has been uncovered by the New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, and David Kirkpatrick, this one in August of 2016.

The gathering at Trump Tower was arranged by George Nader, a Lebanese-American international fixer with ties to Israeli intelligence as well as to Erik Prince’s Blackwater mercenary company. In the past decade, Nader emerged as an adviser to Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, 57, [crown prince] of the UAE.

Donald Trump, Jr., attended, as did Joel Zamel, head of an Israeli psy-ops firm called Psy-Group specializing in manipulating social media. Zamel appears to have been offered to Trump by the UAE and Nader, and the connection suggests that Mohammed Bin Zayed of the UAE has been deploying Israeli companies for various purposes for some time and offered to let Trump in on the deal. Zamel and Psy-Group are denying working for the Trump campaign according to the Times.”

I added,

“Mohammed Bin Zayed, having helped elect Trump, then slipped into the US incognito (highly irregular) in December of 2016, while Obama was still in office, for a meeting at Trump Tower with Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon. Kushner told the crown prince he wanted a back channel to Russia. Flynn had been communicating directly with Russian ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak. Apparently the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was so thick he did not realize that Kislyak was under NSA surveillance. Jared seems to have realized the danger of a direct communication, so he asked the UAE to set up a back channel.

In January of 2017 before the inauguration, Prince met with Nader and Kirill Dmitriev, an investment banker whose bank is under US sanctions and whose wife has long been best friends with and works for Putin’s daughter. Dmitriev, with whom the UAE has business, was being provided to Trump at Jared’s request as the back channel in place of Kislyak. Also at the Seychelles was Elliott Broidy, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, who had done $200 million in arms sales with the UAE and is also close to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu . . .”

I concluded,

“So the plot had several angles:

1. Get Trump elected since he is corrupt and can be easily bribed and possibly blackmailed

2. Use him to lift sanctions on Russian firms in which the UAE had invested.

3. Use him to scotch the Iran nuclear deal and put downward pressure on Iran’s oil sales, which would help the UAE make more money from its own oil.

4. Offer lobbying money as bribes to Trump principals so as to reward them for past cooperation and to encourage future cooperation.

5. Enlist the US in a UAE/ Saudi raid on Qatar’s $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, while at the same time drying up funding for the Muslim Brotherhood.”

I once observed that since Americans put their politicians up for sale, they should not be surprised when someone buys them.

( ProPublica ) – Cole Wist was a Republican state House member in Colorado with an A grade from the NRA. Then, in 2018, he supported a red flag law, sponsoring a bill to allow guns to be taken away — temporarily — from people who pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.

Wist lost his seat in the legislature that year in the face of an intense backlash from Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a gun rights organization in Colorado that boasts it accepts “no compromise” as it battles “the gun grabbers.” The group campaigned against him, distributing flyers and referring to him on social media as “Cole the Mole.”

Wist, an attorney, doesn’t regret trying to enact what he considered a measured response to an epidemic of gun violence in the United States. He acted after a mentally ill man in his Denver suburb killed a sheriff’s deputy. The bill didn’t pass until after Wist was out of office and his successor, Tom Sullivan, shepherded it through. Sullivan is a Democrat who lost his son in the Aurora theater massacre.

Wist left the Republican Party this year, citing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as the reason, and is now unaffiliated with any political party. Days after the slaughter of 19 children and 2 adults in an elementary school in Texas, ProPublica talked to Wist about the challenges ahead as proponents once again work to enact gun reforms.

Colorado is one of 19 states, including Illinois, Florida and Indiana, that have red flag laws, sometimes called extreme risk protection orders. Texas does not. After the Robb Elementary School murders on Tuesday, a bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate agreed to negotiate over possible anti-violence measures, including expanding red flag laws.

In Colorado, a spokesperson for the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners called Wist “a sellout” on Friday and said the organization had no choice but to work against him. “At the end of the day, my goal is to hold politicians accountable regardless of whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat,” said RMGO’s Executive Director Taylor Rhodes.

Rhodes called the assault on the elementary school a “massive terrorist attack” but said gun control is not the answer.

“We protect everything in our nation that’s valuable with guns. We protect our banks with guns, courthouses … our homes. We protect them with guns.” The group’s logo includes an image of a firearm that resembles an assault rifle.

This interview with Wist has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about why you introduced the legislation in Colorado.

