money in politics essay

FiveThirtyEight

Sep. 10, 2018 , at 5:56 AM

How Money Affects Elections

By Maggie Koerth

Filed under 2018 Election

To quote the great political philosopher Cyndi Lauper, “Money changes everything.” 1 And nowhere is that proverb more taken to heart than in a federal election, where billions of dollars are raised and spent on the understanding that money is a crucial determinant of whether or not a candidate will win.

This year, the money has been coming in and out of political campaigns at a particularly furious pace. Collectively, U.S. House candidates raised more money by Aug. 27 than House candidates raised during the entire 2014 midterm election cycle, and Senate candidates weren’t far behind. Ad volumes are up 86 percent compared to that previous midterm. Dark money — flowing to political action committees from undisclosed donors — is up 26 percent.

Presumably, all that money is going to buy somebody an election. In reality, though, Lauper isn’t quite right. Political scientists say there’s not a simple one-to-one causality between fundraising and electoral success. Turns out, this market is woefully inefficient. If money is buying elections a lot of candidates are still wildly overpaying for races they were going to win anyway. And all of this has implications for what you (and those big dark money donors) should be doing with your political contributions.

The candidate who spends the most money usually wins

How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win. From 2000 through 2016, there was only one election cycle where that wasn’t true: 2010. “In that election, 86 percent of the top spenders won,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign fundraising and spending.

Looked at this way, a campaign is like a dinner party, and fundraising is the plates and silverware. You may work hard. You may get a lot of other things right. But if everyone is eating four-star lasagna off the table with their hands, the party will still be a failure and remembered more for what it didn’t have than what it did.

Overall, advertising ends up being the major expense for campaigns, said Travis Ridout, professor of government and public policy at Washington State University. In 2012 and 2014, the average Senate campaign spent 43 percent of its budget on ads, he told me, and the average House campaign spent 33 percent. Presidential races spend an even bigger chunk of their budgets on advertising. In 2012, for instance, ads made up more than 70 percent of President Obama’s campaign expenses and 55 percent of Mitt Romney’s.

But that doesn’t mean spending caused the win

Money is certainly strongly associated with political success. But, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning,” said Richard Lau, professor of political science at Rutgers. “I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”

That’s not to say money is irrelevant to winning, said Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford who also manages the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections . But decades of research suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research on this was done in the last century, Bonica told me, and it generally found that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear . Even the studies that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money causes wins. In fact, Bonica said, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan . There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to vote a split ticket because they liked your ad.

Instead, he and Lau agreed, the strong raw association between raising the most cash and winning probably has more to do with big donors who can tell (based on polls or knowledge of the district or just gut-feeling woo-woo magic) that one candidate is more likely to win — and then they give that person all their money.

Advertising — even negative advertising — isn’t very effective

This is a big reason why money doesn’t buy political success. Turns out, advertising, the main thing campaigns spend their money on, doesn’t work all that well.

This is a really tough thing to study, Ridout said, and it’s only getting harder as media becomes more fragmented and it’s less clear who saw what ad how many times and in what context. But it’s also something people have been studying for a long time. Driven by fears that attack ads might undermine democracy by reducing voter turnout, researchers have been looking at the impacts of negative advertising since the 1990s. And, beginning around the mid-2000s, they began making serious progress on understanding how ads actually affect whether people vote and who they vote for. The picture that’s emerged is … well … let’s just say it’s probably rather disappointing to the campaigns that spend a great deal of time and effort raising all that money to begin with .

Take, for example, the study that is probably the nation’s only truly real-world political advertising field experiment . During Rick Perry’s 2006 re-election campaign for Texas governor, a team of researchers convinced Perry’s campaign to run ads in randomly assigned markets and then tracked the effect of those ads over time using surveys. Advertising did produce a pro-Perry response in the markets that received the treatment. But that bump fizzled fast. Within a week after ads stopped running, it was like no one had ever seen them.

What’s more, Ridout said, ads probably matter least in the races where campaigns spend the most on them — like presidential elections. Partly, that’s because the bigger the election, the more we already know about the people running. It’s not like anyone went into the 2016 presidential race confused about who Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were, for example. Also, partisan politics are just really powerful: In 2016, about 7 in 10 voters identified as either a Democrat or Republican, according to exit polls ; 89 percent of Democrats voted for Clinton and 90 percent of Republicans voted for Trump. Even in congressional races, most voters aren’t persuadable. Instead, when there’s a shift from one party to another, it’s usually more about national waves than what is happening in individual districts, Bonica said. So the ad run by your would-be congressperson matters less than the overall, national sense that this year is really going to swing for one party or another.

There are times when money does matter, though

“Money matters a great deal in elections,” Bonica said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they know are a sure thing.

In the 2016 campaign for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, for example, House Speaker Paul Ryan plunked down $13 million winning a race against a guy who spent $16,000. Across the country that same year, 129 members of Congress were elected in races where they spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars — and their opponents reported no spending at all . It wasn’t the cash that won the election. Instead, challengers likely chose to not invest much money because they already knew they would lose.

But in 2017, Bonica published a study that found, unlike in the general election, early fundraising strongly predicted who would win primary races. That matches up with other research suggesting that advertising can have a serious effect on how people vote if the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.

Basically, said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, advertising is useful for making voters aware that a candidate or an issue exists at all. Once you’ve established that you’re real and that enough people are paying attention to you to give you a decent chunk of money, you reach a point of diminishing returns (i.e., Paul Ryan did not have to spend $13 million to earn his seat). But a congressperson running in a close race, with no incumbent — or someone running for small-potatoes local offices that voters often just skip on the ballot — is probably getting a lot more bang for their buck.

Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy . In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged.

“That may be the biggest effect of money in politics,” West wrote to me in an email.

So you probably missed the window to have your donation really affect this election

Look, donating to congressional and presidential campaigns is not, across the board, a great investment. Fortune magazine told rich people as much back in 2014 , pointing to big donors like billionaire Tom Steyer — who poured $50 million into TV ads for various candidates and got less than half of them elected. If big donors wanted their dollars to actually affect the outcome of elections, Forbes wrote, they should focus spending on issue referendums, small races and long-term strategies (making sure state-level redistricting ensures highly predictable partisan elections at the national level, say).

And researchers have similar advice for “petite” donors. The best time to donate is early on in the primary, Bonica said, when out-of-the-gate boosts in fundraising can play a big, causal role in deciding who makes it to the general election. At this point in the cycle, not only are most general election races in the hands of partisan district power, but ads start to be less and less effective. If the Rick Perry study made you think it’s best to advertise the week before an election — well, at that point, pretty much everybody has made up their minds, and studies show ads don’t have much effect at all.

Lauper’s recording was a cover of a song written by Tom Gray in 1979 and recorded by his band, “The Brains.” The aphorism dates to at least the 1870s and a book by American author Caroline Cheesebro’ called “The Foe in the Household.”

Maggie Koerth was a senior reporter for FiveThirtyEight. @maggiekb1

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2020 Election (1214 posts) Congress (568) 2018 Election (360) 2018 House Elections (146) Political Science (131) 2018 Senate Elections (129) 2018 Governors Elections (68) Campaign Finance (27)

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13 The Role of Money in Politics

Robert E. Mutch is an independent scholar who has written extensively on campaign finance reform. His most recent books are Campaign Finance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (Oxford University Press, 2014).

• Published: 02 April 2020
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Money in some form has always been needed to finance politics, even in the eighteenth century, before there were any political parties or election campaigns in the modern sense. The ways of raising and spending that money have changed many times since then, as have opinions about how it should be raised and spent. As long as that money was raised and spent inside the parties, and as long as it came from politicians themselves and from rank-and-file party members, regulation of campaign funds was minimal. That began to change toward the end of the nineteenth century, when political money began to come from rich donors outside the parties. Government regulation began when opinions about how campaign funds should be raised and spent became legitimate questions of public policy. This chapter reviews how campaign finance practices and the laws regulating them have changed over the course of American history.

Introduction: Money in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Money has not always played a major role in American politics but wealth has. Government and politics in the eighteenth century, when electorates were small and elected offices few, were dominated by the rich and well-born. There were no campaigns in the modern sense. Candidates got out the vote by using their own and their gentry supporters’ patron-client relationships: men who owed them money, who rented property from them, or who in any other way needed or wanted the goodwill of the wealthy would be told which candidates their patrons favored.

Candidates did not often do more than this to win office, so cash outlays were rare but not unheard of, as may be seen in the cases of two future presidents: George Washington and John Hancock (Hancock was president of the Continental Congress). When Washington first stood for a seat in the Virginia legislature in 1758, he spent a large sum of money to buy wine and liquor for the voters on election day. This practice, called “treating,” was fairly common in the South. Washington was not bribing voters with drink but being a generous host to the poorer men who had come to the county seat to vote, showing the magnanimity that was expected of rich planters. 1

Treating was not common in colonial Massachusetts, but merchant candidates there used cash in other ways to strengthen patron-client relationships. It was in the nature of their business that Boston merchants depended on the services of artisans and shopkeepers from nearly every craft in the city. As the biggest customers for those services, rich merchants like Hancock were also the direct or indirect employers of many of the city’s voters, as well as their creditors and landlords. When an election approached, a candidate might decide it was time to get his roof repaired and buy more barrels for his counting house, or that rent and debt payments could be put off until after an election. 2 Hancock, who was one of the richest men in the colonies, could afford to do even more: when a devastating fire swept through Boston during his first year in the Massachusetts legislature, he matched the amount of money the government appropriated for disaster relief. 3

This kind of patron-client politics gradually became much less important after the Revolution as restrictions on voting decreased and the number of elective offices increased. 4 The old gentry families, joined by the new ones of the Industrial Revolution, were still politically active. As the young republic became a mass democracy, however, the new political parties needed many more candidates to fill the larger number of government offices.

It was the salaries paid to the men—they were almost all men—who held those offices that solved the greater part of the problem of how to finance the new democratic politics. The parties paid election expenses by levying assessments on everyone from candidates for Congress to lighthouse keepers and night watchmen. Candidates had to help pay for their campaigns, and clerks had to pay for the jobs they held by kicking back 2 to 3 percent or more of their salaries to the party that appointed them.

This form of political finance was called the spoils system, the “spoils” being all the government offices that could be filled by victorious parties. Nineteenth-century parties were held together by long chains of government patronage that stretched from Washington, DC, to small towns all over the country. Men won patronage appointments as rewards for political heavy-lifting, usually in an election. Once in office, they were expected to continue working for the party in addition to paying their assessments. The spoils system was a different kind of patron-client politics. 5

President Andrew Jackson is usually given the credit, or blame, for creating the spoils system, and the first signs of it, at least at the federal level, appeared during his administration. 6 Assessments were at best tolerated by those who had to pay them, and resistance to them occasionally broke out at all levels of government. The new practices raised the question of where campaign funds came from as a legitimate public policy issue. Practical limits on where campaign funds could come from did not give legislators many choices when it came to making policy; but disagreement over where they should come from gave them a weapon they could use against partisan foes.

That weapon was first used in 1839, when Congress investigated embezzlement by the Collector of Customs of the Port of New York. Tariffs were the main source of federal government revenue, which made the New York Custom House the country’s biggest patronage prize and the biggest source of assessment income. Whigs turned the corruption investigation into an inquiry about assessments levied by the administration of Democratic president Martin Van Buren. They also tried, and failed, to pass a bill to prohibit assessments. 7 Two decades later, in the months before the 1860 presidential election, the Republican Party launched a much bigger investigation into President James Buchanan’s administration. The investigation focused on Buchanan’s subservience to the southern wing of the Democratic party, but a secondary target was assessments levied to finance Buchanan’s 1856 campaign. 8

Once in office, however, the Republican Party expanded and perfected the spoils system in the much larger federal government that emerged from the Civil War. And it was also Republicans who made the first attempts to reform that system. Republican Party luminary Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced the first bill in 1864, but the one that got the most attention in and outside of Congress was introduced in 1865 by Thomas Jenckes (R-RI), a little-known member of the House. Civil service reform never quite took hold, though, until a revived movement coincided with the assassination of President James Garfield in 1880. The assassin was a disturbed man usually described as a disappointed office-seeker, and once-dormant reform organizations were able to use the shocking event to bring attention to their cause. 9

In contrast to the early days of the spoils systems, when politicians either denounced or denied levying assessments, politicians by the 1880s were more likely to claim that assessments were actually voluntary contributions and to denounce reform as an attempt to suppress political speech. But the times and the sources of campaign funds were changing, and in 1883 Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. The act, which was a revised version of Jenckes’s bill, began the slow dismantling of the spoils system. The parties could afford to support a reform designed to eliminate the financial base that had sustained them for more than half a century because the economic expansion that followed the Civil War produced more than enough private business money to compensate for the loss of kickbacks from lowly government clerks. 10

The Gilded Age was a time of Republican Party dominance, but both parties relied on business money to finance their operations. That changed in 1896, when the Democratic Party split after western and southern populists joined the party’s progressive wing to nominate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan’s nomination drove away the Democrats’ business donors, all but a few of whom fled to the GOP and never returned. The Republicans held on to their business donors, who have remained loyal ever since, making the GOP the sole remaining business party. The Democrats continued to get most of their money from business because that is where the money is, but they never regained the broad business backing they enjoyed during the Gilded Age. The party’s factional split in 1896 created a permanent realignment of the parties’ financial constituencies. 11

The Federal Corrupt Practices Act, 1907–1972

Modern campaign finance reform began at the turn of the twentieth century with a financial scandal in the life insurance business, which was then closely connected to investment banking. An investigation into the business practices of the big insurance firms unexpectedly discovered that those firms had been making corporate contributions to Republican presidential candidates, including generous gifts to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign. 12

The scandal brought together two men who had been advocating for reforms that suddenly became the focus of press and public attention: William E. Chandler, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, who was still promoting a bill he had drafted four years earlier that prohibited corporations from making campaign contributions; and Perry Belmont, a former Democratic representative from New York, who had just failed to get a disclosure law through the state legislature. Belmont and Chandler created the National Publicity Bill Organization (NPBO), the country’s first campaign finance reform group, to persuade Congress to pass their two bills. The Congress that was already in session when the scandal broke out did pass Chandler’s bill—which came to be named after Senator Ben Tillman (D-SC), an unlikely ally who agreed to sponsor it after all of Chandler’s former Republican colleagues turned him down. 13

Belmont’s disclosure bill, however, did not even come up for a vote. The NPBO tried again in 1908, hoping to capitalize on a related scandal about the large fund that President Roosevelt had asked railroad baron E. H. Harriman to raise in 1904. The NPBO found an ally in William Howard Taft, then secretary of war, whose support was not enough to get the bill through Congress. But when he won the Republican nomination a few months later, he pledged to voluntarily disclose his campaign donors and promised to get a disclosure bill passed as president. Bryan, the Democratic candidate, had made the same pledge. Both candidates also discouraged big contributions and launched small-donor programs. 14

The practices introduced by Taft and Bryan became permanent features of presidential campaigns. The release of Taft’s disclosure report, with its many small donors, proved to be a public relations bonanza for the GOP, and the Republican-controlled Congress passed the NPBO’s bill in 1910. Other funding practices changed without being required by law. The same big donors who had given funds in 1904 gave again in 1908, but they made smaller contributions and continued to write smaller checks through the 1950s. The parties soon realized that the small-donor programs they began in 1908 would never bring in enough money to finance a presidential campaign, but they continued those programs into the internet era. 15

Congress took reform even further in 1911. The Democrats had won control of the House in 1910 and passed a bill requiring political committees to disclose their donors before as well as after elections—which Bryan had done in 1908. The Senate, still in Republican hands, extended disclosure requirements to cover primary elections and added limits on expenditures for congressional campaigns. These provisions went well beyond what reformers had in mind, but the final bill still passed easily in 1911.

