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And They're Off to the Money Race

By J. Barlow Herget
Published: Jan. 7, 2002

RALEIGH - It didn’t take long. Two days after the North Carolina General Assembly adjourned, I received a call from a friend who is running for office in 2002. He wasn’t calling to wish me a Happy New Year. He asked for a contribution.

Representatives and senators increasingly must raise thousands of dollars every two years to campaign. The N.C. Center for Voter Education reports that in the 2000 Election a House seat in cost the winner on average $69,000 in campaign expenses; in the Senate, the figure was $134,500. Those costs are much higher than they were even 4 years ago. So the pressure to raise the cash is high.

However, legislators are governed by a law that prohibits them from holding fundraisers or soliciting money from registered lobbyists -- some of the biggest political givers in the state -- while the legislature is in session. The law was enacted out of shame. The public saw legislators asking for money from lobbyists one day and voting on those same lobbyists’ interests the next day.

If you wanted the chairman of the Appropriations Committee to fund a project in your city, and he invited you to a $250 per ticket cocktail party, would you stick a thumb in his eye and say no thanks?

Likewise, politicians believed they had to strike while the lobbyists’ mind was on practical matters. The practice of raising money during the session became so unseemly that the legislators banned it. Since then, the race for campaign money starts as soon as the legislature adjourns. In 2001, thanks mostly to an obdurate "gang of eight" Democratic dissidents, the session didn’t finish until December, setting a record. Hence, my friend’s holiday call.

In some ways, you’ve got to feel sorry for them. No sooner have our legislators finished an 11-month session than they have to begin raising campaign cash. Surely they’d rather go home and put their feet up, like the rest of us do through the Holiday season. Instead, the system demands they continue to raise campaign money.

In other ways, we should really be feeling sorry for ourselves. If our legislators are stuck in Raleigh for 11 months of the year, and start fundraising the minute the session ends, when do they find time to represent average folks, or listen to the concerns of people other than the lobbyists and those who give the campaign cash?

My friend, of course, is by no means alone. Candidates in the U.S. Senate race for Sen. Jesse Helms’ seat have also been engaged in early gamesmanship. The various candidates tried to raise as much money as possible before Dec. 31. They must file campaign finance reports in January that show how much money they have raised as of Dec. 31, 2001. Thus, their campaign money raisers busily called friends and supporters, asking for "early money."

This is the serious business in politics where perception is sometimes more important than reality. If, for example, a candidate wants to convince political party leaders and organizations that he is a contender, the candidate must show them that he has enough money to run a serious campaign.

Obviously, the more contributors the better, but it’s the money that counts most, sometimes even more than political experience or connections. For example, Sen. John Edwards was a political novice compared to his opponents in 1998, but he was prepared to spend millions of dollars of his own money to win the Democratic Primary. More recently, the new mayor of New York City, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, spent an estimated $70 million of personal funds to win. Like Edwards, it’s the first political office Bloomberg has ever held.

Money, if well spent, means a candidate can take his or her message to the voters. Unfortunately, the citizen who wants to run for office without spending thousands or millions of dollars simply cannot talk to enough people or shake enough hands to compete with the reach of modern media, especially television. If you hear a candidate say he’s not going to join the money race because he doesn’t want "to buy" the election, you might wonder if he’s either foolishly naïve or knows he can’t raise the money to win. Sadly, though noble, he’s not likely to have to worry beyond the primary about buying the election.

This is not cynical speculation. Figures from the North Carolina legislative races in 2000 showed that the candidates who spent the most money in his or her campaign won in 85 percent of the contests. The record in federal campaigns for the U.S. House and Senate showed similar results.

The money race has become more expensive with each election cycle. And for the citizen interested in politics and good government whether it is Democratic, Republican, Libertarian or any other color, he can expect to be getting more and more phone calls like the one I received. Unless we change the system.