“Money On My Mind” is a monthly column by Jay Mandle. The views expressed here are those of the author (not necessarily those of Democracy Matters) and are meant to stimulate discussion.
April 2018
By Jay Mandle
Ten days after the massacre of high school students in Parkland Florida, the New York Times published an assessment of why the National Rifle Association (NRA) has been able successfully to resist efforts to limit the control of weapons. Its headline was “The True Source of the NRA’s Clout: Mobilization, Not Donations.” The authors argued that the source of the NRA’s strength was not its ability to buy political support with campaign donations. Instead, “the NRA derives its political influence …from a muscular electioneering machine.” To support their claim the authors, Eric Lipton and Alexander Burns, reported that “over the last decade [the NRA] has not made a single direct contribution to any current member of the Florida House or Senate.”[i]
Soon thereafter in an article in Vox, Charlotte Hill issued a strong rebuttal. She pointed out that the Times’ analysts had ignored “something that’s absolutely crucial: outside spending.”[ii] Outside political spending are expenditures that have no limits, but that do not go directly to candidates’ campaign. They also are not allowed to be coordinated with official campaigns, though this restriction is widely ignored. The result is, as I noted in last month’s Money on My Mind, campaigns of both office holders and challengers have become increasingly dependent on these unlimited and “uncoordinated” expenditures. The omission of outside spending therefore is devastating to the arguments that appeared in the Times.
The fact is that the NRA has become a prominent player in this burgeoning mechanism by which unlimited wealth is used to shape election results. In 2016 alone, the NRA’s independent expenditures, through its Institute for Legislative Action and its National Rifle Association PAC, totaled $54 million. The NRA strategically chose a relative handful of races in which to become heavily involved. First and foremost was the Presidential election, in which it spent a total of $31 million; $20 million was spent in opposition to Hillary Clinton, and $11 million in support of Donald Trump. Almost all of the rest of its outside political spending was used in six carefully chosen senatorial races, the data for which are presented in Table 1.
By concentrating its expenditures in those six races, the NRA was able to be the single most important financial player in those elections. With such a vast sum of money at its disposal, in five of these contests, not surprisingly, the candidate that benefitted from the NRA’s expenditures was victorious. Only Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada was able to survive the NRA’s financial avalanche.
The pattern of the NRA’s expenditures in its targeted races is striking. In each, it spent a great deal less money in defending the candidate it hoped would win, than in attacking that person’s opponent. Overall in these races, the ratio of attacks to defense was almost five to one. In short, because of the flood of money it controls, and its willingness to go on the attack against candidates who oppose its agenda, the NRA is a major contributor to both the gun culture’s political victories and to the poisonous content of political dialogue in this country.
Table 1
NRA Outside Spending on Selected Senate Races, 2016
Unfortunately, the NRA is under no obligation to reveal the sources of the funds that it uses politically. Most of the money it collects is channeled through “social welfare” organizations that are not required to identify their donors. However, a 2013 investigative report in Mother Jones concluded that “in the past couple of years the NRA has also turned to deep-pocketed conservative allies, including Charles and David Koch and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.”[iii] In light of the sums involved, outside expenditures are clearly one of the political tools used by the super-rich.
And because that is the case, the defense of democracy must find an alternative source of political funding. It is simply not credible to argue that fair elections exist when the rich lavish unlimited amounts of money to support individual politicians. And it is furthermore not credible to argue that there are alternative sources of private money that would allow the political dialogue to include the interests of the majority of Americans – people who cannot afford to make large contributions to official campaigns, let alone engage in unlimited outside expenditures.
It is only a robust form of public funding of election campaigns that can provide a meaningful counter to the ever-increasing political greed and power of today’s super-rich.
[i] Eric Lipton and Alexander Burns, “The True Source of the N.R.A.”s Clout: Mobilization, Not Donations, The New York Times, February 24, 2018, nytimes.com[ii] Charlotte Hill, “The Real Reason the NRA’s Money Matters in Elections,” Vox, February 27, 2018. https://www.vos.com.
[iii] Peter Stone, “Inside the NRA’s Koch-Funded Dark-Money Campaign,” Mother Jones, April 2, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com
Source: Center for Responsive Politics, “National Rifle Association Outside Spending Summary, 2018,” https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/detail.php?cmte=National+Rifle+Assn&cycle=2018