To the modern left, the corrosive effect of money in politics is an immutable article of faith. The fact that campaign spending poisons our democracy is an inviolable liberal truth, like Keynesianism, tea party racism or the infallibility of their leader, Jon Stewart.
A handful of recent high-profile court cases in Wisconsin and nationwide have magnified the role of money in politics, setting progressive imaginations aflame with visions of corruption. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign's Mike McCabe said the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case, which allowed unions and corporations to spend money to directly support candidates, "will rank right there with the Dred Scott decision as one of the darkest moments in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court." (Fortunately for McCabe, Dred Scott was unavailable for comment.)
Most media coverage of campaign finance ranges between whether money in politics is lighting democracy on fire or merely running our system of governance through a wood chipper. But rarely is an important question asked: Does campaign spending really affect campaigns that much?
The answer: Sometimes, but not nearly as much as we think.
Campaigns are extremely complex endeavors, which are affected by any number of factors. Perhaps most important, the partisan makeup of a district controls who is elected; it doesn't take a seasoned political mind to recognize that Republicans vote for Republicans and Democrats vote for Democrats.
Because of how voters are represented in a given district, many races are over before they even begin. For instance, the Koch brothers could drop $100 bills out of a helicopter in Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore's Milwaukee district, and the GOP's infinitesimal chances of victory still couldn't be viewed with a microscope. Candidates who spend more money than their opponents lose all the time — just ask Meg Whitman, who spent $140 million in the 2010 California gubernatorial race only to be clobbered by Democrat Jerry Brown.
Other factors are just as complicit in a candidate's success. For instance, incumbents in normal elections have huge advantages; they already have proven to voters that they are electable, they have their office resources to contact constituents and are able to use the media to spread their message over the course of a two-, four- or six-year term. One landmark study estimates the built-in advantage of incumbency to be about 10 percentage points.
Other ingredients season the campaign stew. How charismatic is the candidate? Is he or she effective at garnering good media coverage or prone to saying boneheaded things? How competent is the campaign? What is the political landscape like? Is the candidate running in a "wave" year that puts his or her party at a distinct advantage or disadvantage?
One 1993 study estimated that between 91% and 93% of voters typically know who they are going to vote for before campaigns even get started — and even that seems low in high-profile contests such as this year's Wisconsin gubernatorial race.
A knee-jerk blanket condemnation of campaign spending also masks the benefits money in politics provides. For one, money helps challengers overcome the aforementioned built-in advantage incumbents enjoy. In 2000, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers John J. Coleman and Paul F. Manna found that increased campaign spending actually makes races more competitive than they would be otherwise. Other studies have shown that the higher the spending in the race, the more knowledgeable voters tend to be about the candidates and the more likely citizens are to turn out and vote.
There's also the small matter that campaign spending is free speech, protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has moved quickly recently in removing restrictions on political speech, but since 1976's Buckley vs. Valeo decision, it steadfastly has maintained that money is speech because "virtually every means of communicating ideas in today's mass society requires the expenditure of money."
Thus, restrictions on campaign spending restrict who can speak and how much. This leaves a select few with the resources to make a difference in campaigns; newspapers, celebrities, television stations and YouTube video creators all would enjoy a larger share of the public discourse by utilizing their built-in audiences.
Finally, Americans aren't nearly as gullible as campaign finance reformers believe them to be. We don't sit in front of our glowing tubes all night, uncritically soaking in campaign advertisements without a modicum of skepticism. Generally, people recognize ads as propaganda and process them accordingly. Whether a voter sees a television ad once or 30 times, the ad is usually taken slightly less seriously than an episode of "The Bachelor."
So next time you see a press report critical of money in campaigns, ask yourself: "What exactly are they afraid of me seeing?"