The new disclosure law, plus Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to challenge President Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination, led Republican regulars in the Senate to hold the first investigation into presidential campaign funds since 1860. A Senate committee was appointed to examine the financing of the 1912 primaries and to take testimony on the financing of the 1904 general election campaigns. The regulars hoped to help Taft and embarrass Roosevelt by throwing more light on the fundraising practices revealed in the 1905–1907 scandals. The hearings did little to help Taft or embarrass Roosevelt, but they did bring out a torrent of new information about the financing of the 1904 campaigns. The most important new finding was a donor list compiled by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1904—the first to be made public for any presidential campaign. 16

Bryan and Roosevelt had in their different ways both been disruptive forces in party fundraising from 1896 to 1912. When the post-Bryan Democrats met the post-Roosevelt Republicans in 1916, fundraising for both parties settled into a stable pattern between the extremes of 1904 and 1908. The Democrats never regained the broad business support they had enjoyed during the Gilded Age, but from 1912 on they were able to raise more business money than had been possible during the Bryan years. But the Republicans got several times more donors and money from the economic elite—the rich and the top officers of the biggest banks and corporations—than the Democrats, a pattern that held steady through the 1960s. 17

The 1920s proved to be an eventful decade for campaign finance laws and practices. The Republican party, justifiably confident of regaining the White House in 1920, conducted that year’s campaign as an exercise in reform. The RNC set a $1,000 contribution limit and conducted a small-donor program based on the Liberty Loan drives that had sold bonds to finance World War I. The party ended up $1,500,000 in the red, however, and tried to retire the debt in ways that got tangled with the Teapot Dome scandal. One of the oil company presidents involved in the scandal gave the RNC an undisclosed, Gilded Age–sized contribution of $260,000. It was never made public because the 1910 law required reports only in election years and it was not made in an election year. The discovery of this loophole was one of the events that led Congress to revise and recodify campaign finance law into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1925. 18

The other event that prompted Congress to act was the Supreme Court’s decision in Newberry v. United States . Senator Truman Newberry (R-MI) had been convicted of spending many times more money in his 1918 primary campaign than was allowed by state and federal law. The Court overturned the conviction but disagreed on the reason for doing so. The justices split 4–4 on whether primaries were elections under the Constitution, but the ninth justice sided on other grounds with the four who believed primaries were not elections. Congress responded to these events by making the FCPA both stronger and weaker: it extended disclosure to cover nonelection years, but it also read Newberry to mean that it had no authority to require primary election candidates to file disclosure reports or comply with spending limits. 19

Bigger changes in laws and practices came in the 1940s, mostly in delayed response to organized labor’s active involvement in the 1936 presidential campaign. The American Federation of Labor stayed on the sidelines, but United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis led a breakaway faction of mostly industrial unions to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which openly backed FDR’s reelection. The CIO and other unions spent more money in 1936 than the total amount organized labor had spent in all previous elections. The Democrats still got many times more money from business than labor, but the 1936 campaign gave the 1896 realignment of party financial constituencies a pronounced class character for the first time. 20

The 1936 election is generally seen as a referendum on the New Deal and as confirmation that the realignment of electoral bases in 1932 was not a fluke. But not everyone in Congress was happy with FDR’s administration. In 1939, acting on evidence that New Deal Democrats had been making political use of the tens of thousands of people who had become federal government employees by working in relief programs, Congress passed the Hatch Act to give civil service protection to those employees. Republicans and southern Democrats amended it in 1940 to cover state government workers who were paid partly from federal government funds. The expansion was controversial because spoils system practices were still common at the state and local levels. New Deal Democrats opposed the new law and tried to kill it by adding a $5,000 contribution limit and a $3 million spending limit as poison pill amendments. Republicans swallowed the pills, though, and the bill—now something neither party wanted—passed.

The RNC revealed the reason for its acquiescence a few weeks later: it said the limits did not apply to the total amount raised and spent by all political committees, but separately to each committee, party and non-party, whether national, state, or local. The immediate result was a mushroom growth of ostensibly independent committees, all raising and spending money on behalf of major party candidates. Independent spending has been a political and legal headache ever since. 21

The political action committee (PAC) was another permanent change begun in the 1940s. PACs were created in response to an attempt by Republicans and Southern Democrats to weaken New Deal Democrats. In 1943 John L. Lewis broke the wartime no-strike pledge the AFL and CIO had made after Pearl Harbor by taking the United Mine Workers out on strike. Lewis had resigned from the CIO and backed Wendell Willkie for president in 1940, putting him at odds with President Roosevelt and other labor leaders. But his strike gave the conservative coalition in Congress the opening they needed to move against organized labor. They passed the War Labor Disputes Act, which prohibited labor unions from making campaign contributions for the duration of the war.

The CIO struck back at once with legal and organizational innovations that made permanent changes in campaign finance practices and law. Because expenditures, as distinct from contributions, were not covered by the law, it got around the wartime ban by using union treasury funds to make expenditures on behalf of candidates. It also created the CIO-PAC, which solicited one-dollar contributions from union members for a fund that was kept separate from the CIO’s own treasury; the PAC made contributions in the 1944 and 1946 general elections only from that fund. This became the model for all later labor and business PACs. 22

In 1947, after Republicans won control of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration, they joined Southern Democrats to pass the Labor-Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act. Amid the act’s restrictions on union organizing was a provision making the wartime contribution ban permanent and adding a ban on expenditures by unions and corporations. Both houses passed it along partisan lines and passed it again on partisan lines to override President Truman’s veto. The Taft-Hartley Act became the most vigorously enforced part of the FCPA and gave rise to a long string of labor union cases in federal courts. Unions’ support for Democrats in 1936 might have been a marriage of convenience, but beginning in the 1940s organized labor became the Democrats’ most reliable financial constituency. 23

The 1950s saw revived interest in reform, partly in response to the rising costs of radio and television advertising and partly to the inadequacy of disclosure. Proposals to create a federal enforcement agency date back to the 1930s, but bills to create something like today’s Federal Election Commission only began to take shape in the 1950s and 1960s. Another old reform idea that was revived in the 1960s was public funding of elections. This idea had been proposed by various people and groups since the first years of the twentieth century and Congress actually passed a public funding bill in 1966. Passage of the bill, however, was less a serious reform than a parliamentary tour de force by its sponsor, Senator Russell Long (D-LA), and bipartisan majorities repealed it in 1967.

The Federal Election Campaign Act, 1971–Present

In 1971 Congress revised and recodified the FCPA as the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). As it had done with the FCPA, Congress strengthened some laws and weakened others: it wrote stricter disclosure requirements but repealed limits on contributions and nonbroadcast expenditures. It even provided for a kind of enforcement agency, at least for presidential campaigns. Reports for House and Senate campaigns were still to be filed with the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate, but reports for presidential campaigns were to be filed with the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), which set up an internal unit to carry out its new function.

President Richard M. Nixon signed the FECA into law, but his reelection committee saw the switch from the FCPA to the FECA as an opportunity to raise money in ways that would have been illegal under both laws. Nixon’s committee acted as though neither law applied in the weeks between the last reporting date under the FCPA and the day the FECA took effect on April 7, 1972. Promising anonymity to donors, it solicited contributions in amounts that exceeded limits under the old law and did not report them under the new one. The newly organized reform group Common Cause took on the job of uncovering these secret contributions, which became part of the Watergate scandal. 24

The Republicans’ 1972 campaign fund was at the time the largest in history, more than twice the size of the Democrats’ fund and, in constant dollars, almost twice the size of the GOP’s 1936 fund. Party finances still followed the 1896 pattern, with Republicans getting several times more donors and money from the economic elite than the Democrats. But the Nixon committees’ intense fundraising in the weeks before April 7 helped make the balance of financial support dramatically lopsided: big donors—those who gave $10,000 or more—gave President Nixon a stunning thirty-six times as much they gave Senator George McGovern. Some of those contributions were illegal, coming from the treasuries of Gulf Oil (now part of Chevron), Goodyear Tire & Rubber, 3M, and other big corporations.

Watergate gave Congress the same kind of external shock delivered by the 1905 insurance investigation. The Senate acted first by almost unanimously passing—the vote was 88–2—FECA amendments that reimposed tighter contribution and expenditure limits and created an independent Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce the new law. Before the House acted on the bill, however, Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and Hugh Scott (R-PA) added public funding for presidential elections. This was much more controversial, especially for Republicans, and public funding dominated floor debate in both houses in 1974. The FECA amendments with public funding passed, but Senate Republicans were notably less enthusiastic than they had been in 1973.

Senator James Buckley (Cons.-NY), one of the conservative minority that had failed to defeat the 1974 law in Congress, joined reform opponents outside of Congress to refight the legislative battle in the courts. In Buckley v. Valeo these opponents challenged the FECA’s constitutionality, arguing that political spending was tantamount to political speech and deserved the same degree of protection under the First Amendment—hence the “money is speech” label for this argument. Imposing limits to reduce wealth-based political inequality, they said, violated the First Amendment; promoting political equality was an impermissible goal under the Constitution. The conservatives’ challenge was couched in terms of constitutional law but was based on a vision of democracy that was much less egalitarian than the one that had informed the first laws.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the first to hear the case, still held to the traditional egalitarian vision. The judges voted 6–2 to reject the challengers’ argument, finding that the new law enhanced First Amendment values by reducing “disparity due to wealth.” The Supreme Court, which had become much more conservative under President Nixon, preferred the challengers’ vision and voted 7–1 to adopt their argument. The justices ruled that limiting expenditures to reduce wealth-based political inequality was “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”

Buckley v. Valeo gave the challengers a substantial, if partial, victory. The justices readily accepted the newest and most controversial parts of the law—public funding and the FEC—and focused their ire on the oldest and least controversial parts—contribution and expenditure limits. They struck down expenditure limits, which had been accepted by large majorities of both parties in both houses of Congress, because they said expenditures were “pure speech,” and therefore untouchable under the First Amendment. They did accept contribution limits, but only as a means to prevent quid pro quo corruption—a rationale that was largely the Court’s own invention, as it had been of little importance in congressional debate.

One of the first consequences of the 1974 FECA was the explosive growth of corporate and other business PACs. Many corporations had had informal political committees for years, but they had little need for PACs until the $1,000 limit made large contributions illegal. The low limit meant that corporations would have to make larger numbers of smaller contributions; that required them to solicit smaller sums from larger numbers of executives, which is what PACs were designed to do. The change in corporate practices showed up in the numbers. Of the 600 PACs that existed in 1974, corporate committees made up only 15 percent and were outnumbered more than two-to-one by labor committees; by 1982 there were about 3,500 PACs, more than 40 percent of which were corporate and only about 10 percent of which were labor. 25

The PAC explosion did put new business money into elections, as about half of corporate PACs were formed by companies that had never had political contribution programs. 26 But there is no way to know whether PACs brought in more business money than there had been before. That money was suddenly much more visible, however—something else PACs were designed to do—so it became more controversial. PACs are the embodiment of special-interest money and they became the reformers’ prime target in the 1980s. They remained the prime target until the late 1990s, when concern about PACs was eclipsed by even greater alarm about soft money.

Soft money resulted from the relaxation of federal law by Congress and the FEC. To address issues that arose in the 1976 election, Congress lifted the limits on money spent for party-building activities such as voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives; those activities still had to be financed with hard money (i.e., money raised under the FECA), but there were now no limits on how much parties could spend. The FEC had already permitted money raised under state laws to be mixed with FECA-regulated funds for party-building activities that involved candidates for both state and federal office. The Republicans quickly saw that the new rules opened a way to raise and spend money that was regulated only by a patchwork of less restrictive state laws and began raising millions of dollars in “outside,” or “soft” (i.e., not FECA-regulated), money. 27

Democrats were slow to catch on, but in 1988 and 1992 they raised almost as much soft money as Republicans. 28 That was just the beginning, however. Soft money really took off when the parties took advantage of Buckley ’s ruling that issue advocacy—ads that did not expressly support or oppose a candidate’s election—was not really political and so did not have to be funded with hard money. The result was that most soft money for both parties came from corporations, a perfectly legal evasion of the Tillman Act. The parties raised more than three times as much soft money in 1996 and nearly double that again in 2000. Those years saw a wave of sham issue ads that were forms of express advocacy in all but name and threatened to undermine the FECA. 29

Not everyone was alarmed by soft money. Because it was given to and spent by the parties, some political scientists saw it as party money. In this view, special interest contributions were “cleansed” by passing through parties on the way to candidates. But many others saw the same process merely as the laundering of otherwise illegal money. It was those concerns that shifted reformers’ target from PACs to soft money and moved Congress to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), better known as McCain-Feingold. BCRA banned party soft money by extending federal regulation of campaign advertisements to cover sham issue ads. It added to issue and express advocacy a new category called “electioneering communications,” defined as all ads that mentioned a clearly identified federal candidate—even if they did not expressly say “vote for” or “vote against”—and were aired to that candidate’s constituency within thirty days of a primary or sixty days of a general election. 30

BCRA immediately achieved its goal of making both parties turn their attention to raising hard money: they raised more hard money in 2004 than they had raised in hard and soft money combined in 2000. 31 But BCRA did not completely block outside money. In 2004 outside money flowed into elections through “527s,” tax-exempt groups formed under permissive IRS rules that kept them free from stricter FECA regulations. Like the issue-advocacy loophole through which the parties channeled so much soft money, the rise of 527s can be traced directly back to Buckley .

