Dollarocracy, p.9
Dollarocracy, page 9
That brings us into the $9 billion range for baseline spending on races where voters had to pick a candidate. So where do we find the last billion on the way to the $10 billion figure? On the part of the ballot that makes no mention of parties’ candidates, except in judicial races.
Welcome to the new frontier of the money-and-media election complex.
INITIATIVES, REFERENDUMS, AND JUDICIAL RACES
If you were looking for extreme spending in 2012, for the spending that produced the most ads on television stations in states such as California and Maryland, you would have to pay attention to the campaigns for and against initiatives and referendums. According to State Legislatures magazine, 174 ballot measures were considered by the electorates of thirty-eight states on November 6, 2012.86 That figure does not include the hundreds of local school and public-services spending referendums considered in states across the country; almost all of these referendums saw substantial spending. How substantial? Add up the numbers from all the ballot measures—from liquor law changes in Chicago precincts, where local bar owners ponied up their thousands, to the $55 million fight over labeling of genetically modified food in California87—and the total easily exceeds $1 billion.
In many statewide “issue” votes around the country, the spending went beyond “substantial.” The proper word is “extreme” or, arguably, “obscene.” Consider this: in California, spending on statewide initiatives was at least $450 million. In Maryland, it was $100 million. In Michigan, the initial spending reports pointed to total spending easily in excess of $150 million.88 The Michigan figure is instructive, as the Detroit News explained in a preelection report that summed up the extent to which initiatives and referendums trumped all other politics in a number of major states:
The high-profile ballot issues alone total $149.5 million—and counting—of the campaigning to amend the constitution, a whopping 85 percent of all spending on state races.
Ballot proposal spending dwarfs the $107 million spent in 2010 on all state races for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, the Legislature and courts.
“This is really all about the ballot stuff—that’s what’s carrying the whole thing,” said Rich Robinson, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which tracks money in state politics.
Campaigns to amend the state constitution or thwart those changes are being largely funded by a handful of wealthy individuals, labor unions and organizations bundling millions in anonymous donations, a Detroit News analysis of spending data shows.
Some of the donors are more traceable than others.
The most widely known financier of ballot issues is billionaire Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel “Matty” Moroun, whose companies have dumped $33.1 million into a campaign to pass Proposal 6, requiring statewide votes for new public bridges, and another $3.5 million for Proposal 5, seeking a two-thirds voting threshold for the Legislature to raise taxes.
In the Proposal 2 fight over a union-led effort to enshrine collective bargaining in the constitution, members of the DeVos family in Michigan have contributed $1.58 million to a campaign to defeat the initiative while billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife have chipped in another $2 million to the cause.89
Hey, not that Sheldon Adelson? Not the guy whose $150 million in contributions to Republican candidates and causes made him the most notorious campaign donor of the super-PAC era? The very same. Like most of the major donors to candidates, including the privatization-obsessed DeVos family, Adelson moved his money into referendum and initiatives campaigns that gave him a chance to achieve his ends.90
A century ago, in the Progressive Era, initiatives, referendums, and recalls (“IRRs,” as the old campaigners described it in the shorthand of the day) were seen as democratizing tools—like the direct election of U.S. senators—that would take politics out of the back rooms and give people the power to set agendas, frame policy, and hold elected officials to account. Throughout much of the twentieth century, in states from California to Maine, this was the case. With the rise of Dollarocracy, however, IRRs have been co-opted by the Money Power.
The same goes for judicial elections. Just as the Progressives of a century ago sought to battle corruption by handing more authority over policy-making to the voters via direct-democracy initiatives, and just as they sought to take the power to select senators away from state legislators and give it to the people, they battled to move authority over the selection of state and local judges out of the back rooms and into the hands of the voters. There are now thirty-nine states where the voters, as opposed to the politicians and their Big Money backers, choose justices and judges in elections that, until recently, served the purpose the Progressive reformers of the past intended. The relative integrity of the justice system for much of the twentieth century makes it easy to forget just how corrupt the process was only one hundred years ago. In recent generations, there was minimal funding of these judicial races: American Bar Association ratings, newspaper recommendations, experience and reputation in the community, and party affiliations went a long way toward determining the outcomes. As recently as 1990, total campaign spending for all state Supreme Court races nationwide was estimated at $3 million.
