What could we do with $143 million? Something better than Kentucky’s U.S. Senate campaign?
What would you do with $143 million?
Ginny Ramsey has one idea.
“We would END homelessness and hunger and it could be done in Kentucky by building communities that include housing, services and all basic needs,” said Ramsey, who directs the Catholic Action Center, one of Lexington’s homeless shelters.
But where would we find such riches? Well, $143 million just happens to be what was spent on Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race. Incumbent Mitch McConnell, who basically created the campaign finance system we have now, raised about $55 million, and his challenger Amy McGrath, got $88 million and then set it on fire when she lost to Mitch by 20 percentage points.
The Catholic Action Center’s annual budget, by the way, is about $450,000, so that campaign money could pay the bills for about, um, 317 years?
What was all that campaign money for? Most of it went to a whole lot of terrible and annoying advertising. People and groups here and outside the state sent $143 million to one of the poorest states in the country to watch Mitch and Amy insult each other. Remember the Swamp Turtle cartoons?
It happens everywhere. Consider this about the country’s two big Senate races from Jake Sherman of Politico: “Amy McGrath and Jaime Harrison (of S.C.) raised a combined $199,004,686 and lost to Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham by a combined 35 points.” (Also as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out, the presidential campaign reached $14 billion, twice as expensive as the 2016 race.)
Oh the things we could do! Here in Lexington, we could properly fund programs that depend on the city budget, from GreenHouse17, which serves domestic violence victims to Arbor Youth Services for homeless youth to the Salvation Army and the Community Action Council. The city gives them only about $2 million, but it’s crucial to their budgets. What about funding them for infinity?
We could fund universal preschool in Fayette County for a couple of years and see how well it worked. Or we could help CASA of Lexington stop running the fundraisers their $860,000 annual budget depends on and concentrate on their mission of advocating for abused and neglected children as they go through the court system. Kentucky, by the way, has the country’s highest rate of abused children.
We could help the people being evicted because of lost jobs from coronavirus. Ben Carter of the Kentucky Equal Justice Center said that $143 million would let them fund a yearly $1 million budget, put $40 million in an endowment and have $103 million left over to help people pay rent this winter.
You know what else would happen if we stopped pouring so much money into political campaigns? We’d have a better political system, one that wasn’t so responsive to big donors and corporations. Incidentally, McConnell is the father of our current campaign finance, as ushered in though the Citizens United case, in which the Supreme Court decreed that corporations could be considered people when giving politicians money. Add in dark money, where politically active nonprofits don’t have disclose their donors, and you have a shifty, shady world of big money and politics.
Reform advocates like the Brennan Center for Justice advocate public campaign financing, such as “small donor public financing,” in which public funds match and multiply small donations. It would keep the numbers lower and more transparent.
Republican consultant Tres Watson thinks it’s crazy to try to stop money in politics, or tell people how to spend their own money.
“Instead, create reforms and make sure the candidates are the ones who receive the money,” rather than PACs and political parties. “It should be transparent so everyone knows where the money comes from and where’s it’s spent.”
He also noted: “If you believe that money buys elections, Amy McGrath is exhibit #1 that’s not true.”
That’s hard to argue, but big money does, of course, influence access, who gets in the room to plead their case and who does not. And it supports mission creep of more consultants and more pollsters (doing a great job, btw), and more political establishment.
Campaign finance reform won’t solve everything wrong with politics, but it could stop many of the worst excesses. In the meantime, here’s another idea from Ginny Ramsey: A 10 percent tithe from every political campaign to homeless shelters in every town and every state. At least all those millions of dollars would be doing more and more good than just interrupting our favorite TV shows.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 3:37 PM.