Congress added section 527 to the tax code in 1975 to clarify the tax status of political committees: it guaranteed that income from contributions was not taxable when used for the exempt function of “electioneering” or influencing the election of candidates to public office. Most party and nonparty political committees registered with the IRS as 527s and with the FEC as political committees. Then the Supreme Court decided that issue advocacy had so little influence on elections that it could not be counted as political spending under the FECA. The Buckley ruling did not apply to the tax code, however, which raised the question of whether the IRS still defined issue advocacy as an exempt function for 527s. More than twenty years after Buckley the IRS opened another loophole by deciding that spending on issue ads did still count as electioneering. 32

The result was the sudden appearance of new 527s, formed to do only issue-advocacy spending. The attraction of these new groups was that they retained their tax-exempt status but did not have to register with the FEC as political committees and were not subject to FECA disclosure requirements or limitations on funding sources. This was the beginning of what came to be called “dark money,” political expenditures from sources that do not have to be disclosed.

Spending by 527s dropped in 2008 because both candidates—Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and John McCain (R-AZ), whose name was on the most recent reform—actively discouraged it. In 2012, however, the stream of dark money became a flood, flowing through 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups and super PACs. 33 The main reason for this change was President George W. Bush’s two appointments to the Supreme Court. Shortly before the Court’s 2005 term, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her intention to resign and Chief Justice William Rehnquist died unexpectedly. Bush appointed John G. Roberts to replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice and three months later appointed Samuel Alito to replace O’Connor. Roberts and Alito joined Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy to form a slim conservative majority that was even more hostile to reform than the Buckley and Bellotti Courts.

The Roberts Court soon began chipping away at BCRA and McConnell . Their first opportunity came in 2006, when a conservative group sought an exemption from the electioneering communications provision for a series of political ads. Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL) accepted contributions from business corporations but wanted to use treasury funds, not PAC money, to pay for political ads. The ads asked people to call Senator Russ Feingold and tell him to oppose a filibuster against President Bush’s judicial nominees. Feingold was then a candidate in a U.S. Senate primary, which alone made the ads electioneering communications that had to be financed with hard money. WRTL claimed that the ads were nonetheless issue advocacy that could be financed with non-FECA money and requested an exemption for them.

In FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life the Court granted the exemption, saying that “the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it” (551 U.S. 449, 457). The decision fatally weakened BCRA’s electioneering communications provision by assigning to the FEC and federal courts the job of deciding on a case-by-case basis how to apply it. What was formally no more than an exemption for three ads in fact revived a pre-BCRA use of soft money. 34

Two years later, in Davis v. FEC (554 U.S. 724), the Court further weakened BCRA by overturning the “millionaire’s amendment,” a BCRA provision that lifted the contribution limit for candidates facing rich opponents who financed their campaigns with personal funds. The majority struck down the provision because giving “fundraising advantages” only to candidates who were not rich enough to finance their own campaigns burdened rich candidates’ ability to “robustly” exercise their First Amendment rights. 35

The Court’s most controversial assault on reform came in Citizens United v. FEC , the 2010 decision in which the new majority undermined more than 100 years of campaign finance law by allowing business corporations to make independent expenditures in candidate elections. The core precedent for Citizens United was the Court’s 1978 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti . At issue was Massachusetts’s 1907-era law, which included a ban against corporate spending in ballot-measure elections. The bank and other corporations challenged the law, claiming that it violated their First Amendment rights of political speech. The state’s highest court unanimously rejected their argument, finding that they did not have the same speech rights as citizens. The Supreme Court thought otherwise: citing Buckley , the justices ruled 5–4 that political spending was protected political speech whatever its “source,” and that corporations did have much the same First Amendment rights as citizens. 36

The Court carved out another exception to the Tillman Act in FEC v. Massachussetts Citizens for Life . That case came to the Court when the FEC charged Massachusetts Citizens for Life (MCFL), an incorporated voluntary association, with violating the act by using treasury funds to make an independent expenditure in a congressional election. The act made no distinction between for-profit and non-profit corporations, but the Court decided in another 5–4 split that it was intended to cover only for-profits. Congress, the Court said, had wanted only to head off “the prospect that resources amassed in the economic marketplace may be used to provide an unfair advantage in the political marketplace” (479 U.S. 238, 257). Voluntary associations like MCFL posed no such danger because their resources were contributed by, and represented the views of, their members.

Four years later, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce , the Court heard another case about a nonprofit corporation making an independent expenditure in a congressional campaign. The Chamber claimed an MCFL-type exemption from the state’s 1907-era version of the Tillman Act despite the fact that three-fourths of its members were for-profit business corporations. The Court found that the Chamber was not an MCFL-type voluntary association and rejected its claim to exemption. This was not too far from the Austin Court’s finding, but the three Reagan appointees dissented. Although two of them—Justices Antonin Scalia and O’Connor—had joined the Austin majority, they and Anthony Kennedy now claimed that Buckley and Bellotti were precedents for extending First Amendment rights to the Chamber and its corporate members (495 U.S. 652).

The dissenters saw Austin as a break with precedent. Conservatives outside the Court agreed, but they would not get the votes to overturn the decision until the appointments of Alito and Roberts. They also needed a case that would justify such a vote and Citizens United did not look like what they needed. The case looked like Austin , as Citizens United was also an incorporated nonprofit that accepted corporate contributions. The group used treasury funds to pay for a feature-length film attacking Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), who was then a candidate in the 2008 presidential primaries, and wanted to use treasury funds to make it available for download on cable television. The FEC said Citizens United’s acceptance of corporate money made the film an electioneering communication that had to be funded with hard money. The group said the amount of corporate money it received was too small to trigger the BCRA provision and sought an exemption from it.

The Supreme Court heard the case in March 2009 but did not decide it in that term. In a surprise move, the five conservatives asked Citizens United to submit supplemental briefs on whether the Court should overrule Austin and parts of McConnell . They now had the majority they needed to overrule Austin and decided to turn Citizens United into a case that would justify it. Citizens United argued in its supplemental brief that a proper disposition of its case required the Court to overturn Austin —which is what the Court did in January 2010. 37

Citizens United was essentially Austin II , with the dissenters in the majority. One of the Austin dissenters, Justice Kennedy, wrote the majority opinion. Citing Buckley ’s ruling that independent expenditures have little corruptive potential in candidate elections, and Bellotti ’s ruling that for-profit corporations could make such expenditures in ballot-measure elections, Kennedy claimed precedent for giving corporations the right to make those expenditures in candidate elections. This controversial decision led directly to the creation of super PACs and the sharp increase in expenditures by tax-exempt social welfare groups.

Super PACs can be traced directly back to Buckley , specifically to its decision to define independent expenditures as having too little corruptive potential to need regulation. In what must have been an oversight, however, the Court did not exempt committees that made only independent expenditures from the $5,000 limit on contributions to all PACs. Soon after Citizens United , the DC circuit court cited that decision in striking down the limit on contributions to independent-spending PACs. The FEC, also citing Citizens United , then ruled that such committees could solicit unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, and unions. This ruling opened the way for super PACs and made independent expenditures an even bigger factor in elections than they had been in the 1980s. 38

Super PACs had to register with the FEC and file disclosure reports, but they still became a vehicle for dark money. Although they must identify the committees that give them contributions, they do not have to identify the people and organizations who gave to the contributing committees. And if those contributing committees were tax-exempt organizations formed under IRS regulations that did not require them to report to the FEC, then super PAC money could go largely undisclosed.

Section 501(c) of the tax code grants tax exemptions to groups whose primary activity is something other than influencing elections. The most politically active of these groups have been 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, 501(c)(5) labor unions, and 501(c)(6) business associations. These groups could make the same kinds of issue-advocacy expenditures made by 527s, but only if they convinced the IRS that they spent most of their money on the activities that earned them a tax exemption. After Citizens United these groups, most of which were nonprofit corporations, could also make express-advocacy expenditures—and finance them with contributions from for-profit corporations.

The most politically active of these groups were the 501(c)(4)s, whose primary activity was officially nonpolitical, defined as “promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community.” What made them attractive to political activists was that they did not have to disclose their donors, even to the IRS: the FEC ruled that social welfare organizations had to disclose only those donors who expressly financed a specific election-related expenditure. Applications for tax exemptions under section 501(c)(4) doubled after Citizens United , and social welfare groups were the main source of dark money in the 2012 election. 39

In 2014 the Supreme Court struck down another piece of the FECA. McCutcheon v. FEC (572 U.S. 185)was a challenge to the $123,000 aggregate limit on contributions an individual donor could make to candidates, parties, and PACs in a two-year election cycle. The challengers did not target the “base limit” on contributions to any single candidate, party, or PAC, and the aggregate limit was a tiny fraction of the sum of all possible base-limit contributions a donor could make. The Court struck down the aggregate limit because it did not serve the Buckley -mandated function of preventing quid pro quo corruption. The McCutcheon decision makes it possible for rich donors to contribute almost thirty times more money than the FECA had allowed.

Reformers have been on the losing side of the battle over campaign finance reform ever since Buckley . Buckley was a controversial decision, but probably few people at the time imagined how great an impact it would have on the role of money in politics. Reform opponents used its rulings that independent spending could not be limited and that issue advocacy spending could not be regulated at all as wedges to weaken and evade the rest of the FECA. Opponents have greatly increased the amount of money in elections, which might have been one of their goals; but more and more of that money is now being spent outside the parties, which might not have been one of their goals.

Buckley led almost immediately to the rise of nonparty independent spending committees in the 1980s. The Buckley ruling on issue advocacy led to the explosion of party soft money in the 1990s, and in 2004, after BCRA outlawed soft money, the same ruling legalized the use of nonparty 527s to get around the new law. In 2010 the Citizens United Court used Buckley ’s definition of express advocacy spending to justify extending the First Amendment rights granted to corporations in Bellotti . The Buckley rulings and Citizens United also led in 2012 to the biggest explosion of nonparty spending in history by super PACs and 501(c)(4)s. Nonparty spending will probably keep increasing, and the Roberts Court’s hostility to reform almost guarantees the continued dismantling of the FECA.

See Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 ); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) ; Charles S. Sydnor, American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965) ; Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) .

For a 1767 broadside alleging just such an election strategy, see “The Conversation of Two Persons under a Window on Monday Evening the 23d of March,” Early American Imprints , Series I, No. 41531.

See Herbert S. Allan, John Hancock: Patriot in Purple (New York: Macmillan, 1948) ; Harlow Giles Unger, John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000) .

Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000) .

Newspapers were part of the patronage chain. Party newspapers subsidized by government printing contracts began well before the spoils system, and can be traced back to the papers set up in the 1790s by political rivals Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. As president, Jefferson established the National Intelligencer as the official administration organ, a practice that continued through the antebellum years. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001 ); Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 years, 1690 to 1940 , rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950) .

See Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) ; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) ; Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan, 1954) .

See Robert E. Mutch, “The First Federal Campaign Finance Bills,” Journal of Policy History 14 (2002) : 30–48; White, Jacksonians .

Roger A. Bruns, “The Covode Committee, 1860,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger and Roger A. Bruns, eds., Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792–1974 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1975), 1071–1194 .

See Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961) ; Ari Hoogenboom, “Thomas A. Jenckes and Civil Service Reform,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1961) : 636–658.

See Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils ; C. K. Yearley, The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970) .

Robert E. Mutch, Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) .

See Morton Keller, The Life Insurance Enterprise: A Study in the Limits of Corporate Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963) ; Mutch, Buying the Vote ; Robert E. Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law (New York: Praeger, 1988) .

See Mutch, Buying the Vote ; Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts .

Mutch, Buying the Vote , 41–43, 60–67.

Ibid., 88–89, 118–119, 168–169.

For hearings testimony see U.S. Senate Privileges and Elections Committee, Campaign Contributions , 2 vols, 62d Congress, 3d Session (1912–1913).

The big exception here, of course, is 1964, when elite donors tended to back away from Senator Barry Goldwater. See Herbert E. Alexander, Financing the 1964 Election (Princeton: Citizens Research Foundation, 1966) ; for the financing of the 1912 and 1916 elections, see Mutch, Buying the Vote ; Louise Overacker, Money in Elections (New York: Macmillan), 1932 .

Overacker, Money in Elections .

Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts . For the politics around the Newberry case, see Paula Baker, Curbing Campaign Cash: Henry Ford, Truman Newberry, and the Politics of Progressive Reform (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).

See Mutch, Buying the Vote ; Louise Overacker, “Campaign Finance in the Presidential Election of 1936,” American Political Science Review 31 (1937): 473–496 ; Louise Overacker, “Labor’s Political Contributions,” Political Science Quarterly 54 (1939) : 56–68 (“simply effects a return to the scheme that was approved in Buckley ,” 540 U.S. 93, 125).

Overacker, “Campaign Finance,” 701–727.

See Mutch, Campaigns, Congress, and Courts ; Louise Overacker, “Presidential Campaign Funds, 1944,” American Political Science Review 39 (1944): 899–925 .

Mutch, Buying the Vote : “simply effects a return to the scheme that was approved in Buckley .”

Herbert E. Alexander, Financing the 1972 Election (Lexington: Heath Lexington Books, 1976) .

Larry J. Sabato, PAC Power: Inside the World of Political Action Committees (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984) .

