High Cost of Political Ambition

As the costs of seeking public office soar, increasing numbers of candidates are turning to self-financing to help cover their campaign expenses. A decade ago the Center for Responsive Politics counted 64 congressional candidates who spent more than $100,000 in personal funds on their races. In the 1993-94 election cycle it found 131 candidates who did so. And the money they spent more than tripled, from $32 million to a whopping $109 million.

The law limits individual contributions to candidates to $1,000. But there’s no limit on self-financing, nor under the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, the Supreme Court has held, can there be. Rich candidates can, and do, commit huge sums to their electoral quests. Ross Perot, Steve Forbes and Michael Huffington each threw tens of millions of dollars of their personal fortunes into what turned out to be losing efforts--in the first two instances for the presidency, in Huffington’s case for a Senate seat from California. Some candidates who contribute to their own races do so in the form of loans. Winners stand a good chance of getting paid back, in whole or part, through postelection fund-raisers.

Personal wealth does not, as the above cases show, guarantee electoral success. The Center for Responsive Politics in fact found that only 15 of the 93 House candidates who contributed $100,000 or more to themselves in 1994 were elected. But that doesn’t necessarily tell the whole tale. There’s no way to know, for example, how many highly qualified potential candidates are intimidated into not running because they can’t hope to match what rich opponents are able to spend. Nor is there any sure way to measure the distorting effects that vast funds, often spent on heavily negative campaign advertising, may have on the political process. But clearly it’s an important factor.

Money and politics have always been inseparable. What has become worrisome is the ever-greater prominence that money plays in campaigns. The encouraging news, so far, is that massive spending--almost unlimited spending when self-financing is at work--doesn’t necessarily lead to electoral success. The bad news is that the failure rate hasn’t dissuaded growing numbers of candidates from spending wildly.