Every time we have an incident like this, people tend to go into their camps. We’ve got some folks who say we should ban certain kinds of guns or expand universal background checks or any other number of policy proposals to try to eliminate guns from society. On the other hand, you have folks who say no, these are mental health issues, this is an indication of a larger mental health crisis in the country. But you know, I don’t really hear a whole lot of policy solutions from those folks. So in an effort to try to pair concerns about mental health and the combination of mental health crisis with access to firearms and weapons, I started investigating extreme risk protection orders and how they’ve been passed in other states. And one of the first states in the country to do this was Indiana. And I don’t think you’d really think that Indiana is a hard left state, by any means. … And ultimately, I decided to sponsor legislation relating to extreme risk protection orders.

When you served in the state legislature, the Republicans controlled the state Senate and Democrats had the House. What was the makeup of your district?

I represented a district that at that time was predominantly Republican. It had historically elected Republican legislators, but it was a suburban district becoming more purple. And, you know, look, when you’re elected to represent a district in the legislature, you’re not just elected by the people that voted for you, you’re elected to represent everyone in the district, and that includes unaffiliated and Democratic voters.

Who opposed you when you ran for reelection in 2018?

So there’s a group called the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a very active gun rights organization. They targeted me or targeted my race for campaign activity and actively worked against me. … They put flyers on people’s doors, including my own door, and used their resources to campaign against me.

Are the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners similar to the National Rifle Association?

I think they characterize themselves as being the no-compromise gun rights organization. So I would characterize them as certainly more aggressive on gun rights issues than the NRA, and the NRA is the more well-known organization, the one with more resources. But in Colorado, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners is the gun rights group that seems to have the most sway. They’ve been successful in recalling a couple of legislators here.

Did it seem like they sacrificed your seat to send a message to other lawmakers to stay in line?

I guess that’s a fair interpretation, that you either stay in line and vote the party line on this issue, or they will remove you. And that’s what they did. I mean, there were other factors in play in 2018. That was also the midterm election of Donald Trump’s first term in office or his only term in office. … So there were more issues in play than gun policy. But it was certainly a group that worked against my reelection and didn’t help. … It might have been enough to suppress turnout on the Republican side for me.

What was the reaction from the GOP leadership to your sponsorship of the red flag bill?

I was the assistant minority leader in the state House at that point. There was an effort to strip me of that leadership post. That effort failed. I think there’s some reluctance in Republican circles here to take on groups like the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners for fear of getting primaried, for fear of having them work against you. And I suppose people may look at my experience as being something that deters them from even having conversations. I introduced a bill that was very controversial. In those circles, even being open to conversations about gun policy or gun safety legislation creates risk for folks in Republican circles here. So, if your objective is to stay in office for a long time and continue to get reelected … you don’t cross that line.

In the aftermath of Uvalde, what does your experience suggest about the likelihood of our politicians enacting some measures to prevent future atrocities?

I see some of the same signs happening again, in the aftermath of this event, where everyone sort of retreats to the corners. And some people are calling for banning certain kinds of guns and changing the purchase age for certain kinds of guns. If you try to ban AR-15s, I think that’s a policy solution that some people think is something we should do. I don’t agree with that. We’ve got millions of guns already in the possession of gun owners across the country. How much of an impact are you going to have if you ban certain kinds of guns at this point? I think a better discussion is to talk about why people commit these kinds of violent acts with guns and other weapons. … And so I think red flag laws and legislation that focuses on trying to reduce risk and talking about why these kinds of events happen is the most productive conversation for us to have. Let’s give law enforcement and families tools that they can use.

But one of the things that’s lost in this conversation is that — I’ll talk specifically about Colorado — we have one of the highest suicide rates in the country. We also have one of the highest percentages of gun ownership in the country, and the highest percentage of suicides here are committed by guns. So when folks are going through a severe mental crisis, yes, there’s a risk that they might go commit a homicide, but there’s probably a greater risk that they’re going to hurt themselves. So I think there’s this way of characterizing red flag laws as confiscating guns and trying to hurt someone’s constitutional rights. But instead, I think it’s something that’s being used to help protect that person, to prevent them from harming themselves and prevent them from harming family members.

Can you describe the toll this experience took on you and your family?

I received threats as a result of going through that process. And that was very stressful for my family. I don’t miss that part of public life. And, you know, social media and other things have made being in office very difficult. And folks can say just about anything and do say just about anything. So I can choose to do a couple of things. As a private citizen, I can kind of retreat from this and not talk about it, or try to do what I can to raise awareness and just try to encourage folks to come together. I don’t know that you’re ever going to change everyone’s minds. But we don’t solve problems unless we talk to each other and not talk past each other. And every time we have an incident like what happened in Texas this week, there’s sort of the initial, let’s talk, let’s come together, let’s talk about this. But I’m just amazed at how quickly everyone just sort of retreats to the same old political position. I hope this time is different.