Edward Handler and John R. Mulkern, Business in Politics: Campaign Strategies of Corporate Political Action Committees (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1982) .

See Anthony Corrado, “Money and Politics: A History of Federal Campaign Finance Law,” in Anthony Corrado et al., eds., Campaign Finance Reform: A Sourcebook (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 7–47   Xandra Kayden, “Parties and the 1980 Presidential Elections,” in Campaign Finance Study Group, Financing Presidential Campaigns: An Examination of the Ongoing Effects of the Federal Election Campaign Laws on the Conduct of Presidential Campaigns (Cambridge, MA: Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Press, 1982) .

See Herbert E. Alexander and Monica Bauer, Financing the 1988 Election (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991) ; Anthony Corrado, “Money and Politics: A History of Federal Campaign Finance Law.” In Corrado et al., eds., Campaign Finance Reform: A Sourcebook (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997) .

Anthony Corrado, “Financing the 2000 Presidential General Election,” in David B. Magleby, ed., Financing the 2000 Election (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 79–105 .

Robert F. Bauer Bauer, More Hard Money, Soft Law . (Washington, DC: Perkins Coie) 2004 ; Anthony Corrado. “The Regulatory Environment: Uncertainty in the Wake of Change,”, n David B. Magleby, Anthony Corrado, and Kelly D. Patterson, eds., Financing the 2004 Election (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006), 30–67 . Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had led Senate opponents of reform since the late 1980s, immediately challenged BCRA’s constitutionality. In McConnell v. FEC , however, the Court upheld the law, finding that it “simply effects a return to the scheme that was approved in Buckley ” (540 U.S. 93, 125).

See Robin Kolodny and Diana Dwyre, “A New Rule Book: Party Money after BCRA,” in David B. Magleby, Anthony Corrado, and Kelly D. Patterson, eds., Financing the 2004 Election (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), 183–207 ; Raymond La Raja, Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008) .

Richard Briffault, “The 527 Problem … and the Buckley Problem,” George Washington Law Review 73 (2005): 1701–1758 .

See Erika K. Lunder and L. Paige Whitaker, “501(c)(4) Organizations and Campaign Activity: Analysis under Tax and Campaign Finance Laws” (Congressional Research Service May 17, 2013 version). Donald B. Tobin, “FAQs on 501(c)(4) Social Welfare Organizations,” May 20, 2013 , Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2491&context=fac_pubs .

See Richard L. Hasen, “Beyond Incoherence: The Roberts Court’s Deregulatory Turn in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life,” Minnesota Law Review 92 (2008): 1064–1109 ; Raymond La Raja, Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008 ).

554 U.S. 724 at 5, 7, 8, 12, 13 (slip opinion). See also Arizona Free Enterprise v. Bennett , 131 S. Ct. 2806 (2011).

435 U.S. 765. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court cases is at 359 N.E. 2d 1262. See also Mutch, Buying the Vote , 7.

37. Richard L. Hasen, “Citizens United and the Illusion of Coherence,” Michigan Law Review 109 (2011): 581–624 .

38. See Richard Briffault, “Super PACs,” Minnesota Law Review 96 (2012): 1644–1693 ; R. Sam Garrett, “Super PACs in Federal Elections: Overview and Issues for Congress” (Congressional Research Service April 4, 2013 version), http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42042.pdf .

39. See Thomas B. Edsall, “Who Needs a Smoke-Filled Room? Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and the End of Political Transparency,” New York Times , September 9, 2014 , http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/opinion/karl-rove-the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-political-transparency.html ); Lunder and Whitaker, “501(c)(4) Organizations and Campaign Activity.”

Alexander, Herbert E.   Financing the 1964 Election . Princeton: Citizens Research Foundation, 1966 .

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Allan, Herbert S.   John Hancock: Patriot in Purple . New York: Macmillan, 1948 .

Bauer, Robert F.   More Hard Money, Soft Law . Washington, DC: Perkins Coie, 2004 .

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Briffault, Richard . “ Super PACs. ” Minnesota Law Review 96 ( 2012 ): 1644–1693.

Bruns, Roger A. “The Covode Committee, 1860.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger and Roger A. Bruns , eds., Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792–1974 . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1975 , 1071–1194.

Cigler, Allan J. “Interest Groups and the Financing of the 2008 Elections.” In David B. Magleby and Anthony Corrado , eds., Financing the 2008 Election . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2011 , 249–289.

Corrado, Anthony . “Financing the 2000 Presidential General Election.” In Financing the 2000 Election , ed. David B. Magleby . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002 , 79–105.

Corrado, Anthony . “Money and Politics: A History of Federal Campaign Finance Law.” In Anthony Corrado et al., eds., Campaign Finance Reform: A Sourcebook . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997 .

Corrado, Anthony . “The Regulatory Environment: Uncertainty in the Wake of Change.” In Financing the 2004 Election , ed. David B. Magleby , Anthony Corrado , and Kelly D. Patterson . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006 , 30–67.

Edsall, Thomas B. “Who Needs a Smoke-Filled Room? Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and the End of Political Transparency.” New York Times , September 9, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/opinion/karl-rove-the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-political-transparency.html .

Garrett, R. Sam . “Super PACs in Federal Elections: Overview and Issues for Congress.” Congressional Research Service (April 4, 2013 version), http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42042.pdf .

Handler, Edward , and John R. Mulkern . Business in Politics: Campaign Strategies of Corporate Political Action Committees . Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1982 .

Hasen, Richard, L. “Beyond Incoherence: The Roberts Court’s Deregulatory Turn in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life .” Minnesota Law Review 92 ( 2008 ): 1064–1109.

Hasen, Richard L. “ Citizens United and the Illusion of Coherence.” Michigan Law Review 109 ( 2011 ): 581–624.

Hoogenboom, Ari . Outlawing the Spoils . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961 a.

Hoogenboom, Ari . “ Thomas A. Jenckes and Civil Service Reform. ” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 ( 1961 b): 636–658.

Isaac, Rhys . The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 .

Kayden, Xandra . “Parties and the 1980 Presidential Elections.” In Campaign Finance Study Group, Financing Presidential Campaigns: An Examination of the Ongoing Effects of the Federal Election Campaign Laws on the Conduct of Presidential Campaigns . Cambridge, MA: Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1982 .

Keller, Morton . The Life Insurance Enterprise: A Study in the Limits of Corporate Power . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963 .

Keyssar, Alexander . The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States . New York: Basic Books, 2000 .

Kolodny, Robin , and Diana Dwyre . “A New Rule Book: Party Money after BCRA.” In Financing the 2004 Election , ed. David B. Magleby , Anthony Corrado , and Kelly D. Patterson . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006 , 183–207.

La Raja, Raymond . Small Change: Money, Political Parties, and Campaign Finance Reform . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008 .

Lunder, Erika K. , and L Paige Whitaker . “ 501(c)(4) Organizations and Campaign Activity: Analysis under Tax and Campaign Finance Laws. ” Congressional Research Service (May 17, 2013 version).

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Mutch, Robert E.   Campaigns, Congress, and Courts: The Making of Federal Campaign Finance Law . New York: Praeger, 1988 .

Mutch, Robert E. “ The First Federal Campaign Finance Bills. ” Journal of Policy History 14 ( 2002 ): 30–48.

Overacker, Louise . “ Campaign Finance in the Presidential Election of 1936. ” American Political Science Review 31 ( 1937 ): 473–496.

Overacker, Louise . 1941 . “ Campaign Finance in the Presidential Election of 1940. ” American Political Science Review 35: 701–27.

Overacker, Louise . “ Campaign Funds in a Depression Year. ” American Political Science Review 27 ( 1933 ): 769–783.

Overacker, Louise . “ Labor’s Political Contributions. ” Political Science Quarterly 54 ( 1939 ): 56–68.

Overacker, Louise . Money in Elections . New York: Macmillan, 1932 .

Overacker, Louise . “ Presidential Campaign Funds, 1944. ” American Political Science Review 39 ( 1945 ): 899–925.

Pasley, Jeffrey L.   “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001 .

Sabato, Larry J.   PAC Power: Inside the World of Political Action Committees . New York: W. W. Norton, 1984 .

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Williamson, Chilton . American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860 . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960 .

Yearley, C. K.   The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860–1920 . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970 .

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7 facts about Americans’ views of money in politics

Widespread dissatisfaction with the role of money in American politics is one of the many themes in Pew Research Center’s recent report on Americans’ dismal views of the nation’s political landscape .

This analysis summarizes key findings about money and politics from the recent Pew Research Center report “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics.” We conducted the study to better understand how Americans view U.S. politics today and explore in depth how the public thinks about the quality of their political representation and the relationship between political actors and the people they represent.

The analysis is based on a survey of 8,480 adults from July 10 to July 16, 2023. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report , along with responses, and its methodology .

Explore Americans’ views of the political system

This article draws from our major report on Americans’ attitudes about the political system and political representation, based on surveys conducted this summer. For more, read:

• The report chapters on money in politics and problems with the political system
• The full report

Large shares of the public see political campaigns as too costly, elected officials as too responsive to donors and special interests, and members of Congress as unable or unwilling to separate their financial interests from their work as public servants.  

Here are seven facts about how Americans view the influence of money on the political system and elected officials, drawn from our recent report.

Most Americans favor spending limits for political campaigns. Roughly seven-in-ten U.S. adults (72%) say that there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. Just 11% say individuals and organizations should be able to spend as much money as they want, and 16% are not sure.

Support for spending limits crosses ideological and demographic lines. Across all groups, by margins of at least three-to-one, more people say there should be limits than say there should not.

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say it’s possible to have laws that would effectively reduce the role of money in politics. About two-in-ten (21%) say it’s not possible to legislate this effectively. A similar share (20%) are not sure.

Liberal Democrats are particularly likely to say it’s possible to have laws that would reduce the role of money in politics. About three-quarters (76%) say this, compared with 57% of conservative or moderate Democrats and 52% of Republicans. There are no ideological differences on this question among Republicans.

In an open-ended question, 11% of Americans volunteer that the biggest problem with elected officials is that they’re too influenced by money in politics. An additional 9% describe elected officials as corrupt and 16% say they don’t work for the people they represent. These concerns are among the top responses to this question .

In a separate open-ended question about the political system as a whole, 15% say that the biggest problem is greed or corruption among elected officials.

Americans overwhelmingly say that the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office. More than eight-in-ten Americans (85%) say this is a good description of the U.S. political system today, including identical shares of Republicans and Democrats.

A similar share of the public (84%) says that “special interest groups and lobbyists have too much say in what happens in politics” is a good description of the political system.

Self-interest – especially the desire to make money – is one of the main reasons people think most elected officials ran for office. More than six-in-ten (63%) say that all or most of the people who currently serve as elected officials ran for office to make a lot of money .

Majorities also say that all or most officials ran for office to seek a higher-level office in the future (57%) or to seek personal fame and attention (54%). Far fewer say that all or most elected officials ran to address issues they care about (22%) or to serve the public (15%).

Roughly eight-in-ten Americans say members of Congress do a bad job of keeping their personal financial interests separate from their work in Congress. The public also rates members of Congress poorly on listening to the concerns of people in their districts, working with members of the opposing party and taking responsibility for their actions.

Campaign donors and lobbyists are widely viewed as having too much influence on members of Congress. Eight-in-ten U.S. adults say the people who donate money to political campaigns have too much influence on the decisions members of Congress make. And 73% say lobbyists and special interest groups have too much influence. Large majorities of Republicans and Democrats alike say campaign donors, lobbyists and special interest groups have too much influence.

By contrast, 70% of Americans say the people who live in representatives’ districts have too little influence over the decisions their representatives make.

Note: Here are the questions used for the report , along with responses, and its methodology .

• Election System & Voting Process
• Politics & Policy
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Andy Cerda is a research assistant focusing on politics at Pew Research Center .

Andrew Daniller is a research associate focusing on politics at Pew Research Center .

More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think

What can improve democracy, 2024 presidential primary season was one of the shortest in the modern political era, representative democracy remains a popular ideal, but people around the world are critical of how it’s working, bipartisan support for early in-person voting, voter id, election day national holiday, most popular.