That is no longer the case. Over the past two decades, corporate interests and funders like the Koch brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have zeroed in on judicial elections as a cost-effective way to buy control of the court system. By the mid-1990s, the spending on state Supreme Court races increased fivefold from 1990; it then tripled again by 2000, according to a 2012 study by the Center for American Progress (CAP). “Since then,” the CAP reports, “corporate America’s influence over the judiciary has grown. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in particular, has become a powerful player in judicial races. From 2001 to 2003 its preferred candidates won 21 of 24 elections. The chamber spent more than $1 million to aid the 2006 campaigns of two Ohio Supreme Court justices, and in the most recent High Court election in Alabama, money from the state’s chamber accounted for 40 percent of all campaign contributions.”91 That does wonders when it comes to reducing corporate liability in civil cases, among other things.92
The most dramatic recent example of the payoff provided for corporate interests that set out to buy state court elections comes from West Virginia. The A. T. Massey Coal Company—yes, the same Massey Energy Company responsible for the worst American mining disaster since 1970, killing twenty-nine West Virginia miners in 2010—took an interest in West Virginia court contests in 2002 when a West Virginia jury ordered Massey to pay out $50 million to plaintiffs. As the matter went through the appeals process, then CEO Don Blankenship spent $3 million of his own money in the 2004 election cycle to unseat a justice on the state Supreme Court and gain the seat for his ally, Brent Benjamin. Well, Benjamin won, and when Massey’s appeal got to the state’s highest court, Benjamin joined the majority in a 3–2 vote to overturn the award.93
The process accelerated in 2012, as tens of millions of dollars in money, much of it from outside the targeted states, poured into judicial contests. The spending shattered records and produced tens of millions in spending and some of the crudest campaigns of the season.94 With spending for down-ballot state judicial posts, as well as circuit, county, and municipal judgeships, added in, the total spending is certainly in the range of $50 million. Most of that money was targeted to win control of the top courts, since they have the power to overrule the lower courts. And a substantial portion of the spending on High Court races paid for advertisements designed to discredit and defeat sitting justices. According to the Justice at Stake Campaign, a record-breaking $29.7 million was spent on more than 51,000 television ads seeking to influence 2012 state Supreme Court contests.95 Ten states saw television advertising exceed $1 million: Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and, yes, West Virginia. And the money came from familiar groups, such as the American Future Fund, the shadowy organization that pumped money into the West Virginia attorney general contests. Talk about coming at a “problem” from all sides—the American Future Fund was picking prosecutors and judges.96 But that’s just one reason that “investing” in judicial contests is probably the best investment to be found in American electoral politics. Because there is scant press coverage of judicial races, and because in some states judicial candidates are limited in what they are allowed to talk about during the campaign, judicial candidates who are seen as insufficiently procorporate tend to be easy pickings. A barrage of negative attack ads is often enough to do the trick.
The entire process has made a mockery of the justice system. As retired U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor put it, “When you enter one of these courtrooms, the last thing you want to worry about is whether the judge is more accountable to a campaign contributor or an ideological group than to the law.”97 “Every litigant,” said the CAP’s Billy Corriher, “is supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law. But this principle is less true with each passing judicial election.”98 Indeed, a new Justice at Stake survey finds that 76 percent of Americans believe campaign contributions have at least some impact on the decisions made by justices and judges in their courtrooms.99 So much for the integrity of the bench.