( Cronkite News ) – WASHINGTON – Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to back the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion social and clean-energy spending package has made her a target for Democrats – and possibly “the most powerful person in Washington right now,” one analyst said.

It’s not the first time that Sinema, a Democrat, has bucked her party on high-profile measures that need every Democratic vote to pass in the evenly divided Senate.

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(Video by Brenda Rivas): Sinema’s Strategy: Cronkite News

——

That has brought scorn from Democrats in Washington and Arizona, with the state party this month threatening to formally censure her if she “continues to delay, disrupt or votes to gut” party priorities.

But it has also landed Sinema numerous meetings with the president this week and led to surprisingly high support for her among Arizona Republicans, according to a recent survey.

It’s a balancing act, but one that has “all eyes … on Sen. Sinema,” said Mike Noble, chief of research at OH Predictive Insights.

Eyes are currently on Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., two centrists who have said the $3.5 trillion price tag is too high for President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan, a domestic spending plan that calls for everything from free community college and child care to clean-energy and housing projects. The White House insists the plan will be paid for in full by tax increases on high earners and corporations.

The House has already approved the plan, but with the Senate evenly divided and Republicans dead-set against the measure, Democrats cannot afford to lose any votes. Which makes Manchin, a senator from a small state, and Sinema, a relatively junior member of the Senate, suddenly more important.

Biden has met one-on-one with both Manchin and Sinema repeatedly in recent days, trying to broker a deal.

“The president’s role and work in communicating with Sen. Manchin and Sen. Sinema to help get that done is probably one of the most constructive roles he can play,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday. “And that’s what he’s been focused on over the last few days.”

That has done little to calm progressives in the House, who have threatened to block a popular $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that would fund roads, ports, transit and other projects, unless they get assurances that Manchin and Sinema will get on board with the Build Back Better plan.

Several accused Sinema in news reports this week of refusing to negotiate in good faith, charging that she has not told Biden or Senate leaders exactly what she wants.

That led to a testy statement Thursday from Sinema’s office, which said she had “shared detailed concerns and priorities” in August with the White House and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, including a statement that she could not go along with the $3.5 trillion price tag. Claims that she has not shared her views with Schumer and Biden “are false,” the statement said.

“While we do not negotiate through the press … (Sinema) continues to engage directly in good-faith discussions with both President Biden and Sen. Schumer to find common ground,” the statement said.

But her positions – including a refusal to do away with the Senate filibuster and a vote earlier this year against a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage – have made her increasingly unpopular with progressives back home.

A recent poll by OH Predictive Insights found that 46% of Arizona voters had a favorable opinion of Sinema, compared to 47% for Arizona Democrat, Sen. Mark Kelly. The survey of 882 Arizona voters was taken from Sept. 7 to 12 and had a 3.3% margin of error.

But while Kelly was viewed favorably by 80% of Democrats surveyed, just 56% of Democrats felt the same way about Sinema. And 40% of Republicans viewed Sinema favorably to 20% for Kelly, more of what the survey called her “quite interesting” numbers.

“Republicans haven’t had an excuse to not like her so far,” Noble said. “But if she were to vote for this (Build Back Better) bill, it would be very hard for her to get back to the current level she’s at.”

Despite pushback from her party, Sinema is not under the same pressure as other Democrats who are up for re-election next year. Her term runs through 2024, giving her plenty of time to turn her numbers around, Noble said.

That was echoed by Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher for Inside Elections.

“Democrats feel a sense of urgency to not just help the American people, but to have something tangible to show voters what they have done with the power voters gave them,” Gonzales said, urgency that is not present for Sinema.

Related story

Biden, senators tentatively agree on $1.2 trillion infrastrusture plan

“Ultimately, the political impact of her maneuvering won’t be known for another few years since she’s not going to face voters until 2024,” Gonzales said. “That’s the ultimate test of how voters view her actions during this negotiation process.”

Sinema did not respond to requests for comment for this article. And while Manchin has spoken and written in the media on his concerns about the bill, Sinema has been mostly silent with the public.

But Laura Rodriguez, legislative director for the Center for American Progress, said, “That’s just the way that she functions.”

“She is very clear that she doesn’t like to negotiate in the press. She negotiates with her colleagues,” Rodriguez said.

While Sinema “shouldn’t have to give every single detail of every single thought,” a little more communication could be helpful, Rodriguez said. But she said Sinema’s reticence also keeps her from painting herself into a corner.

The fact that she has continued to talk with the president is a good sign, Rodriguez said.

“This is a really complicated issue that has been made a lot more complicated by a lot of the negotiating in public,” Rodriguez said.

In two decades of working in and around Congress, Rodriguez said she “has never seen anything like this,” and that the “second-by-second twist and turns have heightened the temperature.” But it’s important to remember, she said, that legislating can be a long, drawn-out process.

