More Wealthy Candidates Fill Own Coffers

Rep. Mike Huffington (R-Santa Barbara) has grabbed the national spotlight by pouring more than $27 million of his own money into his bid for a U.S. Senate seat, but he is merely the most visible example of a phenomenon that is rewriting the rules of congressional campaigning.

Across the country, wealthy candidates are spending millions of dollars on their own races. Encouraged by widespread public distaste for incumbents and political insiders in general, at least 96 House and Senate candidates already have bankrolled their 1994 campaigns with $100,000 or more of their own funds--a 35% increase since the last midterm election cycle in 1990. Nearly two-thirds of them are Republicans.

In addition, self-financed candidates are expected to set new records for the amount of money they inject into their campaigns, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign money.

Most of these well-heeled hopefuls--many are entrepreneurs, lawyers or physicians--are challengers who are digging into their pockets to help establish political credibility and jump-start campaigns through expensive television ads and other paid media. Many are political novices who maintain that they must spend lavishly to introduce themselves to voters and to attack the records and reputations of better-known opponents.

To the surprise of some political experts, these big spenders do not appear to be paying a price for seeking to “buy the election,” in the words of some opponents. Even more striking, some appear to be reaping a windfall among voters for putting their money where their mouth is, political professionals say.

“It is advantageous to put your money in because voters perceive you can’t be bought,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who worked for billionaire Ross Perot’s self-financed 1992 independent presidential bid. “If you’re a millionaire, special interests can’t touch you. You don’t need anything from them. And if you’re a rags-to-riches story, you’re golden.”

The flip side is that self-financed candidates who run without significant track records of public service can find their business backgrounds subject to unusually harsh attacks. Cases in point are Republican Huffington’s campaign against Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Republican neophyte Mitt Romney’s bid to unseat 32-year Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts.

The proliferation of out-of-pocket candidacies reflects--and reinforces--another trend: the skyrocketing cost of running for office. Altogether, congressional candidates either loaned or contributed nearly $75 million to their own campaigns as of Sept. 30, a threefold increase over the entire election cycle a decade earlier.

The phenomenon of candidates relying on personal wealth is as old as the Republic itself. And America has a storied tradition of political dynasties--such as the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Rockefellers--who have benefited financially from familial support.

Indeed, candidate contributions are constitutionally protected under a landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley vs. Valeo. The court held that limiting the amount of private money spent in elections violates the right to free speech under the First Amendment.

But the recent proliferation of self-financed candidates is provoking concern among critics of escalating campaign spending. In 1992, victorious Senate candidates spent an average of $4 million each; the figure for House winners was $542,093.

“This is clearly an indication of the plutocratic drift in American government,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “Either you have to be wealthy or be beholden to wealthy interests to have a viable political campaign. Essentially, neither of them is responsive to the average American.”

The number of millionaires in the House rose 13% in the current Congress to at least 72; the Senate figure is at least 28. Even if Congress is moving toward John Adams’ ideal of “a portrait in miniature of the American people” in terms of women and minorities, it is going in the opposite direction when it comes to class.

The big jump in self-financed candidacies occurred during the 1992 campaign, when a combination of anti-incumbent fervor, a large number of congressional retirements and the once-a-decade redrawing of election districts created extraordinary opportunity for challengers--including 77 open seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

A total of 122 candidates poured $100,000 or more into their campaigns two years ago, considerably more than in any of the previous three election cycles. The combined total of their personal donations was $76.5 million, more than double the previous figures.

The effect of the practice involves more than just the bottom line. By simply writing a check to his or her campaign, a candidate can avoid the considerable investment of precious time, energy and fund-raising costs required to prospect for contributions from others.

This year, 27 Senate candidates had invested more than $100,000 of their own funds as of Sept. 30. The figure is certain to increase during the final five weeks of the campaign.

The biggest self-financers include Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.), who loaned or donated $4 million to his campaign. Investor and developer Richard Fisher, a Texas Democrat waging a long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, ponied up nearly $4 million. Venture capitalist Romney gave $2 million, and surgeon Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican mounting a strong challenge to Democratic Sen. Jim Sasser, donated $1.3 million.

But these expenditures pale next to Huffington’s self-financing tally, which hit nearly $25 million by Oct. 19. The figure represents all but $400,000 of his total campaign spending. He has already set a new standard for the nation’s costliest Senate campaign.

The scion of an oil and gas fortune, Huffington stunned political professionals when he invested a record $5.2 million to win a House seat in 1992. In both races, Huffington said it was necessary to spend large sums to introduce himself to voters--an especially costly process in a state as vast as California--and to offset the advantages of his well-known opponents.

Huffington has attacked Feinstein for relying on powerful special interests to finance her campaign. But she in turn has alleged that his company “stiffed taxpayers for millions”--charging that one bankrupt Huffington family business owes $6.7 million to California in back taxes, while another defaulted on a $6-million loan to a failing bank.

Huffington said Feinstein has misrepresented both matters. But recent surveys conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll show that growing numbers of California voters have questions about Huffington’s integrity.

Feinstein, a multimillionaire herself, has endowed her $11-million campaign with loans totaling $1.5 million. She pumped $3 million of her own money into her hard-fought Democratic gubernatorial primary race in 1990, but eventually raised $17 million from other donors for her primary and general election campaigns.

In this year’s House races, 69 candidates topped $100,000 in loans and contributions to themselves by Sept. 30. The leaders include Gene Fontenot, a Republican hospital owner who has plowed $1.7 million into his bid for an open seat in Texas, and Bob Schuster, a Democratic attorney who has pumped $850,000 into his campaign for an open seat in Wyoming.

Richard Sybert, a Republican attorney and businessman opposing nine-term Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills), expects to sink about $500,000 into his million-dollar campaign.

“If you’re willing to put your own money into the race, it establishes you as a serious candidate,” said Sybert, a former aide to Gov. Pete Wilson. “I felt funny asking others to support me financially if I hadn’t done so myself.”

Still, self-financing a campaign by no means assures success. Only four of the 34 Senate candidates who pumped six-figure sums into their 1992 races were victorious, and two of them were incumbents. In the House races, 18 of 88 such candidates won. Many of this year’s big spenders have already lost primaries.

Even so, Jamin B. Raskin, an associate professor of constitutional law at American University Law School, finds the infusion of individual wealth into elections alarming.

“The process that has grown up drives the vast majority of citizens out of political participation,” Raskin said. “The idea that a middle-class person, much less a working-class person, could run for the Senate in California today is almost comic. That’s a very dangerous condition when the majority of citizens are turned into spectators in a media-driven game.”

Times staff writer Dwight Morris and researcher Caleb Gessesse in Washington contributed to this story.

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