Of course, this is exactly as might be expected under Dollarocracy. And, notably, it is in the judicial competition that the promise of Dollarocracy is being realized for corporate donors—far more rapidly and far more clearly than in contests for top-of-the-ballot partisan posts or referendum votes. In a number of states, once the moneyed interests control the High Court, increasingly no one even makes a serious attempt to challenge their dominance. In Alabama in 2012, for instance, the Democrats fielded a candidate in only one of the five open Supreme Court races. Just the threat of money is sufficient to keep challengers at bay.100
Maybe this is how Dollarocracy solves the problem of too much money in elections: just stop having meaningful and competitive elections.
THE BIGGEST LOSER?
Arguably, the dominant meme among the pundits in the weeks following the 2012 election was that Big Money lost and Adelson was the biggest loser of them all. Along with his wife, the twelfth richest man in the world, and the seventh richest in the United States, poured tens of millions into helping Newt Gingrich get beat in the Republican primaries; then he poured tens of millions, and tens of millions and tens of millions more, into helping Mitt Romney get beat in the November election. They spent tens of millions more, directly and indirectly, to influence U.S. House and Senate contests. Major publications and Web sites took a certain glee in noting, as Politico did in December 2012, that “Adelson’s massive amounts of cash largely went toward supporting candidates who lost.”101 “Sheldon Adelson Had a Bad Night,” read the Salon headline on the morning after the November 6 election. But Adelson, media outlets noted with the fascination reserved for coverage of the emotional state of the rich and famous, did not seem all that upset. Perhaps because, while he might not have been winning high-profile races, he was winning contests for “causes close to Adelson’s heart”—and his pocketbook.102
In Michigan, the heartland of the United Auto Workers union and a key base of strength for unions nationally, organized labor sought to protect collective bargaining rights with a constitutional amendment. Antiunion interest from across the country rushed in to defeat the referendum, knowing that its success might create a model for prounion ballot initiatives across the country. Adelson and his wife wrote some of the biggest checks, and they were not just “interested observers.” Just weeks before the Michigan vote, the Adelsons poured $2 million into the coffers of Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, one of several shadowy groups that flooded Michigan airwaves with ads that, literally, sought to suggest that collective bargaining guarantees would make it impossible to remove child molesters from schools.103
It was an antiunion fantasy, but Adelson has few passions to rival his antilabor stance. His Venetian hotel is the Las Vegas Strip’s only hotel-casino that is not unionized. The billionaire says he started backing the Republican Party in the 1990s because it was more consistently antiunion. And union activists like Yvanna Cancela, the spokeswoman for the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, know that. For all the speculation about Adelson’s motivations for donating huge amounts of money in 2012, the casino king’s disdain for organized labor still topped the list. “It is a shame that we have a political system that allows for one person to essentially buy elections,” said Cancela after the election. But wait . . . didn’t all the headlines say Adelson lost?104 Well, he won in Michigan. The measure that would have provided a clear constitutional protection for collective bargaining rights was defeated.105
The New York Times headline two days after the election read, “In Michigan, a Setback for Unions.” It was also an opening for those “causes close to Adelson’s heart.”106 Barely a month after the voting was done, the Michigan legislature passed so-called right-to-work legislation, the most virulent of all antilabor initiatives. In one week, basic protections for all workers were dramatically weakened and the ability of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson to rake in ever-greater profits with the prospect of paying lower wages and benefits to employees was increased.107 And crushing labor is a twofer, because as unions decline in power, so does their ability to pry the Democrats away from dollarcrat policies, not to mention win elections for them.
This is the best way to understand the role that Big Money plays in our politics in the emerging Dollarocracy. The Money Power may win or lose a race, even an election year. But its authority is not conveyed via an election result. Its authority comes from its permanent presence. The Money Power is constant and, ultimately, definitional. Its purpose is not just to prevail on a particular election day. Its purpose is to create a politics where temporary setbacks are just that: temporary. It is their permanence that gives the biggest spenders their power. Adelson knows this. Maybe 2012 wasn’t all that great an election year for him. But it finished with a great big win on one of his most vital issues in a key state, and that win set the stage for new fights filled with promise for Adelson. After all, if the unions that played such a critical role in thwarting Adelson’s ambitions in 2012 could be beaten down in Michigan, the heartland of the labor movement, how hard will it be to beat them down in Nevada, the heartland of Sheldon Adelson’s empire? And if the ability of unions to function as effective political forces can be undermined in enough states, then Adelson’s election year “investments” will go a whole lot further.
