Jun. 12, 2001
The High (and Getting Higher) Cost of Democracy
By J. Barlow Herget
RALEIGH - When I first ran for the eight-member City Council here in 1989, I talked to friends about the cost of such a campaign. Former incumbents said it shouldn’t cost more than $3,000, if that much. I raised almost $10,000, spent $8,600 and won.
I wrote a magazine article in 1990 about my experience and noted the large sums being spent on local elections: “In the game of big city politics, there are no cheap seats left.” The 1989 mayor’s race in Winston-Salem stood out. Candidates there had spent more than $475,000 combined, an astounding amount at the time. The winner in our own sharply contested mayor’s race that year had spent a record for Raleigh, $58,000.
I ran unopposed in 1991, and when I ran for mayor in 1993, I estimated the winner must spend at least $150,000. I raised and spent almost $245,000 -- and lost to an opponent who spent about the same. Eight years later in the 1999 Raleigh mayor’s race, the candidates’ combined spending was over $1 million!
What I wrote in 1990 is even more the case today. This trend of larger and larger campaign sums in local, municipal elections -- elections, by the way, that already are underway in North Carolina’s larger cities this Election Year -- this trend is part of the state and national tides toward ever increasingly expensive campaigns.
North Carolina, for example, topped the national charts in 1984 when Sen. Jesse Helms and then Gov. Jim Hunt ran up campaign costs of over $25 million in their battle for Helms’ seat. Since that race, citizens here have grown accustomed, perhaps even jaded to high prices in elections for congressional and gubernatorial offices.
The first test -- and sometimes the final exam -- for a candidate seeking election to one of these offices today is his or her ability to raise “serious money.” Translation: a minimum $1 million. And that’s considered just seed money in a Senate or governor’s race.
Before the 1990s, North Carolina legislative races seldom moved into the high-rent district. There still are popular incumbents who can run for re-election out of their back pockets.
The evolution of campaign costs is illumed by the story told by former U.S. Sen. Robert Morgan. He writes:
“When I was in law school in 1950, I ran for clerk of superior court in my county, and I had no contributions whatsoever. I paid for little hand cards myself and I bought my own gas. Later on, I ran for the state Senate, five times. My district included a huge area, from Sampson County in the eastern part of the state all the way to High Point. It was 150 miles from one side to the other. And in all that time, I only had one tank of gas and one $10 bill given to me.
“Then I ran for Attorney General of North Carolina, a statewide election, and I only spent about $75,000. In 1974, I ran for U.S. Senator. We asked about 500 people across North Carolina to raise me $1,000 each. Not give me $1,000 each. But raise $1,000 from their friends and associates, in small contributions of $10 and $25. We raised practically all of our money through local contributions.
“Those days are gone. A young person can’t do that today. The state senator who now holds my old district -- which has been reduced to only one-and-a-half counties -- spent $280,000 in the 1998 campaign.”
According to an examination by David Rice of the Winston-Salem Journal, the cost for state legislative campaigns in the 2000 Election totaled $19.4 million! Rice found that the average price for a seat in the 120-member House was $69,000. The average price for one of the 50 seats in the North Carolina Senate was $134,500. (Also of interest, 151 out of the 157 incumbent state legislators in the 2000 Election were re-elected.)
Current campaign regulations do nothing to reduce the ever-higher costs of campaigns. In 2002, without campaign finance reform, expect the numbers here for legislative races to be 26 percent higher. That was the growth rate between 1998 and 2000 election costs.
Thanks to campaign finance disclosure reforms following the Watergate Scandal, however, citizens can follow the money in this year’s municipal elections. A report by Jay Price and David Raynor in The News & Observer last year showed that in Triangle local races, the largest contributors were those who did business at City Hall, namely real estate developers. They gave $549,411 to campaigns. Is anyone surprised? The next largest contributor group was retired donors who gave $91,976 followed by attorneys with $75,854.
If you are one of those cheerful souls who believe as does the U.S. Supreme Court that campaign money is no more than one person’s political speech, consider this loud fact: The candidate who spends the most money almost always wins. In the 2000 elections for the General Assembly, the biggest spenders won 87 percent of the time! If money talks, it shouts in politics.
Barlow Herget is a businessman and former member of the Raleigh City Council.
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