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• OpenSecrets.org Great source for data and analysis on campaign finance at the federal level. Covers contributions to candidates and PACs; campaign spending by outside groups; lobbying and interest groups; personal finances of politicians and the revolving door of politicians to lobbyists; political ad buys; and more. From the Center for Responsive Politics. 1998+ Bulk data freely available for non-commercial use.
• Follow The Money Data and reports on money and spending in state-level politics. Covers campaign finance donations, spending by outside groups, and spending on ballot measures for all 50 states. You can view national or state overviews of spending; get breakdowns by district, candidate, party, industry, incumbency status, and more. The National Institute on Money in State Politics cleans, verified, and standardizes the data. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, or JSON. 1988+
• Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) Campaign finance project by Adam Bonica at Stanford as part of a project to ideologically map political elites, interest groups, and donors in the "political marketplace". The resulting database contains over 500 million political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections from 1979 to 2022. A corresponding database of candidates and committees provides additional information on state and federal elections. Data has been extensively cleaned, standardized, and geocoded.
• Capitol Hill Access (formerly CQ Political MoneyLine) This link opens in a new window Provides data and reports for analyzing the flow of money through the U.S. political system. Provides campaign donation data dating to the 1979-80 election cycle and lobbying data from 1999. Track contributions from individual donors, associations, corporations, lobbyists, PACs, 527s and other sources, as well as candidate disbursement details.
• ProPublica House Office Expenditure Data Details the official spending done by the House of Representatives, including lawmakers’ offices, committee offices, and administrative offices, using the official House Statement of Disbursements (see below). One file contains summary information for each office and category of spending, and the other file contains details of each recipient of office spending and its purpose. Note that the data has not been standardized (meaning that "AT&T" might also appear as "A.T.&T."). Quarterly files from 2009-present in .csv. A single file containing 2009-2018 is also available.
• Statement of Disbursements of the House Quarterly report on expenditures by the House, including salaries of staffers and expenses by committees and Members' offices. Digitized by Boston Public Library and the Internet Archive. Since 2009, the House has published disbursements online in .csv format (see the ProPublica link above for cleaned, Excel versions of the 2009+ data). more... less... These can also be found in ProQuest Congressional : Search in House/Senate Documents/Reports and Miscellaneous Publications: [TITLE] "Statement of Disbursements of the House" OR "House of Representatives Detailed Statement of Disbursements" OR [ALL EXCEPT FULL TEXT] ("report of the clerk of the house" OR "annual report of clerk of house" OR "Contingent expenses of House of Representatives") AND (employees OR employes)
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• LegiStorm: Congressional Staff Salaries, Financial Disclosures, and More Information on Congressional salaries, trips, financial disclosures, foreign gifts, earmarks, and more. Salary data on members and staffers from 2000-present; data on privately financed trips from 2000-present; financial disclosures from 2001-present; foreign gifts from 1999-present; earmarks for fiscal years 2008-2010. Limited personal access with free registration.
• Campaign Finance Institute Historical Data Tables Historical data on congressional and presidential election fundraising, expenditures, and party, interest group, and PAC spending. Tables and figures are in PDF and cover 1974-present. Many of these tables are available in Excel (with a slight time lag) from the Vital Statistics on Congress (see chapter 3 on Campaign Finance in Congressional Elections). CFI also produces also other reports as well as a useful Money in Politics Bibliography covering academic literature back to 2006.
• FEC Disclosure Data Download itemized and trend data and filings for contributions and disbursements by/for candidates, committees, PACs, and independent expenditures. Bulk downloads of detailed data are available.
• Historical Database of State Campaign Finance Laws The Campaign Finance Institute has compiled a database of state campaign finance laws covering every state, 1996-2018. There's a visualization tool allowing for easy comparison across key variables and the full database can be downloaded to access more than 500 variables per state-year.
• Links to State Disclosure Offices Links to the official state agency websites for campaign finance, elections, and lobbyist disclosures. From Follow The Money.
• State Campaign Finance Laws and Regulations The National Conference of State Legislatures compiles information on laws and regulations governing campaign finance in all 50 states. It has separate sections on contribution limits, independent expenditures, disclosure requirements, and public financing of elections. Mostly current with some coverage of previous years. Its database of campaign finance legislation goes back to 1999 and is searchable by year, state, type of legislation and status.
• Lobbyview.org Parses Congressional lobbying disclosure reports to provide better coding of lobbying data linking them to congressional bills and their sponsors, industry and issue areas, and company identifiers. Provides bulk data downloads as well as an API. 2000-2020.
• MapLight Bill Positions Database MapLight, a nonpartisan research center, collected over 200,000 positions taken by interest groups on proposed federal legislation at various points in the legislative process, 2007-2022. Fields include Congressional session, bill number and name, type of legislative action, a flag for whether the action was substantive, organization name and ID, position (support/oppose), date, and title of position document. Data in Excel.
• U.S. Senate: Lobbying Reports Database of documents required to be filed by lobbyists under the Lobbying and Disclosure Act (LDA). Database can be searched or downloaded (by quarter), 1999-.
• U.S. House Lobbying Disclosure Search Online database to search lobbying filings back to 2011. Results can be downloaded to .csv, XML, or JSON.
• Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability The Center for Political Accountability tracks disclosure practices of corporate political spending of the top 300 companies in the S&P 500. It creates an annual index, the CPA-Zicklin Index, ranking companies' disclosure transparency. 2011+
• Washington Representatives Study Includes information about thousands of organizations involved in national politics, their organizational characteristics, and the activities they undertook in the pursuit of policy influence. This collection encompasses all organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directories for 1981, 1991, 2001, 2006, and 2011. These organizations have been classified into 96 categories based on the kinds of interests represented. Variables include organization name, membership category, founding year, and main objective, as well as number of lobbyists hired, number of amicus briefs filed, political action committee (PAC) donations made, and web-based lobbying activities.
• Post-Political Careers Data Replication data for Maxwell Palmer and Benjamin Schneer, "Postpolitical Careers: How Politicians Capitalize on Public Office," The Journal of Politics 81, no. 2 (April 2019): 670-675. Covers more than 1200 former top office holders from 1992-2014 and codes whether they were paid lobbyists or served on boards of public corporations.
• NCCS Data Archive This link opens in a new window The National Center for Charitable Statistics builds compatible national, state, and regional databases and develops uniform standards for reporting on charitable organizations. Includes data on the finances and activities of nonprofit organizations 1989-2017. For other sources, including more current data, see the ProPublica Nonprofit Data Explorer and our subscription to Guidestar Pro .

After Republicans took control of the House and Senate, they placed a moratorium on earmarks in legislation, which appears to have been adhered to since 2011. Some sources for data from previous years is below.

• Taxpayers for Common Sense Earmarks Database Database of Earmarks from a nonpartisan group. FY 2008-2010 currently available online for download in Excel.
• OMB Earmarks Database Database of earmarks from the Office of Management and Budget covering FY2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Data is searchable and browseable, and can also be downloaded as a CSV.
• USAspending.gov "USAspending.gov is the publicly accessible, searchable website mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are spent."
• USA Facts Project led by Steven Ballmer to provide a detailed description of federal, state, and local government revenue and spending categorized according to 4 broad constitutionally expressed purposes with associated data on outcomes. All data comes from official sources; generally 1980–present. Also includes the current year data in a detailed 10-K style report.
• Tracking Federal Funds: USAspending.gov and Other Data Sources CRS report on official sources for tracking government spending, Oct. 2018
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• Last Updated: Apr 3, 2024 2:29 PM
• URL: https://libguides.princeton.edu/politics/american

The Chicago Blog

Smart and timely features from our books and authors

Five Questions with Ann Southworth author of “Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending”

While the American public prepares for the 2024 Presidential Election, large questions about the state of American democracy loom large. As important debates about the country’s future abound, let’s discuss some of the history that shaped our current political landscape. In Big Money Unleashed , law professor Ann Southworth examines how the First Amendment became an obstacle to campaign finance regulation—a history that began much earlier than most imagine. With US citizens headed towards the voting booths come fall, Big Money Unleashed charts how we got here in the first place and what the insidious relationship between protected rights, money, and elections means for our country’s future. In this post, we chat with Ann about her research and the milestone events that paved the way for money to further infiltrate election campaigns.

While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

I was amazed to learn about the origins of the idea that election spending is constitutionally protected speech. The First Amendment does not mention campaign finance; it provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Bringing election spending within the First Amendment’s coverage was the work of creative lawyers, beginning fifty years ago.

The primary architect of the foundational legal theories was Ralph Winter, a conservative Yale Law School professor (and later faculty advisor to the first chapter of the Federalist Society), who wrote two influential pamphlets published by the American Enterprise Institute while Congress was considering campaign finance legislation in the early 1970s. Winter received assistance from John Bolton, who was one of Winter’s law students. (This is the same John Bolton who later served as US ambassador to the United Nations, from 2005 to 2006, and as President Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.) Winter and Bolton refashioned and extended doctrine protecting political dissenters so that it would also cover campaign contributions and expenditures by wealthy individuals and institutions. The pamphlets asserted that limits on campaign contributions and expenditures are, in effect, constraints on political expression and cannot be “distinguished from a law forbidding speech of over 10 minutes in public parks.” In response to potential objections about the unequal distribution of the resource that facilitates this “speech,” they claimed that money is indistinguishable from other types of resources that influence elections and are unequally distributed in society, such as free time and celebrity. Regulating money but not volunteer services or fame, they said, would amount to discriminating against wealthy people. The pamphlets also suggested that proponents of campaign finance regulation were elites who controlled the political process and mistrusted voters’ ability to discern their own interests.

The arguments advanced in those pamphlets laid the foundations for the litigation campaign described in my book, and they have served ever since as key points stressed by opponents of campaign finance regulation. Those theories are now embedded in the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions, including the most famous of them, Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which held that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money in federal candidate elections, provided that those expenditures are independent of the candidate’s campaign.  

How did the First Amendment become a major obstacle to regulating big money in politics?

Supreme Court justices obviously played key roles in developing this law. But my book emphasizes the contributions of “nonjudicial” participants—lawyers, advocacy organizations, patrons, and networks.

The story begins in the 1970s when entrepreneurial lawyers (including Winter and Bolton) developed legal theories and brought challenges to campaign finance regulations. They received support from wealthy individuals of the political left and right who wanted greater freedom to use their money in elections and from politicians who wanted that financial backing. The effort gathered steam in the 1990s and early 2000s as opponents of regulation established specialized groups to challenge restrictions, recruited plaintiffs, and introduced and reworked ideas to unite disparate groups and constituencies (or at least the lawyers for these groups and constituencies) around the idea that regulating campaign spending amounts to censoring political expression. These specialized groups led the way in advancing this theme and chipping away at campaign finance restrictions, using an incremental litigation strategy pioneered by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to dismantle racial segregation. Opponents of regulation tapped into legal mobilizing around abortion, guns, and Tea Party activism, as well as rising populist mistrust of elites. The Federalist Society’s Free Speech and Election Law Practice Group served as a site for cultivating arguments and coordinating amicus participation. The effort attracted partial support from some civil libertarian and labor groups. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell also played an important role: he led Republican opposition to legislation; assembled teams of lawyers to challenge campaign finance laws; recruited FEC commissioners who shared his opposition to regulating campaign finance; and oversaw the appointment of federal judges who were receptive to this deregulatory agenda (and other Republican priorities). How did you become interested in this topic?

My interest in this topic grew out of research for another book, Lawyers of the Right , a group portrait of the lawyers active in the conservative legal movement. That book explored the role of lawyer networks in generating ideas necessary to change law, cultivating credibility for those ideas, pursuing law reform campaigns modeled on those of public interest law groups of the political left, and building litigation alliances. It also considered the challenges of managing deep differences in the policy priorities of the primary constituencies of the conservative legal movement. These constituencies mostly avoided direct conflict with one another in Supreme Court litigation during the period covered by my research, but they generally did not actively assist one another. Campaign finance regulation was an exception; organizations linked with all the major constituencies of the Republican coalition joined together on the same side of litigation challenging the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (a.k.a., McCain-Feingold). I found it puzzling that social conservatives assisted in a battle that seemed likely to benefit primarily wealthy individuals and corporations, perhaps even at the expense of the more populist elements of the Republican alliance. That curious phenomenon was the impetus for the research that eventually led to Big Money Unleashed .

As the 2024 Presidential election draws near, what should citizens be more cognizant of in terms of the campaigns they either do or do not support?

People should be aware that the recent influx of big money in American elections is partly a function of Supreme Court rulings on the constitutionality of campaign finance regulations. Those rulings, in turn, are the product of a long-term effort to shape First Amendment law. The Roberts Court’s campaign finance decisions have unleashed billions in election spending by super PACs and other politically active groups. Much of that spending is “dark”—meaning that the identities of large donors who seek to influence elections and elected officials through these entities are not disclosed to the public. The decisions have also emboldened campaigns to disregard existing laws and to test their boundaries.

What do you most hope readers will take away from your book?

I hope readers will take away a better sense of the process and players behind the creation of constitutional law in this one very important area of constitutional law. There was nothing inevitable about how those actors and resources came together to create new laws, and there was nothing inevitable about the doctrine that resulted from this effort. The same is also true of other areas of constitutional law in which we’ve seen major changes over the past several decades—including guns, affirmative action, abortion, the reach of anti-discrimination laws, and much more.

Ann Southworth  is professor of law and codirector of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession at the University of California, Irvine.

Big Money Unleashed is available from our website or your favorite bookseller .

Money in politics: the good, the bad and the what could become ugly

For democracies to function properly and meet the needs of citizens, they need to be adequately resourced. It is therefore unavoidable to talk about money when discussing the conduct of elections, running a government, drafting laws and running public services.

The discussion is not just about the amounts of money and how it is allocated. It can also include the system of allocation and where the money comes from. This is important as while money can enable a democracy to better provide and secure the future of its citizens (the good), it is prone to abuse (the bad). 

Abuse of money in politics can undermine the running of a democratic system. Through corruption, money can be used to influence democracy actors and institutions to favour certain groups and their interests. Unbridled use of funds by candidates and political parties can make the playing field for elections uneven. Illicit funds by organized crime can lead to inefficient or disrupted public services.

It is important, therefore, that in a democracy the use of money is transparent, monitored and regulated. This is the premise behind International IDEA’s money in politics initiative. This is also expressed in the Secretary-General of International IDEA’s message as he reflects on the year that was and what it means for democracies worldwide, particularly in relation to money in politics.

Over the past 15 years, International IDEA has developed an extensive body of knowledge and resources on money in politics. The objective is to give money a more positive role in politics by building the institutional capacity of governments, political parties and oversight agencies to regulate political finance and reduce corruption.

Our three-pronged approach consists of (a) supporting the actors responsible for the design and oversight of political finance laws in monitoring the threats posed by illicit sources of money and designing strategies for their prevention and mitigation; (b) working with political parties and other actors in complying with the political finance regulations; and (c) supporting efforts to increase the transparency of the information that is produced as a result of political finance laws and regulations.

In this issue of our newsletter, we feature the actions we undertook using this approach. In Let’s talk about money: comparative perspectives on political finance regulations , we present our recently updated Political Finance Database , the leading global resource of comparative political finance data in the world today. It tackles all aspects of political finance regulation through 74 questions and covers 180 countries. In Mongolia calls for political finance reform amid political turmoil , we discuss International IDEA’s EU-funded technical assistance in Mongolia to help combat corruption. Through the report, Political Finance in Mongolia: Assessment and Recommendations , a set of actionable points are put forward to in order to help reform the country’s political finance framework. In Campaign Finance Framework in Myanmar , we present challenges to Myanmar’s campaign finance regulatory framework as it gears up for its second democratic general elections in 2020.  In so doing, we also highlight International IDEA’s support to the Union Elections Commission’s reform efforts to keep the credibility of the electoral process. In Daniel Zovatto: “The rules of political financing must be thoroughly reformed.” , our Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Daniel Zovatto , discusses the challenges of political finance in Latin America and puts forward ways that this can be addressed. Finally, in Gender-targeted public funding to support women in politics: the Albanian case , we focus on how public funding can help level the playing field for women and men candidates. In particular, we look closely at the experience of Albania, which resulted in an increase in the proportion of women in parliament. International IDEA’s research on the impact of public funding in addressing gender inequality can be found in the book, Gender-Targeted Public Funding for Political Parties

Being aware of how money can be used to advance democracy and its principles of equality and accountability, as well as be abused to unduly influence political actors and institutions empowers us, citizens. We then recognize the importance of transparency and become vigilant in ensuring that money is used appropriately.

