Why Incumbents Hold Their Places

This has been a frustrating year for campaign reformers. Hopes of passing federal legislation to limit spending and establish public financing for congressional elections were dashed this spring when Senate Democrats were unable to crack a Republican filibuster, despite a record eight cloture votes.

Now campaign finance experts from around the country are watching California--where voters will consider an initiative establishing a similar expenditure-limiting, public-financing system for state legislative races on the June 7 ballot. Proposition 68 is backed by a diverse coalition including Common Cause and the California Business Roundtable; it is opposed, with uncharacteristic unanimity, by the bipartisan leadership of the state legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian--a group that usually couldn’t agree on the weather. A competing initiative to ban spending limits, Proposition 73, shows no signs of getting off the ground.

On both the federal and state level, the drive to limit campaign spending has been energized by public concern about inexorably rising costs. In California, spending in state legislative races jumped 30% from 1984 through 1986.

Total spending, though, isn’t the most dangerous trend in campaigns. More frightening is the rapidly advancing extermination of electoral competition in legislative and congressional races, insulating legislators against effective review by their constituents. Barring a scandal, it has become virtually impossible to unseat an incumbent. “Right now we reelect House members at a rate equal to that of Kremlin elections,” said Mark Green, president of the Democracy Project, a progressive think tank in New York.

In 1986, only six members of the House of Representatives were defeated in the general election. Nationally, the percentage of incumbent state legislators reelected has climbed into the high 90s. In California, no one seeking reelection to the state Assembly, the state Senate or Congress was defeated in 1986. In the 1984 election, only one incumbent representative and one state legislator lost their seats.

The real scandal in campaign spending is the way money insulates incumbents from competitive races. The spending gap between incumbents and challengers has exploded over the past decade. In 1974, the average U.S. representative outspent the challenger by 46%. By 1986, the gap had widened to 174%, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In the Senate, over that same period, the spending gap between incumbents and challengers expanded from 38% to 93%.

In the state, the gap is at insurmountable levels. In 1976, California Assembly incumbents outspent opponents by 3-1; a decade later, they had widened their advantage to 30-1. In recent state Senate races, incumbents overwhelmed challengers with a 62-1 spending advantage.

Why the growing chasm? A reason is the increasing tendency of Political Action Committees (PACs) to buy into, rather than challenge, the legislative status quo. Liberals often look at PACs as mortal enemies--the pernicious tools of conservative business interests dedicated to uprooting progressives. But, in practice, PACs care less about ideology than incumbency; they are the ultimate pragmatists. Instead of funding long-shot challengers, PACs increasingly prefer to invest in incumbents--even those they disagree with--so they can guarantee access to entrenched legislative powers. “This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Incumbents have a tremendous advantage so people and groups are only willing to bet on challengers in extraordinary circumstances,” said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), one of the last campaign’s six successful challengers.

In the 1985-86 election cycle, PACs gave almost five times more money to congressional incumbents than challengers. In this campaign, according to Ed Zuckerman, editor of a newsletter on PACs, the committees have given almost 14 times as much money to incumbents as challengers. Because so many congressional incumbents are Democrats, PACs, ironically, have become a bulwark of the Democrats’ liberal Capitol Hill majority. The same trends govern dispersal of special-interest money in Sacramento, with the vast majority of funds going to incumbents, no matter their ideological persuasion.

With so much of the big money showered on incumbents, challengers haven’t been able to keep up. Most reformers believe the only way to narrow the incumbents’ financial advantage is to place limits on overall spending, as Proposition 68 would do. “Incumbents can always raise more money than challengers, so if you are placing your spending limits at a point the challengers can reach, you are improving their chances,” said Robert M. Stern, co-director of the California Commission on Campaign Financing that wrote the proposal the initiative is based on.

But not all analysts agree. Some, such as Herbert E. Alexander, a campaign finance expert at USC, argue that expenditure limits help sitting legislators because challengers often must outspend them to overcome the advantages of incumbency. That’s true--but more at a theoretical than practical level, since challengers almost never outspend incumbents anymore. Only one challenger for a U.S. Senate seat has raised more money than his opponent in this campaign. Of the seven challengers who unseated Senate incumbents in 1986, only one (Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.) outspent his opponent. Even four of the six successful House challengers in 1986 were outspent.

Given the bias toward incumbents in political giving, it’s hard to see how the proposition’s expenditure limits would make state races less competitive. The measure’s ban on fund-raising before the election year would certainly prevent incumbents from scaring off challengers by amassing huge war chests. And incumbents wouldn’t be so opposed to spending limits if they believed restrictions would make it tougher for challengers.

But an expenditure limit isn’t enough to increase healthy competition. In Wisconsin, where a similar public-financing, spending- limit system is in place, the reelection rate for state legislators remains above 95%.

Part of the problem is that public financing doesn’t necessarily level the financial playing field. Many California state legislative candidates raise so little money they wouldn’t meet the threshold set by the initiative ($20,000 in Assembly and $30,000 in state Senate races) to qualify for public dollars.

And spending limits address only one of the advantages incumbents enjoy. An incumbent’s other assets include subsidized mailings to constituents, years of cultivating contacts and full-time staffs delivering favors in the district. Most daunting, legislative incumbents often represent gerrymandered districts so heavily stocked with party partisans that challenges become impractical, if not impossible.

Challengers for U.S. Senate seats can overcome these disadvantages because they attract enough money, and media, to make themselves known to the voters--even if they are outspent. That’s largely why challengers were able to topple one-fourth of the Senate incumbents seeking reelection in 1986.

But most House and state legislative challengers find it impossible to cross that visibility threshold. Val Marmillion, a former congressional aide challenging Westside Democratic Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson in the June primary, has received no local TV coverage and his campaign cannot afford advertising in the expensive Los Angeles media market. Under those circumstances, even alerting voters to the existence of a challenger “is a hell of a problem,” Marmillion said.

To enhance competition, Green and others have proposed requiring TV stations to make time available to all qualified federal candidates at low or no-cost, and mailing government-funded brochures to voters in which candidates could explain their positions. Both ideas would make challengers more viable--as would expenditure limitations. But the key in many states, particularly California, remains redistricting. After the last census, Democrats so artfully redistricted the Statehouse and congressional districts that most campaigns are little more than formalities.

That hard fact doesn’t diminish the importance of campaign finance reform. Many Washington reformers are hoping that a California vote to limit campaign spending will revive the issue of federal expenditure limits, although prospects in the next Congress currently appear bleak. But in California the fight over campaign spending is only half the battle. Without a major reform of redistricting in time for the next reapportionment (after the 1990 census), a victory for the spending limitation on June 7 could be a hollow one.