What We're Doing with This Campaign Finance Stuff

In partnership with Dartmouth Rootstrikers we've been keeping track of monthly polling averages for all of the races we've been watching, including the 34 Class 2 Senate elections plus the two special Senate elections, as well as all 36 gubernatorial elections this year. Rootstrikers, if you didn't know, is a group (largely students) devoted to reducing the influence of money in politics. In part this is an extension of our study over the winter, in which we found a negative correlation between the amount of money spent in a Senate race and the margin of victory in that race: the more money was spent, the more competitive the race was.

McCutcheon and the Landscape of Political Expenditures

Last Wednesday's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, as you've no doubt, heard struck down the aggregate limits on campaign contributions imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002). What they did uphold was a cap on donations to individual candidates and parties. Under the new, Roberts-approved BCRA, an individual still cannot donate more than $2,600 to any one candidate per election, but the ruling in McCutcheon means that they can give $2,600 to each single candidate. Before, they could only donate a maximum of $123,200 for each election cycle.

Here we could go off on a discussion of the legal arguments at work, whether money has a corrupting influence on politics or how compelling the government's interest in preventing corruption really is: that's all for our partner group, Dartmouth Rootstrikers. We're not going to do that; what we're really interested in here is the empirical effect the ruling in McCutcheon will have on campaign spending this cycle. Numbers, if you will.