Campaign Activities

Campaign Activities

I went to the Mountain Home Senior Citizens Center last night as part of a candidates' forum. Again, the format was really not well suited to this: one minute opening statements by all the candidates, and then written questions from the audience. Still, I had a number of people approach me afterwards to tell me how impressed with how intelligent I am. (Perhaps it was just the comparison that made me look good.)

One person on the Elmore Republican Central Committee whom I have called several times approached me and explained that he had not returned my calls because he was planning to vote for Corder. After hearing me speak, especially on the Second Amendment, he had changed sides, and asked for a campaign sign.

My wife and I also went out to the most eastern part of the district, Glenns Ferry and Hammett, to plant campaign signs. The contrast between northern Boise County and eastern Elmore County is quite dramatic. Both are sparsely populated--but eastern Elmore County is high desert, while northern Boise County is mountainous pine forest.

I had another lobbyist show up at the house this morning to give me money. What really impresses me is how little work I have to do to raise money--it flows in, in surprisingly large chunks from gun rights activists, and in chunks from lobbying groups that I have never heard of, never talked to, and would not have thought were interested in me in the least.

So, what strings are attached to all this special interest money? I confess that until last year, I assumed that when interest groups gave you money, it was often a form of disguised bribery. John Lott's book Freedomnomics has one section where he evaluates voting records of politicians who have announced that they are retiring. One could assume that if politician A has been voting for X because interest groups are giving him money for that purpose, that once the interest group money stops coming in, politician A might stop voting for X. Lott found that politician voting behavior didn't really change once they announced retirement.

This doesn't mean that special interest group contributions don't influence the political process. They aren't raising and giving away money because they are such nice people that they want everyone to be involved in politics. Both from what Lott's study found, and from talking to former members of the Idaho legislature, it is pretty clear that special interest group money does influence legislation--but not in the corrupt "buy off politicians" way that a lot of people assume. It is a considerably more subtle than that.

Let's say that there are three people that want to get elected to public office: Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown, and Mrs. Smith. Mr. Jones is a Big Government liberal who support lots of governmental regulation of business; Mrs. Smith supports free market capitalism; Mr. Brown thinks the big issue the legislature needs to deal with are the space aliens among us. Business interests are going to give money to Mrs. Smith, even if they aren't 100% in agreement with her, because they believe that she is generally going to vote their way. Trial lawyers, labor unions, and other left of center groups are going to fund Mr. Jones, because they believe that he is generally going to vote their way. Mr. Brown is not going to get much funding at all, because the "space aliens among us" crowd is pretty small. (The mind control implants manufactured on Tau Ceti 4 help to keep that crowd small.)

So what happens if Mrs. Smith goes off the reservation, and starts voting for business regulation? The groups that used to fund her campaigns get less and less willing to help. If her leap to the left is dramatic enough, she may find that Mr. Jones's interest groups may start to help--but I suspect that small changes in Mrs. Smith's voting to the left aren't going to be dramatic enough for Mr. Jones's backers to consider Mrs. Smith worth backing. The net effect will be that moving towards the center will often lose more funding than it will gain.

A former neighbor of mine who was a member of the Idaho state senate for several terms described how this happened to him. He was a Republican, but definitely quite a bit to my left on business regulation issues, and over time, the business interests contributed less and less, and his re-election campaigns required more and more of his own money--and finally, he decided that it wasn't worth spending this much of his own money for a job that only pays about $16,000 a year, and involves a substantial time commitment. So he decided not to run for re-election.

UPDATE: Just to clarify: I was addressing the problem of campaign contributions. There is, without question, some serious, direct bribery that goes on out there. The FBI for a while was running around the country, seeing how long it took to give direct bribes to state legislators--and having a depressingly easy time finding legislators in California, Arizona, South Carolina and probably a few states that I missed who were quite prepared to take a cash payment in a nakedly quid pro quo action.

Nor do I want to suggest that interest group money is completely without worrisome consequences. But it just isn't quite the nakedly corrupt problem that a lot of people assume.

One reader suggested that a fairly ideological sort like myself probably is less prone to being corrupted by the process. There's probably some truth to that. The less rigidly you adhere to a set of standards or ideas about the proper role of government, the easier is to bend to the wishes of the moment. This is one of the reasons that politicians that are proud of their "pragmatism" worry me a bit.

The one area which is a real problem is that if an obscure issue comes up, interest groups are likely to have the expertise, the money, and the motivation to present their position in a way that the general public won't. A politician who doesn't know much about this obscure issue may find himself swayed by an interest group's arguments in a way that is not good for the public interest. But this is a problem whether that interest group comes bearing money or not. The best that can hope for is that there will be opposing interest groups who can bring their expertise and motivation to the legislative process. But opposing special interests are not quite the same as serving the public interest.