Maybe that’s why Sheldon Adelson was smiling when he jetted into Washington a few weeks after the 2012 election in which he was supposedly the biggest loser. Adelson met with congressional leaders and power players. He was startlingly blunt about why the doors opened for him. “Mr. Adelson, 79 years old, said he has many friends in Washington,” wrote the Wall Street Journal, which quoted the billionaire as saying, “but the reasons aren’t my good looks and charm. It’s my ‘pocket personality.’” He was, explained the Journal, “referring to his donations.” And Adelson had a message for those who might have thought he was rethinking his political investment strategies: “Mr. Adelson’s 2012 donations were double what he spent in 2008, and looking ahead, he said, he was ready to again ‘double’ his donations,” reported the Journal. “‘I’ll spend that much and more,’ he said in his first extensive post-election interview. ‘Let’s cut any ambiguity.’”108
It’s cut.
NO COUNTRY FOR RICH MEN?
Big donors like Sheldon Adelson were just getting started in 2012. And for every showman like Adelson, there are hundreds of other billionaires, centimillionaires, and CEOs waiting in the wings who prefer anonymity but, like Adelson, demand results. With the institutions, professionals, and PACs they bankroll, they will be back. With more money. And better strategies. “Independent groups have cemented their status as permanent fixtures in the political firmament,” noted the Los Angeles Times. “The center of the strategic universe has shifted from parties to the PACs,” said former George W. Bush strategist Mark McKinnon in the same LA Times article.109
In fact, they never left. Issue advertising is projected to hit $2 billion in 2013, almost double the figure for 2009.110 The megafunders and their PACs are already chomping at the bit about the 2014 election, as it is a midterm with a much lower turnout, especially among traditionally antidollarcrat voters. “A lot of these groups may have much better impact on the money spent on the House and Senate,” just as they did when they dominated the 2010 election, said Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation.111 “Once seasonal affairs, campaigns from the presidential race down to the House contests are becoming longer and more intense,” said Confessore, “driven by deep-pocketed donors eager to see incumbents pummeled throughout the political cycle.”112 In short, thanks to Big Money, says Elizabeth Wilner, “we are in the era of the permanent campaign.”113
The “investors” bankrolling permanent campaigns don’t worry about silly notions like “throwing good money after bad.” For them, political investments come from the petty-cash drawer. What does $150 million mean to Adelson, a man with a net worth of $20.5 billion?114 If Sheldon Adelson donated $10 million to political campaigns every single day from January 1, 2013, until Election Day, November 1, 2016, he would wake up on November 2, 2016, with a net worth of $6.6 billion and still be among the 50 or 60 richest people in the United States. Hell, Adelson could spend $150 million on politics—his epic contribution total for 2011–2012—every single day for four months and still be a billionaire twice over and one of the 250 wealthiest persons in America. The Koch brothers could spend $150 million on political campaigns every single day for a full year, and each of them would still remain among the 120 richest Americans.115 Their heirs and their heirs’ heirs and on and on would still have lives of unimaginable leisure. But that won’t happen, because if Adelson and the Koch brothers spend money, it will have the effect of increasing their net worths; that is the whole point. This is the problem with how so much of the media covered the explosion of campaign spending in 2012. There was the assumption, writ large across the reporting, that millionaires and billionaires were desperately spending their fortunes down in order to “buy” an election. That’s silly. A David Koch, a Dick DeVos, a Sheldon Adelson does not spend until it hurts on politics. They’re making investments, not high-end consumer purchases, and those investments are small in the scheme of things.