“If the vote were to happen today and it were to fail, it’s important to realize that will only be another step in the journey of getting the bill done,” she said.

Diannie Chavez is a visual journalist completing her bachelor’s degree in journalism. Chavez, who interned at Phoenix Magazine, is a visual reporter for the D.C. News Bureau.

Brenda Rivas expects to graduate in December 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication and a minor in business. Rivas, who has interned with Voyage Productions, is working in the Phoenix News Bureau.

Via Cronkite News

The amount of money spent on US elections eclipses the annual total economic output of some small countries. The total spending by candidates, political parties and independent campaign groups in the 2016 race was US$6.5 billion – comparable to the GDP that year of Monaco, Kosovo or Liechtenstein, and more than double that of Liberia.

The 2020 election cycle is forecast to smash previous spending records, with the Center for Responsive Politics estimating it will cost US$11 billion. That would be comparable to the 2019 GDP of Equatorial Guinea or Chad.

By late September 2020, President Donald Trump’s direct re-election campaign had already spent US$362.5 million, while Joe Biden’s had spent US$352.4 million. But this only tells part of the story of the money pouring into this election.

Although campaigns have traditionally been funded by direct donations to candidates, in 2010 the US Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on independent campaign spending by corporations and labour unions were unconstitutional, due to their restriction on free speech.

This ruling, known as Citizen United, meant that corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, paving the way for the production of what has become known as Super Pacs.

While direct corporate and union donations to candidates remain illegal, Super Pacs have been described as “shadow political parties”, which are permitted to raise funds to run their own campaigns independently of candidates. They are subject to fewer regulations, due to the constitutional protection of free speech, are often able to raise money from anonymous sources due to legal loopholes, and are permitted to receive unlimited donations from corporate and union sources.

As a comparative political finance scholar, my ongoing research involves analysing the development of political finance regulations across a number of advanced liberal democracies. As the 2020 presidential election race nears its end, it’s worth looking back at what has changed in the past decade, and what it tells us about how money is being spent.

Increased independent spending

Since the Citizens United ruling, election expenditure has significantly increased, with an immediate explosion of independent spending from groups such as Super Pacs, directly after the decision. Comparing the electoral cycle directly before Citizens United in 2008 to the next comparable cycle in 2012, using data from the Center for Responsive Politics via the open source website Open Secrets, reveals an increase of almost 600% in just four years.

This increase continued, albeit at a slower rate, reaching a record high of US$1.4 billion in 2016. At the time of writing, independent spending on the 2020 election has already exceeded comparable spending in the 2016 cycle, with US$1.6 billion being spent in this way. This is an increase from the 2016 figure of roughly US$1.4 billion.

While this increase indicated an upward trend in electoral spending, patterns in spending by presidential candidates have not mirrored this.

In 2008, presidential candidates spent a combined total of around US$1.7 billion. A decrease of 18% followed in the 2012 electoral cycle and, although presidential candidates increased their spending in the 2016 cycle, this value was still below that of 2008, reaching a figure close to US$1.5 billion in 2016.

Analysing spending data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that the total value of independent expenditures increased by roughly 875% between the 2008 and 2016 election cycles, while spending by presidential candidates decreased by 13% in this period. These trends show a shifting pattern toward independent campaigning, with spending in this area matching that of presidential candidates in 2016.

Changing dynamics of donors

In order to keep up with election costs, some candidates focus their fundraising on donations below US$200. During the 2018 midterm elections, senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders respectively raised 76% and 56% of their total funds in this way.

In contrast, some candidates refrain from focusing any efforts at small donors, with senators Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer and Rob Portman receiving less than 5% of their 2018 midterm election funds from donations below US$200.

While these cases show the extremes of small donor versus large donor fundraising strategies, financial disclosures reveal an overall trend toward large donor strategies since the Citizens United ruling. In 2010, large donations accounted for 62.6% of the value of donations to all candidates, parties, and independent spending groups such as Super Pacs. This percentage has increased in every election cycle since and, in 2018, large donations accounted for 71% of total fundraising, according to data from Open Secrets.

Impact of spending limits

In presidential elections, candidates are subject to spending limits if they accept public funding. With an increased amount of private money in the system, most candidates have chosen to forgo public subsidies in recent elections, rendering the spending limit obsolete.

Several other countries, including Canada and the UK, successfully cap election spending. In the UK, limits are set at £30,000 per seat contested by each party. This means that parties which contest all seats are limited to roughly £19.5 million in campaign expenditures. As a result, campaign costs in the UK are significantly lower than in the US. The 2017 general election campaign cost around £42 million to parties and campaigners, rising from around £39 million in 2015.

