Presidential campaigns have been getting exponentially more expensive, and the 2020 election is shaping
up to be no different.
The Trump campaign has already raised over $124 million.
The president began fundraising the day of his inauguration.
Yet, in the Democratic primary, nearly every candidate has taken some stand on how they
are raising in this election.
I’m building a different kind of campaign.
Money has had such an outside influence on politics.
I don’t believe that democracy should be for sale.
We need to take dark money, the insidious forces out of our politics.
So how do all of these stands actually stack up?
And will they make any difference?
We have I think already an American public that understands that there is a problem and
understands that special interests and wealthy donors have a distorted impact on our political
process.
According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans believe there need to be limits
on how much money individuals and organizations can spend on campaigns.
But, presidential elections were not always as expensive as they are now.
There was a time when most campaigns were publicly funded with government money.
Funds were capped at $20 million and came with a set of restrictions.
Then came the 2008 election, and a key Supreme Court decision.
I accept your nomination for presidency of the United States.
Obama rejected public funds and financed his campaign through private donations, effectively
circumvented the spending caps.
A golden era of PACs followed.
The public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face
opponents who have become masters at gaming this broken system.
PACs -- or Political Action Committees -- are organizations that pool campaign contributions.
Corporate PACs are funded by employees and shareholders of a company.
Since corporations are barred from contributing directly to candidates, these PACs essentially
promote the corporation’s interests.
In 2020, nearly every Democratic candidate has pledged to refuse Corporate PAC money.
We’re not taking corporate PAC money or federal lobbyist money.
That’s why I have said I will not take corporate contributions..
I don’t take corporate PAC money.
Shoot, I don’t take PAC money of any kind.
Super PACs are supposed to be independent from candidates and can accept unlimited contributions
from any source.
In 2010, the Supreme Court upheld the ability of SuperPACs to spend unlimited amounts of
money in the landmark Citizen United case.
Eleven of the Democratic candidates have disavowed support for Super PACs.
But that pledge is a bit more complicated than refusing Corporate PAC money.
If a candidate receives a contribution from a corporate PAC, they can just return it.
A candidate can't formally control a Super PAC, but if the Super PAC pops up and begins
to spend money in their race, there's not necessarily a lot that they can do to prevent that.
According to Fischer, these pledges -- at least so far -- are more symbolic than they
are substantive.
Corporate PACs aren’t typically a big player in presidential primaries and, at this point
in this cycle, the Super PAC pledge hasn’t made a real difference in fundraising.
The pledge that's had the biggest impact is the Warren and Sanders pledge not to hold
high dollar, closed-door fundraisers.
Every election cycle, wealthy donors pay significant amounts to attend private fundraisers with
a candidate.
Instead of raising $5 or $10 at a time, candidates can charge hefty prices for entry into an
exclusive event.
In exchange, wealthy donors get access and an outsized voice.
Over time, if a candidate is spending an inordinate amount of time with wealthy donors face-to-face
hearing from them about their priorities, that's going to have an impact on the policies
that you as a candidate are going to support and promote.
I think that part of the shift that happens is this recognition of the role of small donors
and small donor democracy, which is fundamentally a different way to run for office.
And with that shift in campaigning style is an increased focus on cleaning up the government.
Still, the conversation that we’ve been having for the last 20 years, of course we
need to get money out of politics.
As president, we will make sure that we ban political action committee contributions.
We either pass a constitutional amendment or pass legislation that establishes public
funding for federal campaigns.
Being the party of big structural change, give people a reason to show up and vote.
I’ve joined the end Citizen’s United movement.
A majority of the candidates have made statements in favor of overturning Citizens United and
expanding public campaign financing.
Gillibrand and Yang took that a step further.
Both have proposed providing voters with federal dollars to contribute to campaigns.
I want to get money out of politics.
I want to restore our democracy to the hands of the people and the way you do that is through
publicly funded elections.
Several candidates have called for increased disclosure requirements or better enforcement
mechanisms.
And Bullock, O’Rourke, and Warren have plans to prevent foreign money from influencing
U.S. elections.
Plus, every candidate who is also a member of Congress voted for H.R. 1, a major reform
bill to reduce the influence of money in politics.
The bill passed in the House, but was D.O.A. in the Republican-led Senate.
For a long time, candidates have talked publicly about their support for reforming our political
system, and limiting money's influence on politics, but then privately, they've exploited
every campaign finance loophole they could find or in some cases even created new ones.
So the 2020 cycle is a real shift.
In the meantime, all the candidates can do is make voluntary pledges -- and eventually
one of the Democrats will have to confront the reality of a general election and the
behemoth that is Trump’s re-election campaign.
Trump raised $54 million in the second quarter of 2019 alone.
As of July 16, his campaign has nearly $125 million.
In comparison, the Democratic candidate with the most money so far -- Sen. Bernie Sanders
-- has raised about $46 million.
None of these figures include any outside money.
Whoever the Democratic nominee is going to be up against a challenger, who has the support
of a Super PAC and who has a multi-million dollar campaign war chest built up over the
past four years.
I expect that many of the pledges that have been made in the primary will no longer hold
into general and that may not be totally unreasonable.
We are operating in a broken campaign finance system, where a handful of ultra-wealthy donors
have an excessive amount of influence over our democracy and voluntary campaign finance
pledges is not going to change that.