Political Forecast

The answer is outrageously expensive for a state Iowa’s size. From the Register:

“A new study shows a heavy reliance by incumbent state lawmakers on special-interest political action committee money to finance their re-election efforts.

“Members of both political parties rely heavily on PACs, not individuals in their districts, to fund their campaigns,” the study said. “Nearly 60 percent of the money given to incumbents comes from PACs.”

The study was financed by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, and was conducted by Drake University political science professor Art Sanders.

[…]Small individual contributions accounted for only 20 percent of the money given to candidates, the study found.

The study showed an enormous growth in the demand for campaign money even at the legislative level. To become serious challengers, Iowa House candidates must raise about $65,000 while it takes $100,000 to become a serious Senate challenger.”

Professor Sanders has done some amazing work here, and it makes me proud to have him as a professor. I hope to review the overall study in the next few days and have a greater post about it. You can read the study via Voter Owned Iowa, with links to a MS Word Doc or a PDF.

What I must say is that Democrats in the state legislature must certainly jump on to the idea of real campaign finance reform to clean up politics in this state. While I’m not going to go as far as Ed Fallon and say that all real reform rests on campaign finance–the state legislature will still be ineffective in some cases whether there are contribution limits or not–but significant reform can occur. I know that elections are coming up statewide in November for the entire House and for part of the state Senate, however, if the national Democratic Party can stress the idea of “Honest Leadership” then why shouldn’ t the state parties?

And, I must note right now what State 29 also mentioned over at his place: Prof. Sanders’ stressing of a need for the Iowa Elections and Campaign Disclosure Board to change their reporting processes to make it more transparent and accessible to the general public.

“Before moving on to an analysis of the role of money in the elections of 2004, one important point needs to be made about the disclosure that currently occurs. It is totally inadequate. Disclosure is supposed to allow citizens to make judgments about their representatives and whether or not they are working in the interests of their constituents or are beholden to those with money. But the disclosure that now occurs has no transparency. One cannot really figure out what is going on without undertaking a major, extremely time-consuming examination of files on a line-by-line basis. An enterprising reporter might take the time to examine some single issue from this perspective,9 but an occasional in-depth story on a single issue by an enterprising journalist cannot provide citizens with the bigger picture they need to judge their representatives. It also, by necessity, must come long after the election is over.

Disclosure, the way it is undertaken in Iowa, allows our representatives the illusion of public accountability. They can point to the
fact that all of these figures are available for public inspection. But that accountability is actually an illusion. The level of accountability it provides is not much more than we would get if all of these contributions were made in private. The fact that somebody might go through things carefully might provide some pause before an attempt was made to “buy influence,” but the
likelihood of actually having to account for where you got your campaign money and what, if anything, might have resulted from those contributions is so remote that the disclosure laws are practically worthless.

The IEDC could solve this problem without any changes in procedure if they had enough money to enter all of the data sent by the candidates into searchable databases. This would take time, so you would not have the kind of instantaneous disclosure offered by the FEC at the federal level, but it would mean that within a short time anyone, a political scientist like me, a group with an interest in good government, a curious citizen or a reporter, could examine this information in a systematic way and help us all understand whether or not we need to be concerned about the role of money in our system. Defenders of the system often argue that money does not have the kind of influence that detractors say it does. Perhaps they are correct. But unless we can easily track where that money comes from and the way that money is used, we have no real way of knowing one way or the other.”

Like I said, I’ll look more at it later. But I wonder what IEDCB Director Charlie Smithson has to say about Sanders’ comments? They might have a good chance to meet, as his bio says he has taught election law here at Drake since 2001. He’s not listed on the faculty webpage of the law school, but maybe’s he’s just an adjuct.

Smithson has also commented on the blog before, back in my first post criticizing the IEDCB. He wrote:

“The Ethics Board’s Web site was ranked 7th out of 50 states. To get electronic filing, it takes a change by the legislature. Trust me, we are not thinking “like paper.” I also find it interesting that someone who got in trouble with the Board back in 1998 for failing to file reports is now taking shots at the same entity.”

I subsequently emailed him, asking for more information or a guest post, but I never heard back.