The use of campaign spending limits has also restricted the inflation of campaign costs, both in Canada and the UK. Without effective spending caps, presidential campaign costs in the US increased by 75% between 2004 and 2016.

If the trends exhibited in these graphs continue, spending in US political campaigns is likely to become less transparent and more concentrated. With the rise in the proportion of money coming from independent groups, which is largely anonymous due to disclosure loopholes, the true sources of funds will become increasingly opaque.

William C.R. Horncastle, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Total spending in the 2020 federal elections is projected to set a new record of almost US$11 billion by November.

When adjusted for inflation, that’s over 50% higher than 2016 election spending. This year’s federal election spending – for the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives – is on track to be double what it was in 2008.

The surge in campaign spending is striking. But my research on campaign finance regulation suggests the volume of election spending is not the main problem with the U.S. campaign finance system.

The real challenge for American democracy is where this money comes from.

No public campaign funding

American federal election campaigns are entirely funded by private money; most of it is provided by wealthy individual donors, political action committees and other interested organizations. Wealthy candidates also fund their own campaigns.

The U.S. has a public funding program for presidential elections, established in 1974. For two decades it played an important role in campaigns.

But it provided candidates with limited funds and imposed very low spending limits. As the needs and costs of contemporary campaigns grew, the system collapsed. While still available, no major candidate has taken public funds in the last three presidential elections.

When Joe Biden ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988, and again in 2008, he qualified for and accepted public funds, which accounted for 22% and 14%, respectively, of his campaign funds.

This year, as of Aug. 31, 2020, all of the $531 million funding Joe Biden’s campaign so far came from private funds, according to Open Secrets, a publicly available database that tracks campaign finance data. So did the $476 million funding President Donald Trump’s reelection bid so far.

The one-thousandth of the 1%

The private dollars that fuel U.S. elections come mostly from a tiny fraction of society. Critics of American inequality often talk about “the 1%” – but in campaign finance it is the 0.0001% who matter.

Federal law requires political campaigns, parties, PACs and outside groups to report the identities of donors who give at least $200.

The September campaign finance filings – which cover contributions through the end of August – indicate that just 2.8 million people, or 0.86% of the U.S. population, had contributed $200 or more to this year’s federal elections. Yet collectively, these relatively high spenders had supplied almost 74% of all campaign funds.

That’s almost $5 billion given by a small fraction of Americans. An even smaller number – 44,000 people, or about one-hundredth of 1% of the United States’ 328 million people – have so far given $10,000 or more each to this election, adding up to nearly $2.3 billion. And 2,635 people or couples – less than one-thousandth of the U.S. population – together provided $1.4 billion, roughly one-fifth of total campaign contributions reported as of late summer.

These numbers reflect only publicly reported contributions. The rise of “dark money groups” – which spend to influence election outcomes but do not have to disclose their donors because they claim to be primarily nonelectoral – suggests even more campaign money is provided by a few elite donors.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

The donor class

America’s donor class is not representative of the broader community whose interests are at stake in an election.

Donors are older, whiter and wealthier than America as a whole, my analysis shows, and they hail disproportionately from certain places. So far this year, more money has come from Washington, D.C., than from 20 states combined, and Joe Biden raised 10% of his money from just six zip codes – areas in Washington, D.C., New York City, a New York suburb and a suburb of Indianapolis.

Certain industries, like finance, real estate, communications, law, health care, natural resources, oil and gas, are also particularly big election spenders via both personal and PAC donations related to the industries. There is no formal tracking of these donors.

According to media reports and websites like Open Secrets, recent years have seen a striking increase in the number and importance of small donors. This year, small donors account for about 22% of campaign fundraising, up from 14% in 2016.

That’s a step in a more democratic direction. But big donors are still pivotal to America’s campaign finance system.

Impact on democracy

Whoever wins in 2020 will be tasked with addressing the pandemic’s devastating economic and public health harms. A host of other enormously consequential issues – from racial justice and immigration to trade, the environment and the courts – also hinge on the election outcome.

Having a small number of very wealthy individuals financing political candidates distorts the political process. This is less a classical quid pro quo – the exchange of campaign dollars for votes – than it is politicians’ reluctance to take positions that are at odds with the interests of their large donors. What gets on – or stays off – the legislative agenda can be driven by donor concerns.

Donor influence tends to be more significant for issues that get little media attention – who gets a specific tax break, for example, or qualifies for coronavirus relief – than for hot-button concerns like reproductive rights. But campaign money inevitably shapes government action and who benefits from it, who is harmed and who is ignored.