We can thus do our part to keep money good – and we can prevent its bad aspects from becoming ugly and detrimental to our democracies.

About the authors

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Campaigns & Elections

Why money in politics is so important

It is a near daily complaint during election season: “There’s too much money in politics.”

Every election cycle there is more and more money spent on campaigns, with more and more groups entering the fray. In particular, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is often cited as the beginning of a new free-spending era in political campaigning. Many think our political system would be measurably better if there was less money in politics.

Surprisingly, the amount spent on politics is still quite small. During the 2010 cycle, the total spending for all races was $4.6 billion, which was 8 percent higher than the 2008 cycle. Sure, $4.6 billion spent on politics sounds gigantic—until you realize there are about 314 million people in the United States. Even if you just look at the roughly 200 million people who are eligible to vote, this would amount to the average eligible voter spending $22.50 per every two-year election cycle.

That’s really not so much money. Just compare that to the size of some other industries in America. Look at the amount spent on coffee consumption, for example. A recent study says that the average American worker spends over $1,000 per year on coffee. Per week, the average amount spent is $21.

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The average American spends three times as much on bottled water, four times as much on dog food,  four times as much on gym memberships, fifteen times as much on lottery tickets, and twice as much on plastic surgery. 

Yes, political spending has increased markedly in recent years, but the scale of the industry is still quite small. Even though the industry is less lucrative than most realize, money is still key. If it wasn’t, then shrewd political observers wouldn’t monitor fundraising numbers like hawks and politicians wouldn’t build up war chests to scare off challengers.

Why is money so important to the political process that there will be non-stop political ads this fall?

Name recognition is the main reason. Almost everyone in America knows that Barack Obama is the current president, but beyond the presidency, the amount of people who couldn’t even name their U.S. senators or the governor of their state is alarmingly high. Even well-educated people have trouble identifying their state representatives, let alone their city council, county council, or township elected officials.

There is a small core of people who are either in the political world or political junkies, who have the news on all day. These people really do not need political advertising to tell them how to vote. They will seek out ways on their own to learn about candidates and tend to be strong partisans, who won’t be convinced by opposition advertising.

But the large majority of Americans are not like this. Most people “outsource” their political engagement to others. This is not necessarily a matter of intelligence or civic-mindedness. A small business owner, who works 60-hour weeks, can be very involved in their community but has no time to investigate candidates on their own. So he or she may rely on people they trust, like the local Chamber of Commerce, to tell them which candidates are in their best interest.

It’s not realistic in a bustling society like the United States for every voter to be an expert on every candidate that will be on the ballot. But this means that the main way politicians can influence voters is through political advertisements. For a democratic republic to survive, voters have to be engaged in the political process.

The only way the barrage of political ads will go away is for the entire electorate to be so well-educated that political advertising would be worthless. And as long as most want to live a normal lifestyle, enduring political advertisements will be one of the costs of living in a free society.

Chris Palko works as an assistant media analyst at Smart Media Group, a Republican political media buying agency in Alexandria, Va. He is a graduate of American University and George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.

A version of this post was also published on Smart Media Group’s blog, Smart Blog .

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Grow Ensemble

Build a Better World, Together

The Influence of Money in Politics: Why It Must End Now

Subscribe & Listen: Apple Podcasts – Spotify – YouTube

Ah, democracy. A system where political leaders are fairly elected for the people, by a majority of people, to protect and serve the nation. Or, not so much. 

The influence of money in politics and campaign funding has become a terrifying new reality in the shared democracy of the United States of America. Politicians are no longer elected for their platforms and ability to serve the American public. With cash on the table, politicians exist to serve their donors instead of their voters, which affects the policies they support, how they allocate government spending, and their expressed values.

A few organizations are working to remove the influence of cash within politics. American Promise is making a difference by attempting to uphold our democracy via the passing of the 28th Amendment, which would overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allows uncapped spending and contributions from corporations to candidates in an election cycle. On the Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Podcast, Cory spoke with President Jeff Clements on the stakes of implementing such groundbreaking legislation and how the organization’s goal shapes their day-to-day work. 

What is the Role of Money in Politics? 

Regardless of our personal feelings, money makes the world (and democracy) go round. In our current system, anyone that runs for office needs a serious amount of dough. Some staggering data from the 2020 elections shows that 87.71% of the Senate wins were won by the top-spending candidate. As compared to $2.13 billion in 2000, more than $5.7 billion was spent in the Trump–Biden race. The candidate with the most money usually wins, but, in this case, Biden beat Trump with $1.69 billion raised compared to the $1.96 billion raised by Trump. But billionaires are also running for president and pumping their campaigns full of their own dollars. Billionaire Tom Steyer was a Democratic candidate who put $200 million of spending cash into his own campaign, which is a sum unthinkable to anyone except the super wealthy type.

The History of Money in Politics

In 2010, the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court made it legal for corporations and labor unions to funnel cash through Super Political Action Committees (super PACs) and advertise for the success or defeat of candidates. Sometimes the collective value of super PACs is worth more than the election campaign itself. PACs are pools of funds that are controlled by companies, trade associations, unions, or an interest group. Super PACs can raise unlimited donations, but they cannot directly give those funds as direct campaign contributions.

It seems unfathomable that these external entities have such leverage in our election process. But in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case on campaign finance, they overturned spending restrictions that dated back over 100 years. In the Citizens United case, justices argued that free speech was violated by suppressing donations and preventing corporate donors from spending on campaign finance. A slight majority of justices didn’t believe that there would be a corrupting influence on democracy, but we know from lobbying that is false in this country.

Super-rich Americans are another category to be aware of in campaign finance. An obvious outlier, but still among the wealthiest donors in the world, is Michael Bloomberg. This Democratic former mayor of New York City spent $1 billion in the 2020 election to prevent Trump from winning. How does this impact democracy? This elite, super-wealthy class is almost single-handedly funding elections, which impacts the overall functionality and integrity of our government. Less than 1% of Americans fund the elections of government officials, meaning the power lies in the hands of few. 

Problems with Money in Politics

Instead of platforms, merit, and credibility, cash has become a determining factor for who wins the most crucial elections in the United States. Also, the influx of cash from corporations and interest groups sways our political leaders to pass legislation that supports these entities, regardless of the public’s best interest. The introduction of money in politics has allowed corporations to buy leverage that alters the fabric of our economy. 

Even in congressional races where elections are largely predictable due to the partisan makeup of the state, a massive amount of spending is still filtered into campaigns. The donors receive legislative benefits from Congress, and they could also receive tax breaks or weakened regulations that reduce the amount of their corporate taxes. 

Beyond political advertising and election contributions, cash is influential in the lobbying industry. Hired lobbyists descend on Congress to access politicians and push for policies on behalf of their clients. Often fueled by the revolving door process in which politicians become lobbyists and vice versa, it’s clear that our democracy is unduly affected by spending and lobbying instead of voters. 

Former President Donald Trump racked up 3,700 conflicts of interest by the time he left Washington. Some members of top special interest groups, including the National Confectioners Association and Community Financial Services Association of America, earned special treatment and stayed at the former president’s properties, which led to favors from the American government. 

How to Reduce the Role of Money in Politics 

There are organizations that seek to change the law and reduce the contribution amount that individuals or corporations can spend on fundraising campaigns for PACs. These reformers are from each party, and they exist to give full access of the political system to all Americans, instead of a few individuals. 

Some researchers and organizations are unearthing donor data to follow dark money where there were no disclosure requirements. CREW is fighting for accountability in all governments through the power of the law. The Brennan Center for Justice champions solutions like small-donor public financing. She Should Run identifies and supports female candidates for office, and it guides them to public support, ethical donations, and victory. 

American Promise: Removing Money from Politics

Founded in 2016, American Promise is a nonprofit organization that seeks to win the 28th Amendment. This 28th Amendment to the Constitution would overturn the Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited spending in political campaigns, and it would rebalance the scales of elections. The Amendment needs a vote of two-thirds in Congress and ratification of three-quarters by the states to succeed. The last Amendment was in 1992, but Jeff is hopeful that their mission will gain traction as both sides of the aisle are concerned about corruption and contributions made to political candidates. 

Jeff Clements, President of American Promise

Jeff has an extensive history as an attorney, founder, and advocate for the public. He is the author of Corporations Are Not People , and his work has been featured in a variety of publications, including U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Hill. Jeff is also the managing partner of Whaleback Partners LLC , which invests in entrepreneurial businesses that are building a sustainable local food economy. 

Jeff first served as assistant attorney general and chief of the Public Protection and Advocacy Bureau in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. He led staff in law enforcement and litigation in the areas of civil rights, environmental protection, healthcare, insurance and financial services, antitrust, and consumer protection. Jeff also served as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts where he worked on litigation against the tobacco industry and handled a wide range of other investigations and litigation to enforce unfair trade practice, consumer protection, and antitrust laws. 

“Most Americans agree there’s way way way too much money in politics and most of it is having a corrupting, undue influence and locking out the voices and views of most Americans who don’t have that kind of money to spend.”

Take Action

As Jeff mentioned in the podcast, this is an issue that appeals to each party. Americans can come together to help remove the corrupt nature of money in politics by helping to move the 28th Amendment forward. You can start with the following actions to build support and public awareness for the movement. 

• Sign the Pledge : First, state your involvement in the cause. Your commitment can be put into writing to support the 28th Amendment on the American Promise’s website with this pledge to save our democracy by regulating spending. 
• Contact Officials: The Amendment needs congressional support, so contact your legislators to express your personal belief and values that big money needs to get out of the election process. This template can be used to find contact information. 
• Join a Chapter: On the local level, see if your state has an American Promise chapter or any grassroots organization that supports the 28th Amendment. Check here to see what your state has to offer and why you should volunteer . 
• Follow the Cash: Check out the Center for Responsive Politics to follow the cash and learn more about the influence of big money donors and self-preserving interest groups in Washington.

Closing: More Money, More Problems

For too long, money has been the one thing that has reigned supreme in America’s government systems and left corporate accountability unchecked. Washington should be full of candidates elected by the public for the public and not candidates willing to bend the rules in the interest of big spenders. 

To change the world , democracy, and America, it is crucial for the 28th Amendment to be passed and ratified, so that groups with excessive cash don’t have a bigger say in our government than voters.

Additional Resources and Links from the Podcast: 

• American Promise on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , and LinkedIn
• 2021 National Citizen Leadership Conference
• Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations by Jeff Clements
• Our Common Purpose
• Jack by Marilyn Robinson

Jacqueline Goodwin

Sustainable Workplaces Manager & Writer

Jackie is the Sustainable Workplaces Manager at Urban Green Lab, a sustainability education nonprofit in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s passionate about connecting people with actionable ways to make a positive impact on the environment. She graduated from Dickinson College with a degree in Environmental Studies and a certificate in Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Jackie worked in the nonprofit world in Washington D.C. for Ashoka and the National Building Museum.

Jackie enjoys hiking with her rescue dog, finding craft breweries, and traveling the globe in search of plant-based eats.

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Reader Interactions

October 5, 2022 at 9:41 pm

I think it’s not just corporations but the private sector too. If you’re going to limit corporations, then you should limit doctors and dentists funneling federal / state money back into their pockets.

October 10, 2022 at 8:01 am

Hmmm, not exactly sure what you’re referring to, Ron.

However, corporations are likewise part of the private sector.

Thanks for reading,

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• Reform Money in Politics

Influence of Big Money

A handful of wealthy donors dominate electoral giving and spending in the United States. We need limits on campaign finance, transparency, and effective enforcement of these rules — along with public financing.

Why It Matters

Today, thanks Supreme Court decisions like  Citizens United , big money dominates U.S. political campaigns to a degree not seen in decades. Super PACs allow billionaires to pour unlimited amounts into campaigns, drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans. Dark money groups mask the identities of their donors, preventing voters from knowing who’s trying to influence them. And races for a congressional seat regularly attract tens of millions in spending. It’s no wonder that most people believe the super-wealthy have much more influence than the rest of us. 

Though  Citizens United  opened the floodgates to unlimited independent spending, the Supreme Court continues to uphold limits on direct contributions. Brennan Center for Justice advocates for tighter limits on contributions candidates can directly receive.

We also call for stricter rules to ensure unlimited political spending by non-candidates really is independent of candidates. And we advocate for greater transparency of who pays for political ads, because voters deserve to know. To meet these standards, elections at every level require fair and effective enforcement, beginning with a better-functioning Federal Election Commission. 

Fully Disclose All Political Spending

Congress should pass the DISCLOSE Act, and states should require all groups engaged in political spending in state races to disclose their donors.

Close Fundraising Loopholes for Candidates and Officeholders

Congress and the states should curb coordinated activity between candidates and super PACs. They should also stop the flow of dark money to nonprofit groups that are controlled by and promote elected officials.

Fix the Federal Election Commission 

Congress should overhaul our nation’s dysfunctional campaign finance regulator so that it can effectively enforce the law.

Read more in our Democracy solutions report.

Super PACs & Coordination

There is a yawning gap in the rules that govern money in politics and government ethics. We must prevent special interests from using super PACs and officeholder-controlled nonprofits to bypass campaign finance limits and improperly influence candidates and elected officials.

Citizens United unleashed unlimited spending in our elections, and groups can now spend hundreds of millions without disclosing their sources of funding. We advocate for greater transparency in election spending.

Enforcement & the FEC

The gridlocked Federal Election Commission has failed to enforce campaign finance law. The Brennan Center has proposed reforms to overhaul and update the agency.

Work & Resources

Work & resources.

The Brennan Center's Money in Politics Toolkit

A resource for state and local lawmakers and advocates to develop political financing reforms in six key areas.

Brennan Center for Justice

Expert brief, analysis: new york’s big donor problem & why small donor public financing is an effective solution for constituents and candidates, research report, elected officials, secret cash, five to four, policy solution, the case for small donor public financing in new york, small donor tax credits: a new model, fixing the fec: an agenda for reform, getting foreign funds out of america's elections, secret spending in the states, trump’s use of campaign funds to pay legal bills, related analysis & opinion.

