Campaign Spending Is Down

The drawing above (found at the website Ghost in the Machine) pretty accurately depicts the electoral politics in this country, where the person with the most money has a significantly better chance of winning than his opponent does -- a situation made only worse by the Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited money to come in from corporations and other special interest groups in national elections. In fact, it has gotten so bad that in most places you can't even run for national office unless you are rich or have rich donors to whom you've sold your soul.

This is especially true in presidential elections, where the spending has really gotten out of hand. Here are the spending figures for the candidates in the last five presidential elections:

1992...............$192,200,000
1996...............$239,900,000
2000...............$343,100,000
2004...............$717,900,000
2008...............$1,324,700,000

And with the Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited and secret donations to "Super PACs" (which every candidate has), most pundits expect the campaign spending in the 2012 presidential race to dwarf the total for 2008. Some even expect it to be around $3 billion. That's a staggering amount of money for one race in one election.

It's predictions like that which makes this fact so amazing -- in the 2012 campaign for president, at least so far, spending is down. And it's down significantly.


Here is how Bloomberg News describes the situation:


The top nine Republican candidates spent $53 million through September, compared with $132 million spent at the same time four years ago. The sum is even lower than totals reported during the same period in the 2004 and 2000 primaries -- when most candidates still were abiding by campaign spending limits in order to receive public matching money.

In the crowded Democratic primary in 2004, the candidates had spent $58 million through Sept. 30, 2003. Four years earlier, a primary field of 10 Republican candidates had spent $68 million in the first three quarters of 1999.

This is not due to a lack of campaign funds. As I said, all of the candidates have Super-PACs, and many have received direct donations of large sums of money. There is no doubt that much more could have been spent. Why hasn't it been spent?

One of the main reasons is the large number of debates -- all of them televised nationally. In addition, there has been quite a lot of coverage by all media organizations (broadcast TV, cable TV, newspapers, internet). The candidates simply haven't had to spend large amounts of money to get their message out (even those with messages that make no sense).

Now I have no doubt that the spending will pick up, and will probably set a new record before the next president is elected -- maybe even approaching that $3 billion figure. But the muted spending so far lends credence to the idea pushed by many progressives -- the public funding of elections with required coverage (fair coverage) by all media. This has shown that good coverage by the media, a substantial number of debates, and a moderate amount of public funding could work -- even in a presidential election. And it would open the system to more people, while taking the influence peddling out of it.

The large amounts of money required to currently run for public office has resulted in a government controlled by corporations and special interests. Going to publicly-funded elections, at least for the president and the U.S. Congress, could take the corporate and special interest influence out of the elections and return control of the government to the people. Isn't it time for that to happen?