As the Supreme Court explained in sustaining the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act’s ban on “soft money” – donations that can affect an election without being expressly focused on the election – “The evidence connects soft money to manipulations of the legislative calendar, leading to Congress’s failure to enact, among other things, generic drug legislation, tort reform and tobacco legislation.”

In 2018, then-federal budget director and former congressman Mick Mulvaney admitted as much with disarming candor: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

As the saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

A version of this story was first published on Nov. 2, 2018.

Richard Briffault, Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation, Columbia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Billionaire Backers: Exploring The Big Money Behind Biden And Trump | Forbes

( Otherwords.org) – Less than 1 percent of the population provides most of America’s campaign funds. It looks nothing like the rest of us. By Chiraag Bains | March 17, 2020

Ten years after Citizens United, our elections are awash with money from mega-donors and corporations. They drown out the voices of everyday people and warp public policy, with serious consequences for racial justice and the economy.

An antidote is sitting idle on Senator Mitch McConnell’s desk: H.R. 1, the For the People Act, passed by the House a year ago this month.

In 2016, campaign spending on the presidential election totaled $2.4 billion. The average Senate winner in 2018 spent $15.7 million, with challengers needing on average $23.8 million to topple incumbents. Even local election costs can be forbidding. Spending in the recent Los Angeles County school board primary topped $6 million.

Although occasionally a candidate like Bernie Sanders can raise the money to compete from small donors, that’s the exception. The vast majority rely on a small class of large donors.

How small? Less than 1 percent of the population provides the majority of campaign funds. Indeed, just 25 people pumped over $600 million into the 2016 federal elections.

That donor class looks nothing like America. My organization found that 92 percent of federal election donors in 2014 and 91 percent of donors in 2012 were white. Those numbers are even more skewed for large donors.

What’s the consequence of a political system dependent on an overwhelmingly white donor class? Unsurprisingly, racial inequity.

First, the big money system is a barrier for Black and brown candidates.

They’re less likely to have rich friends and business associates, making it difficult to raise the money to compete. When candidates of color do run, they raise on average 47 percent less than their white counterparts, who are also more likely to be able to self-fund. This is a big reason 90 percent of our elected officials are white, even though 37 percent of us are people of color.

Second, the policy preferences of the donor class are far out of step with those of the general public, and particularly of people of color.

For example, people of color support the role of government in reducing inequality at significantly higher rates (67 percent) than do people earning over $100,000 a year (53 percent). People of color are also more likely to list job creation and affordable college as their economic priorities, while the wealthy cite lower taxes and deficit reduction.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, when elected officials champion an agenda that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of Black and brown families and working people of all races.

The challenge is that the Supreme Court has invalidated commonsense campaign finance protections time and again. It has struck down reasonable contribution limits and restrictions on self-financing, allowed the rise of SuperPACs, and greenlit wealthy individuals pouring millions into the system.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would stay within the lines drawn by the Court and still curb the harmful influence of big money.

For starters, it would create a public financing system for congressional candidates that would match contributions under $200 at a rate of 6:1. In this way, a $20 donation would become $140, a $200 donation $1,400.

The cost of the program is reasonable — about $1 per citizen per year, by one estimate. The bill also creates a pilot program of $25 vouchers for people to give to congressional candidates they support.

These simple ideas work. Similar public financing programs in New York City and Arizona, and a voucher program in Seattle, have diversified the donor pool and allowed more candidates of color to run.

More equitable public policy would follow. For example, public financing in Connecticut was crucial to the state breaking a legislative logjam and becoming the first in the nation to guarantee paid sick leave.

Countering the undue influence of big money in our elections is a civil rights issue. H.R. 1 passed the House a full year ago. The American people should demand that it become law.

Chiraag Bains is the Director of Legal Strategies at the racial justice “think-and-do tank” Dēmos. Follow him at @chiraagbains. This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.

Via Otherwords.org

Featured image: h/t Shutterstock.

It should be underlined, though, that the possibilities for foreign interference in US elections is a much bigger phenomenon than simply this sort of organized-crime style arm twisting by a president.

The Republican-majority Supreme Court has gutted campaign finance law and has allowed essentially anonymous money to flood into campaigns. The Roberts court, in striking down McCutcheon v. FEC”> in McCutcheon v. FEC limits on individual spending on campaigns, opened the door to Donald Trump to simply buy the 2016 election. If he had tried to do that in the 1990s he’d have gone to jail just for that infraction.