Thanks to loopholes and lax enforcement, former president Trump is using campaign funds to pay almost all of his legal bills.

Small Donors to Campaigns Are Not the Problem

Megadonors exert far more control over U.S. politics, and it’s past time to rein them in.

Small Donor Public Financing Can Help More Women Get Elected

Checkbook candidacies, rfk jr.’s vp pick and the dangers of self-funded campaigns, our experts.

Daniel I. Weiner

Ian Vandewalker

Lawrence Norden

Joanna Zdanys

Michael Waldman

Alicia Bannon

Douglas Keith

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy

Informed citizens are democracy’s best defense.

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Israel and Gaza: Despair and What-Ifs

More from our inbox:, trump, oil and big money in politics, ‘journey’ as metaphor, providing help for the homeless and the mentally ill.

To the Editor:

Re “ In Israel, ‘the Darkness Is Everywhere,’ ” by Megan K. Stack (Opinion guest essay, May 18):

I appreciate Ms. Stack’s essay, in which she makes several important observations about current attitudes among Israelis. However, she leaves out the tragic choices that Palestinians have themselves made in Gaza and the West Bank.

In particular, after the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, Gazans had the opportunity to use huge amounts of international aid to build new residential communities and seaside commercial and tourist destinations.

Instead, they diverted essentially all investment into war preparations, including the rocket and tunnel technology that has proved so formidable in several wars with Israel since then. The extremism of attitudes in this conflict isn’t limited to one side.

Stephen Hall San Francisco

I am grateful to The New York Times for publishing Megan K. Stack’s essay. We need more articles on what it is really like on the ground in Israel, and, as disheartening as it may be, we are all better and more informed for reading it.

Only when Jews in the United States (I am one of them) obtain a greater understanding of the horrible plight of the Palestinian people and what they have been subjected to over decades will we be able to affect our government’s policies to produce a more hopeful outcome for the region.

Until then, this vicious cycle will continue, because, as Ms. Stack so eloquently described, “there is no wall thick enough to suppress forever a people who have nothing to lose.”

Roy Friedland Greensboro, N.C.

I am dismayed at Megan K. Stack’s one-sided analysis of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. I am a lifelong supporter of Israel, but I share Ms. Stack’s concern regarding Israel’s extreme right-wing government. Placing all, or even most, of the responsibility at the foot of Israeli Jews, however, is disingenuous.

Consider a counterfactual history in which Arab and Palestinian leaders had said “yes” to any of the opportunities to live next to Jewish neighbors in peace. A simple Arab “yes” might have resulted in two separate states, for two separate indigenous peoples, living side by side.

There might have been no rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, suicide bombings or defensive barriers. Both parties could have lived in peace, dignity and prosperity.

Perhaps the next time an olive branch is offered, if there is a next time, the Palestinians will reply “yes.” What do they have to lose?

Stephen E. Green San Jose, Calif.

Re “ Trump Solicits Billion Dollars at Oil Dinner ” (front page, May 10):

It is a clarion call to get big money out of politics.

You report that Donald Trump “told a group of oil executives and lobbyists gathered at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort last month that they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry.”

Fossil fuel interests already pour tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns, mostly to Republicans, pushing that party’s congressional delegation and presidential nominee to oppose action against climate change.

This push for contributions and profits is in the face of the virtual unanimity of climate scientists that burning fossil fuels is the main cause of global warming.

Big contributions from gun, pharmaceutical, insurance, financial and other wealthy interests also powerfully influence our system in their favor, usually to the disadvantage of ordinary people. When one or a few big donors can buy more political speech than tens of millions of ordinary people combined, the system is rigged in favor of those who already have the most.

Public funding of election campaigns has worked well at the state, county and city levels. It elevates merit and the public interest in government decision-making and builds confidence in our system.

Richard Barsanti Western Springs, Ill.

Re “ When Did Everything Turn Into a ‘Journey’? ” (front page, May 16):

Name the journey — infertility, breast cancer, weight loss, motherhood or a cathartic vacation — and I’ve been on it.

“Journey” has become a euphemism for struggle, often a long, winding road with ups and downs. Some people may reach the finish line and celebrate triumphantly. Others may never get there, leaving loved ones to wonder how their “choose your own adventure” could have followed a different chapter. No journey is ever truly complete.

Infertility may be behind me, but its wake — a stillborn son, a ruptured uterus, a C-section scar, new family members in our surrogates who carried our daughters — will reverberate for my lifetime.

Many individuals will face infertility for the first time today, tomorrow or someday in the future. I always make time for those who reach out to me, hoping my experience can help them — or, at the very least, give them a chance to talk to someone on the metaphorical “other side.”

Journeys can break us or make us into someone new. Whatever euphemism we use, the important thing is don’t make it your ending when you get to the other side. Make it a new beginning to help those who follow in your footsteps.

Lia Buffa De Feo New York

With respect to cancer, its patients and their families — and all those dismayed by what linguists call “semantic drift” — let’s agree to call cancer a “situation.” Not a sentimental, self-help journey. Not a grim or rousing battle. Definitely something fraught and serious: a situation that compels utmost attention and action over time, time that makes no promises.

Karin Halvorson Hillhouse Washington

Re “ Citing Safety, New York Moves Mentally Ill People From the Subway ” (news article, May 11):

As New Yorkers daily enter our transit system, the sight of men and women sleeping on station benches or in subway cars causes mixed emotions ranging from dismay to fear to disgust. The mantra from the riders, either mumbled or spoken aloud, usually goes: “Why can’t the mayor clean this up?”

And it’s a mantra that has, for decades now, moved mayors, under the guise of compassion, to take aggressive action to remove from the subways those who are poor, more often than not homeless, and desperately struggling with mental health issues.

Of course, the cynics in us understand the politics of the moment and the need for mayors to show strength and resolve, even if their actions provide only a short-term fix.

Yes, these are difficult and seemingly intractable problems. But we’re never going to find lasting solutions unless we begin to understand and address the root issues.

As a start, we need to understand how these folks were allowed to fall deeper and deeper into the cracks. How community-based health and mental health systems — often nonexistent or, at best, bare-bones in poor communities — were unable to provide any real, meaningful support before they became so lost to us.

Most immediately, though, the city should engage with high-quality mental health teams to inundate the subway system, offering more than just a stay in a dilapidated shelter or an involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility. And it should study the work of other cities, which have used programs such as Housing First to help address the mental health issues of those living on the streets by providing permanent housing.

Arnold S. Cohen New York The writer is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and former president of Partnership for the Homeless.

“He lives in his little silo,” former prosecutor on why Donald Trump carries around stacks of papers

Posted: May 25, 2024 | Last updated: May 25, 2024

MSNBC'S Alex Witt spoke with Harry Litman, former federal prosecutor, now host of the podcast "Talking Feds" and Susanne Craig --investigative reporter with the New York Times, and asked for their predictions in the hush money case.

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Donald Trump hush money trial recap: Trump doesn't testify; defense rests its case

Tuesday morning saw the completion of testimony by robert costello, who got into a dramatic confrontation with the judge monday afternoon. the defense then rested without calling trump to the stand..

NEW YORK − Donald Trump's defense rested its case after calling just two witnesses − neither of them named Donald Trump − in the former president's historic criminal hush money trial on Tuesday.

Trump had initially said he would testify in his defense, but subsequently backed out. The Republican presidential candidate said he could not testify because of a gag order restricting his potentially intimidating attacks on witnesses and jurors, but Judge Juan Merchan made clear that this did not preclude Trump taking the stand.

After the jury was dismissed until next Tuesday, lawyers for both sides wrangled with Merchan over a vital part of the case: the judge's instructions to the jury.

Earlier Tuesday, defense witness Robert Costello , a Republican lawyer close to Trump, was back on the witness stand after Merchan threatened Monday to throw out his testimony for "contemptuous" conduct .

Merchan set closing arguments for May 28, with jury deliberations to follow.

These were the top developments inside and outside the courtroom:

Trump declines to testify but says press ‘has to cover me’

Former President Donald Trump decided against testifying in his own defense at his New York hush money trial, but he noted during a 12-minute hallway statement to reporters that he is still able to promote his political views and observations about the case.

“At least I have a voice, where I can talk to you, the press,” Trump said as two cable networks broadcast his comments live. “In many cases, it’s the fake news, but even the fake news has to cover me.”

--Bart Jansen

More: Republican allies are declaring things that judge's gag order prevents Donald Trump from saying

Tuesday proceedings wrap

Judge Juan Merchan called an end to Tuesday's proceedings. He said he will make "every effort" to get the jury instructions to the two legal teams by the end of Thursday, giving them four days to prepare their May 28 closing arguments.

– Aysha Bagchi

More: 'This is not a conversation': Read heated exchange between Judge Merchan, Robert Costello

'Please don't get up,' Merchan tells peeved Trump lawyer

Judge Merchan and Trump lawyer Emil Bove have gotten into a somewhat heated exchange after Merchan essentially accused Bove of spinning new versions of an argument the judge already rejected.

The earlier argument has to do with whether Trump can shield himself from the criminal charges by saying he relied on a lawyer's advice. Specifically, Trump would be saying a tabloid publisher told Michael Cohen – Trump's former lawyer – that a hush money deal related to Trump was "bulletproof," so Trump shouldn't be on the hook if it turns out that's not true.

Before the trial started, Trump chose not to make the argument, which is formally known as an "advice of counsel" defense. If he had made it, he would have been required to turn over certain documents and communications.

But according to Merchan, Trump basically tried to have his cake and eat it, too: Before trial, Trump made a new version of the same argument – labeling it a "presence of counsel" defense – without agreeing to turning over the documents. Merchan rejected that attempt. And now, Merchan said, Trump is making a third attempt – trying to get an instruction to the jury on an "involvement of counsel" defense.

"Honestly, I find it disingenuous for you to make the argument at this point," Merchan told Trump lawyer Emil Bove. "Please don't get up, I let you speak," Merchan added.

Merchan indicated the jury won't get an instruction based on Pecker's alleged statement to Cohen, and Trump's lawyers also can't raise it with the jury during closing arguments.

More: Read the transcript: Trump hush money trial judge's heated exchange with witness

Bove rose after that, saying he understood and didn't mean to be disingenuous, but his argument was based on testimony that came after the judge's prior rulings.

"You said that already, Mr. Bove," Merchan responded.

"But then you called me disingenuous," Bove replied.

Trump alert again as lawyer's exchange with judge turns hotter

Within the past 10 minutes, it looked like Trump might be nodding off in the courtroom. However, his eyes are now open and he appears engaged as his defense lawyer Emil Bove has gotten into a more heated exchange with Judge Juan Merchan about a potential jury instruction.

Trump struggling to stay awake?

Trump appeared alert and was reading or scanning documents earlier during the charging conference. However, now at 4:22 p.m. EDT, he has had his eyes closed for an extended period. I counted to 83, with a "Mississippi" between each number, while he had his eyes closed. At the number 83, Trump's face fell down and that motion appeared to make him perk up, at which point he lifted his head and opened his eyes.

Testimony in Trump’s trial ends with a bang − but not with jury hearing from him

Testimony from witnesses in former President Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial came to an explosive end before lawyers began negotiating jury instructions.

Judge Juan Merchan  reprimanded one of just two defense witnesses,  former federal prosecutor Robert Costello , as  "contemptuous" for deriding his rulings  from the witness stand.

And a key prosecution witness,  former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen  acknowledged stealing $30,000 from the Trump Organization.

Cohen had testified Trump knew he was reimbursing Cohen for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche had accused Cohen last week of lying on the stand  when he said he discussed the payment with Trump on a phone call.

Trump decided not to testify, after initially saying he “absolutely” would.

– Bart Jansen

Judge agrees to Trump-specific bias instruction for jurors

Trump lawyer Emil Bove said his team has proposed an instruction to jurors about bias that is specific to Trump. The proposal appears to have been made in a written submission to Judge Merchan that isn't publicly available, at least at this point.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said there is already a standard instruction that addresses bias and the prosecution doesn't believe a special instruction is necessary. However, he added that if the judge disagrees, the prosecution would prefer "the more neutral" language it counter-proposed in a written submission that also isn't publicly available.

Merchan told Bove he doesn't normally give the special instruction, and that he already refers to bias, fairness, and implicit bias several times in his normal instructions. He also noted bias-related issues were addressed in the questionnaire that was used in picking the jury , and that attorneys got to question potential jurors pretty extensively.

Still, Merchan wrapped by saying he'll include the prosecution's counter-proposal instruction.

'What you're asking me to do is change the law': Judge refuses to give Trump special treatment

Judge Merchan sided with the prosecution just now on how to instruct the jury about the definition of "unlawful means."

This may refer to one of the theories the prosecution is advancing for charging Trump with felonies : that Trump falsified business records in order to violate a New York election law that criminalizes using "unlawful means" to conspire to promote someone's election to public office.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said that it's "well established" the jury doesn't have to be unanimous about which unlawful means was used, as long as they all agree that some unlawful means was used.

"This is obviously an extraordinarily important case," Trump lawyer Emil Bove responded. As a result, the jury should be required to make "specific findings" about the means, Bove said.

Merchan asked in response whether Bove agreed juries aren't normally required make those specific findings. Bove said "certainly." However, he maintained that it's appropriate here because of the importance of this case.

"There's no reason to rewrite the law for this case," Merchan said. "What you're asking me to do is change the law, and I'm not going to do that."

Trump appears alert, reading papers with images

Trump is fully alert right now at 3:15 p.m. EDT, although he doesn't appear to be zeroed in on the lawyers' debate over jury instructions. That debate is focused on the legal propriety of various words or phrases in the jury instructions, so it may not be the most engaging discussion for a lay person who is a criminal defendant.

Trump has a stack of papers in front of him that appear to often be stapled in smaller groups and, at least on many pages, contain large images. He is often scanning a page or packet before moving the reading material to the side and looking at new material.

Trump's lawyers, by contrast, aren't looking at any papers. Emil Bove is standing as he argues right now about how to define "intent to defraud." It's an important issue because prosecutors must show Trump falsified business records with an intent to defraud.

Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles are seated at the same table as Trump and are watching the arguments.

Why is a charging conference so important?

Charging conferences can be filled with legalese. The jury isn't present for them, so lawyers know they are only speaking to the judge and don't need to try to be understood by a lay audience. And lawyers are generally just speaking about the law, with reference to sources such as statutes, legal guidance, and past court decisions.

However, the instructions given to the jury are crucial to the ultimate outcome. For example, even if the jury in Trump's case makes factual conclusions about the evidence that paint Trump in a bad light, if the jury concludes those facts don't constitute a violation of the law the judge instructs them on, that would be grounds to acquit the former president.

'Charging conference' on jury instructions underway

The charging conference in former President Donald Trump's criminal trial is underway. A charging conference is basically a hearing to go over the instructions the judge will give to the jury on the law.

Matthew Colangelo is currently handling arguments for the prosecution. Emil Bove is handling arguments for the defense.

Lawyers to argue over crucial jury instructions later today

Although jurors have been excused for the rest of the day, Judge Merchan said proceedings will resume at 2:15 p.m. EDT today for the lawyers. The two sides are set to make arguments to Merchan about the instructions he will give to the jury, before jurors begin deliberating next week.

Those instructions could be crucial to the outcome of the case. Merchan will tell the jury what the applicable law in the case is. He will then task them with not just deciding what happened factually in the case – for example, whether former President Donald Trump authorized Michael Cohen to pay porn star Stormy Daniels hush money – but also determining whether Trump's actions violated the law.

To convict or acquit Trump, 12 jurors must come to a unanimous decision.

Judge excuses jurors until Tuesday after defense rests

Judge Juan Merchan excused jurors not just for the rest of today, but also for several coming days. He said they don't have to come back until Tuesday, when the prosecution and defense will present closing arguments in the case.

Costello says Rudy Giuliani was first to talk of 'back channel'

Before the defense rested, Trump witness Robert Costello testified that Rudy Giuliani was the first person to use the term "back channel" to describe communications from Michael Cohen to Costello to Giuliani, and back the other way.

Cohen previously testified that Costello proposed creating a back channel of communication to Trump through Giuliani, at a time when Cohen's office had been raided by the FBI. Cohen described Costello as "sketchy."

Trump lawyer Emil Bove showed jurors an email from Costello to Cohen, speaking about having had a conversation with Giuliani. "He said thank you for opening this back channel of communication," Costello wrote, adding that Giuliani asked Costello to keep in touch.

Costello says communication to Cohen was privileged in email

Before the Trump defense rested, Trump lawyer Emil Bove showed jurors another email from Costello to Cohen that was dated April 21, 2018.

Bove emphasized to jurors that Costello labeled the email as protected by attorney-client privilege, perhaps seeking to suggest to jurors that Costello was acting in an attorney-like capacity to further Cohen's interests, rather than pressuring Cohen to help Trump.

Costello wrote to Cohen, appearing to reference Rudy Giuliani: "I spoke with Rudy. Very Very Positive. You are 'loved'." Costello added that, if Cohen wanted to have a call, Costello would give him more details.

Costello confirmed to Bove that Cohen didn't respond to the email by disputing that Costello was his lawyer.

Costello email expresses fear Cohen 'played' him

Trump lawyer Emil Bove asked Robert Costello more questions on "redirect," which is an opportunity for lawyers to rehabilitate their own witnesses when it comes to any issues raised on cross-examination.

Bove displayed an email from Costello to Michael Cohen, in which Costello expressed a fear that Cohen had "played" him.

"Please remember if you want or need to communicate something, please let me know and I will see that it gets done. I hope I am wrong but it seems to both Jeff and I that perhaps we have been played here," Costello said, possibly referencing his law partner, Jeffrey Citron.

Hoffinger kept Costello in control with tight questions

In prosecutor Susan Hoffinger's cross-examination of Costello Tuesday morning, she kept the Trump witness under tight control with a series of questions that only invited "yes" or "no" answers. On Monday, Costello showed a strong inclination to expound on his answers beyond what a question actually asked for.

Hoffinger repeatedly asked Costello simply to verify he wrote what was displayed in emails shown to the jury, or either confirm or deny a certain meaning to the emails.

At one point, Costello said he would be "delighted" to explain something about an email Hoffinger showed to the jury. 

"That's alright. Let's move onto the next one," Hoffinger replied.

'What should I say to this a--hole? He is playing with the most powerful man on the planet.': Costello to law partner

Before the Trump defense rested, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger displayed an email that Costello sent to his law partner, Jeffrey Citron, seeming to refer to Michael Cohen with an expletive term. 

"What should I say to this a--hole? He is playing with the most powerful man on the planet," Costello wrote.

Costello has testified he was operating in a lawyer-like capacity for Cohen at the time. But Hoffinger likely wanted the jury to believe Costello was acting in the interests of then-President Donald Trump, not Cohen.

Defense rests without calling Donald Trump to testify

Former President Donald Trump's defense team rested without calling their client to the witness stand. Judge Merchan is now giving the jury instructions on how the upcoming schedule will unfold.

Hoffinger shows emails backing Cohen's testimony

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger has displayed a series of emails that appear aimed at buttressing Michael Cohen's testimony that Costello pushed a back channel of communication with Trump through Rudy Giuliani , and pressured Cohen not to cooperate with federal investigators.

In one email to Cohen, Costello said Cohen thought Trump and Giuliani wanted to discredit him and throw him under the bus, and Costello thought Cohen was wrong. Costello told Cohen that if he really believed he was not being supported by his "former boss," he should make his position known.

"You have the ability to make that communication when you want to," Costello said.

Costello denies discussing Rudy Giuliani closeness in first meeting with Cohen

Hoffinger has begun cross-examining Costello again this morning. She started by asking Costello if he discussed being closely connected to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his first meeting with Michael Cohen. Costello denied that happened in the first meeting.

However, Costello confirmed to Hoffinger that he and Giuliani are close and have known each other for years, and that Giuliani was at Costello's wedding. Costello also agreed he did at some point tell Cohen his relationship with Giuliani could be very useful to Cohen.

Cohen testified that Costello proposed creating a back channel of communication with Trump through Giuliani after Cohen's office was raided by the FBI in 2018 .

Trump: Merchan should dismiss hush money case before jury considers evidence

Former President Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday that Judge Juan Merchan should throw out the case against him for lack of evidence before the jury considers it.

“I think it would be great for Judge Merchan to rule from the bench and determine that this is a witch hunt,” Trump said. “Any other judge would have thrown this case out.”

Trump said his defense would be resting soon. Bob Costello, who was scolded Monday for his reaction to Merchan’s rulings, is expected back on the stand to testify as a legal adviser to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Trump said he would talk to reporters again after what he expects will be a short day in the “ice box” courtroom.

“We’ll have another little scrum in a little while,” Trump said. “It should end a little bit early today.”

Judge Merchan arrives for Day 20 of trial

Judge Juan Merchan entered the courtroom at 9:28 a.m. EDT. The lawyers didn't raise any issues they wanted to discuss before bringing in Trump witness Robert Costello and the jury. Merchan didn't address the heated developments in the courtroom on Monday, including a brief period when he forced reporters to leave and then further admonished Costello for "contemptuous" behavior .

Trump and son Don Jr. arrive in courtroom

Former President Donald Trump and his legal team entered the courtroom at 9:23 a.m. EDT. The prosecution team has also arrived.

Trump is joined for the first time in this trial by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The Trump middle son, Eric Trump, has joined on several previous days. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee's supporters sit in the first two rows of benches behind the defense table.

Who has already testified in Trump's criminal trial?

Prosecution wrapped questioning with its 11th  witness  on Monday afternoon. Here is a look back at who has already taken the stand:

• David Pecker , former CEO and president of AMI, the parent company of tabloid National Enquirer
• Rhona Graff,  Trump's former executive assistant
• Gary Farro , Michael Cohen's former banker
• Robert Browning , an executive director at C-SPAN
• Phillip Thompson  who works for a deposition company
• Keith Davidson , a lawyer who represented former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels
• Douglas Daus  a computer forensic analyst for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
• Georgia Longstreet,  a paralegal with Manhattan District Attorney  Alvin Bragg's  office
• Hope Hicks , a former Trump aide who was the campaign press secretary in 2016
• Jeffrey McConney , the former controller at the Trump Organization
• Deborah Tarasoff , an accounts payable supervisor at the Trump Organization

Trump expert witness says he won't testify after judge's ruling

An expert witness hired by Trump's defense team, Brad Smith, posted on X (formerly Twitter) Monday night that he won't be testifying. He cited a ruling from Judge Juan Merchan earlier in the day that limited what Smith could say on the witness stand.

Merchan said Smith may describe general definitions of terms related to federal campaign finance laws, but may not go further in interpreting federal law. Merchan said allowing that broader testimony would create a "battle of the experts" between the defense and prosecution that would confuse the jury. And he said it would be problematic for the jury to hear legal instructions from two experts plus the judge himself.

Smith is a former head of the Federal Election Commission, who indicated he had planned to testify about the "very complex" Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA).

"While judge wouldn’t let me testify on meaning of law, he allowed Michael Cohen to go on at length about whether and how his activity violated FECA. So effectively, the jury got its instructions on FECA from Michael Cohen!" Smith complained.

The jury did hear that Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, although Merchan also instructed them not to consider that when deciding whether Trump is guilty in his criminal case.

Who is Robert Costello?

Robert Costello is a former federal prosecutor and Trump ally who has been called to challenge testimony from prosecution star witness Michael Cohen. According to Cohen, Costello tried to create a back channel of communication to Trump through former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2018, after the FBI raided Cohen's office.

"I swear to God, Bob, I don't have anything on Donald Trump," Cohen told Costello at the time, according to Costello's Monday testimony. Cohen himself testified that he never told Costello about Trump's alleged involvement in hush money payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Merchan's heated admonition against Costello came after the lawyer-turned-witness exclaimed "Geez!" following Merchan sustaining multiple objections to his testimony on Monday. Merchan first excused jurors to warn Costello about not exclaiming "Geez!," or rolling his eyes, or giving Merchan "side eye."

But during that warning away from jurors, Costello again drew the judge's ire. "Are you staring me down right now?" Merchan asked the lawyer, who was sitting in the witness box just next to the judge.

"No. I'm just wondering how –" Costello began to reply. "Clear the courtroom, please. Clear the courtroom," Merchan instructed. Several reporters protested but were still forced out.

What is Trump on trial for?

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records . Prosecutors allege the real estate mogul falsified records to cover up unlawfully interfering in the 2016 presidential election through a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

When will the trial end?

Judge Merchan said he anticipates holding closing arguments on Tuesday, May 28. That means the jury may have a verdict by the end of next week.

Why does Trump's team say the case should be dismissed?

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked Judge Merchan to dismiss the entire case on Monday.

Blanche said the business records at issue weren't actually false. The records indicate Trump was paying Michael Cohen for ongoing legal services in 2017, which prosecutors say was cover for reimbursing Cohen for a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Blanche said Cohen did provide Trump with 2017 legal services, in keeping with the characterization.

Blanche also argued the case should be tossed because Michael Cohen's testimony should be tossed, and the case can't stand without his testimony. "He not only lied repeatedly in the past under oath, but he lied in this courtroom," Blanche said.

Merchan could issue a ruling on Blanche's request sometime today.

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Fbi was authorized to use ‘deadly force’ in classified docs search at trump’s mar-a-lago, court filings reveal.

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The Department of Justice authorized “the use of deadly force” when FBI agents swarmed former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 looking for classified documents, according to court filings Tuesday .

Agents in the Aug. 8 raid were tasked with seizing “classified information, [National Defense Information], and US Government records,” reads to an operations order revealed in evidence as part of Trump’s criminal case involving the allegedly mishandled documents in Florida.

The authorities also were told to conceal their “law enforcement equipment” and come armed with “ammo,” “handcuffs” and “medium and large sized bolt cutters,” notes the filing by lawyers for the former president.

“The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force,” the agency said in a statement. “No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.”

According to the lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise, the nearly 10-hour “unconstitutional” search swept through the Palm Beach estate’s gym and kitchen, as well as the bedroom suite of former first lady Melania Trump and the bedroom of the couple’s teenage son Barron Trump.

FBI agents only discovered classified documents in a basement storage room, an office of the former president and rooms adjacent to the office.

The government says Trump illegally removed the documents, which include “national defense information,” from the White House, while the former president says he has done nothing illegal.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General George Toscas, in a phone call in the days leading up to the raid, allegedly said he “frankly [didn’t] give a damn about the optics” of the recovery operation.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant.”

Evidence in the court filing reveals an earlier back-and-forth between Trump’s lawyer and a prosecutor working for special counsel Jack Smith over retrieving the documents.

But Steven D’Antuono, the assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, had told the House Judiciary Committee in an interview last year that he expressed concerns about executing the search warrant without the consent of one of Trump’s lawyers.

Smith went on to land an indictment against the former president on 37 criminal counts in June 2023 for allegedly retaining more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI seized in the raid and lying to his lawyer and the federal authorities who sought them.

Trump’s lawyers, in another motion Tuesday, asked for that evidence to be suppressed along with audio recordings from one of his lawyers, Evan Corcoran, that bolstered prosecutors’ allegations of obstruction of justice.

Smith fired back in filings of his own , as prosecutors prepare for hearings before US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday in Fort Pierce, Fla.

The special counsel revealed additional evidence that Trump valet Walt Nauta, who was indicted as a co-defendant in the case, conspired with maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira to delete camera footage of them moving boxes full of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.

In a previously sealed opinion, DC US District Senior Judge Beryl Howell wrote that prosecutors had presented evidence of Corcoran tipping Trump off about a subpoena for video footage at Mar-a-Lago.

News of the subpoena apparently prompted the former president to ask Nauta to return some boxes with the sensitive files to basement storage — but “avoid the surveillance cameras he then understood to have been deputized by the government,” Howell said.

Prosecutors were later unable to find video footage of the boxes returning, she added.

Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial over the classified documents earlier this month, writing in an order that to stick to the May 20 deadline would “be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions … and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury.”

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