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Is Wiconsin a complete outlier... or is it just a bellwether? Compare the sustained national attention on Wisconsin to the recall of Gray Davis a decade ago. Every race now has the potential to garner widespread attention.

Also, your lines "you would be hard pressed to find a single super PAC contribution to any state candidate" and "There is no evidence of a single super PAC contributing to a non-federal candidate" are misleading. The fear isn't that super PACs will contribute to candidates - campaign finance laws can restrict that all they want. The fear is that they will run their own massive campaigns, officially separate from the candidates and thus freed from any checks regarding fundraising, propriety, etc. that a candidate's official campaign may face.

We've already seen this in the area at a lower level with astroturf groups like "Americans for Prosperity" waging an anti-Silver Line campaign. It's not inconceivable that the same thing could happen with elections of candidates.

Then again, DC politics is already full of shadow campaigns, which operate off-the-books and do a lot of the heavy lifting/dirty work, especially the more-or-less explicit racial and cultural appeals that candidates would rather not be associated with officially (all those photos of Sekou Biddle's wife aren't going to Xerox themselves!).

So by all means, ban direct corporate contributions. There's still going to be a thousand different legal, quasi-legal, and illegal-but-unprovable avenues for buying influence, from constituent funds to charities to business dealings, etc. etc.

The main purpose of raising campaign funds is to pay for advertisements, especially expensive TV ads. But DC elections have never been about ads.

by Dizzy on Jun 26, 2012 2:03 pm • link • report