In addition, since the money is anonymous, it can be foreign. I wrote on this issue earlier,

“A series of pro-corporation Supreme Court decisions and the latter’s disingenuous equation of money with speech, including “Citizens United”, have turned the United States from a democracy to a plutocracy. It is not even a transparent plutocracy, since black money (of unknown provenance) has been allowed by SCOTUS to flood into elections. These developments are not only deadly to democracy, they threaten US security. It is increasingly difficult to exclude foreign money from US political donations. We not only come to be ruled by the billionaires, but even by foreign billionaires with foreign rather than American interests at heart.”

At The Intercept, Jon Schwarz and Lee Fang explained that Citizens United (2010) changed everything, allowing corporations to contribute their own money to Super-PACs, with the only restriction that they not directly coordinate with the candidates’ campaigns (a vague restriction, the contravention of which is almost impossible to prove).

Citizens United, by bestowing political personhood on corporations, opened US elections to foreign money in several ways, they point out.

Ghost corporations, the ownership of which is opaque, can be set up precisely for the purpose of contributing to super-PACs. The FEC is underfunded and castrated and lacks the resources and the will to look into the actual owners of the ghost corporations.

Further, some 25% of securities in US corporations are owned by foreign nationals, and it is absolutely impossible to squester foreign and US interests within these corporations or the super-PACs they support.

Non-profit foundations can also contribute to super-PACs. They write,

“Want an example? Consider, for instance, that the American Petroleum Institute is partially financed by the U.S. subsidiary of Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company. In the 2010 midterm elections, API was one of the funders behind attack ads that helped the Republican Party take back the House of Representatives from the Democrats and stop most of Obama’s plans in their tracks.”

Nor is there any prospect of this situation improving. When Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed on the Supreme Court, I wrote,

“Big Money Dominating Politics. Citizens United (2010) and other recent Supreme Court cases allowing the super-rich to saturate the airwaves with advertising for the candidate they back, with full knowledge that they thereby ingratiate themselves with the candidate and can expect to call in favors– all this has made money king in the American electoral system. It isn’t that most Congressmen are personally bribed. It is their campaigns that receive the money. But a big war chest is job security for congressmen and senators. Richard L. Hasen explains that “Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court in 2010 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” rejected the idea that it is corruption for large donors to the campaign of a politician is corruption. Rather, the donor receives only “Ingratiation and access” which is permissible. In a case decided in 2014, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts went even further, celebrating the idea of politicians responding to the wishes of big donors and spenders. Not only are “ingratiation and access” afforded those making large campaign contributions not corruption, Roberts explained. Donors “embody a central feature of democracy — that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.” In a democracy, Roberts tells us, we should want politicians to be responsive to big donors.Citizens United was … a fragile 5-4 decision that could have been weakened or ultimately overturned. Now, it is 6-3 and likely become set in stone to the vast detriment of our democracy.”

So arguably if you’re upset about soliciting or permitting foreign interference in US elections, John Roberts is somebody you should look at impeachings.

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Bonus Video:

Wochit Politics: “Jeb Bush’s Super PAC Lands In Hot Water Over Foreign Donation

Could “fake news” have helped determine the outcome of the 2016 presidential election?

Social media users and intensely partisan news broadcasts disseminated a massive number of messages during the campaign. Many of these messages demonized candidates and seriously distorted the facts presented to voters. One recent study of nearly 25,000 election social media messages shared by Michigan voters identified nearly half as “unverified WikiLeaks content and Russian-origin news stories” that fall “under the definition of propaganda based on its use of language and emotional appeals.”

What hasn’t been clear, however, is how much of an impact – if any – these “fake news” items had on the outcome of the election. To our knowledge, there have been no empirical studies that have systematically assessed the extent to which believing fake news stories influenced voting decisions in 2016. So, we set out to do one.

We are scholars associated with the Comparative National Elections Project, which is coordinated at The Ohio State University. In December 2016, we commissioned YouGov to conduct a nationwide post-election survey. Our study concludes that fake news most likely did have a substantial impact on the voting decisions of a strategically important set of voters.

Here’s what we learned.

Our research questions

The survey had 1,600 respondents. We focus our analysis on the 2016 electoral behavior of 585 respondents who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. This strategic subset of voters was selected for two reasons.

First, restricting our analysis to former Obama supporters allowed us to weed out those respondents who were hostile to all Democratic candidates.

Second, if Hillary Clinton had retained the support of Obama voters, she would have most likely won the 2016 election. Instead, just 77 percent of Obama voters supported Clinton. Our survey data show that 10 percent of these former Obama voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016, 4 percent switched to minor parties and 8 percent did not vote.

Our key research question is: What accounts for these defections?

Study methodology and results

Our survey asked 281 questions, including three false statements best characterized as fake news – two negative statements about Hillary Clinton and one positive statement about Donald Trump. All three were widely disseminated through social media and spread by mainstream and partisan news outlets.

The first is that “Hillary Clinton is in very poor health due to a serious illness.” Twenty-five percent of all survey respondents believed that this was “definitely true” or “probably true,” as did 12 percent of our former Obama supporters.

The second is a statement that asked our respondents if they believed that “During her time as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton approved weapon sales to Islamic jihadists, including ISIS.” Thirty-five percent of our national sample believed that Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State, as did 20 percent of former Obama voters.

Finally, the third is a statement that “Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president prior to the election.” About 10 percent of our national sample and 8 percent of Obama supporters thought this statement was true.

Belief in these fake news stories is very strongly linked to defection from the Democratic ticket by 2012 Obama voters. Among respondents who didn’t believe any of the fake news stories, 89 percent cast ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Sixty-one percent of those who believed one fake news item voted for Clinton. But only 17 percent of those who believed two or all three of these false assertions voted for Clinton.

To be sure, data from a one-time survey cannot “prove” that these fake news items caused former Obama voters to defect. It is also possible that someone who chose not to vote for Clinton might endorse these false statements after the fact in order to rationalize their voting decision.

We also explored a number of other possible explanations for these voters’ defections.

What else could explain these defections?

The Clinton campaign heavily emphasized gender issues in an attempt to mobilize female voters. Could this have alienated men to the extent that they abandoned their prior support for the Democratic presidential candidate? Our data provide no support for such a claim. An identical 23 percent of both male and female respondents who had voted for Obama in 2012 defected from the Democratic ticket.

Did the lack of an African-American presidential candidate lead black voters to waiver in their commitment to the Democratic candidate? No. Indeed, fewer African-American voters (20 percent) defected from Clinton than did white voters (23 percent).

Age is weakly related to defection from Clinton. While 20 percent of voters over 35 abandoned the Democratic ticket in 2016, 30 percent of younger voters did so.

Education is also weakly associated with defection. Among college-educated former Obama voters, just 16 percent did not vote for Clinton, but the percentage almost doubled to 27 percent defecting for those with lower educational attainment.

More overtly political variables had a stronger impact. Half of those who placed themselves near the conservative end of the ideological scale defected from the Democratic candidate, while only 14 percent of those on the left did so.

Similarly, dissatisfaction with the condition of the economy also had an impact: Just 12 percent of those who thought that the economic situation at the time of the survey was “good” or “very good” abandoned Hillary Clinton, while 39 percent who regarded the economy as “poor” or “very poor” at the time of the survey defected from the Democratic ticket.

Party identification exerted a stronger influence. Among the former Obama voters who identified themselves as Democrats, 7 percent did not vote for Clinton. This rose to 40 percent among independents and to 68 percent among those who identified with the Republican, Libertarian or Green parties.

Controlling for alternative explanations

So do all of these alternative factors mean it’s impossible to measure the unique impact of belief in fake news on the vote in 2016? Actually social science offers us a way. Multiple regression analysis is a tool that allows researchers to account for many different factors influencing behavior, in this case defecting from the Democratic ticket in 2016.

We used this tool to estimate the joint impact on the vote of all of these alternative explanatory factors. The first equation we ran included gender, race, age, education, ideological orientation, dissatisfaction with the condition of the economy and party identification. All together, these variables “explained” 38 percent of the likelihood of defection.

We then added the fake news items to the equation to measure their impact. The three fake news items explained an additional 14 percent of the likelihood of Obama voters defecting after the influence of all of the other variables had been taken into consideration.

We also added one more compelling element to our study. Using “feeling thermometers,” we measured how much each respondent liked or disliked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If defection of Obama voters was only due to disliking Hillary Clinton or liking Donald Trump, then the introduction of this thermometer variable into the equation should make the link with fake news disappear.

Though how people felt about Clinton and Trump did somewhat reduce the strength of the relationship between fake news and defection, it did not eliminate it. Belief in fake news remained a significant predictor of defecting from Clinton. In sum, even after the impact of all of these other factors is taken into consideration, former Obama voters who believed one or more of these fake news stories were 3.3 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016 than those who did not believe any of these false claims.

That may not seem like much, but Clinton lost the presidency by about 78,000 votes (0.6 percent of nationwide vote) cast in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Though our evidence does not “prove” that belief in fake news “caused” these former Obama voters to defect from the Democratic candidate in 2016, our study results suggest that it is highly likely that the pernicious pollution of our political discourse by fake news was sufficient to influence the outcome of what was a very close election.

Richard Gunther, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, The Ohio State University; Erik C. Nisbet, Associate Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Environmental Policy and Faculty Associate with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, The Ohio State University, and Paul Beck, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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TYT: “Trump Supporters LOVE Fake News”