Elizabeth Drew: Why the Republicans Won

Powerful – and frightening – piece from Elizabeth Drew in the NYRB.  She enumerates some problems we all knew about (turnout, poor messaging from our side, ruthlessness from the other side), but then reminds us of issues that are less likely to be going away with the return to a presidential-year electorate in 2016: voter suppression and the flood of anonymous, unaccountable money.  (I’ve added some emphasis since the quoted text is a little long.  And don’t blame Elizabeth Drew or the NYRB for the images; I added those.)

In all the breathlessness over the outcome of the 2014 midterms little attention was paid to the too-ample evidence that our democratic election system is working less and less as it should. I say this not because the Republicans were so successful—this trend away from truly democratic elections became apparent well before the 2012 presidential contest. The influence of big money is ever greater and more cloaked in mystery—thus more insidiously effective—and the nationwide Republican effort to block the votes of Democrats’ supporters are increasingly numerous and stringent. Along with anecdotal evidence of voters being blocked at the polls, there are those 40,000 “missing” registration forms in Georgia; and the estimated 600,000 would-be voters in Texas blocked by a highly restrictive new law that the Supreme Court allowed go ahead for this election. (Unhelpfully, three days after the election, a federal appeals court held that the new voter-ID laws that had been in effect during the vote—requiring proof of one’s citizenship, which disproportionately affects blacks, the elderly and students—were unconstitutional.)

The respected Brennan Center for Justice has reported that new voting restrictions on the in twenty-one states held down participation in the midterms—the first election since the Supreme Court removed some of the protections of the Voting Rights Act (on the ground that they were no longer needed). The Brennan report says that in several crucial races—in North Carolina, Florida, Kansas, and Virginia—the margin of difference between the two candidates closely matched the estimated margin of disenfranchisement as a result of these laws.

Any victory that was even partially based on an intentional plan to block the right of an opponent’s supporters to vote is dubious; our elections are increasingly becoming illegitimate. There appear to be constitutional grounds for nationalizing the standards for implementing the right to vote, but the new Republican-dominated Congress is unlikely to give up one of its most treasured devices for winning. Whether the Justice Department and the conservative-dominated Supreme Court will try to rectify this constitutional depredation is very much in question.

The infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 that, combined with subsequent rulings, permitted corporations to make donations to campaigns for the first time since Theodore Roosevelt’s era, and allowed groups of wealthy individuals (and corporations) to pool their money in so-called Super PACs, changed things drastically, but in ways that were unexpected. It turned out that corporations weren’t champing at the bit to make campaign donations, for fear that the disclosure of such expenditures would bring on attacks from opposing activist groups. So they found other ways to siphon large amounts of money into the political campaigns, with the donors’ names kept secret. The reform group the Sunlight Foundation calls these funds “dark money.”

A leading tenet of campaign finance reform has been that disclosure of who was making the donations would help reformers and journalists track who was buying influence from whom and for what. This was a wan second cousin to enforceable limits but as a result of those limits being stripped away (on questionable if not specious grounds), disclosure was all we were left with. Now even that protection against corruption is being eliminated. Super PACs such as the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads are turning to secret contributions. Thus we don’t know who is contributing vast sums of money or even where the money is going.

This year’s senatorial race in North Carolina provided the most spectacular example of the ever-increasing influence of dark money. It was the most expensive statewide race in the nation’s history: $107 million was spent by the candidates and outside groups; and of that sum less than a third, or $28.9 million, was spent by the candidates. The ads by the outside groups contributed greatly to the negativity that characterized the North Carolina race (and elsewhere as well) and appears to have turned off so many voters: according to the Sunlight Foundation, $57 million was spent on negative messages as opposed to $18.3 million on positive ones.

It’s not just the giant contributions but also the mere threat that one will be made that can influence a politician’s behavior. Party leaders know that great gobs of cash can come in against the members of their caucus if they vote a certain way on a certain issue, and this affects decisions about the Congressional agenda. Certain bills might not be brought up for fear of the outside spending that might be unleashed against the members. However, this doesn’t work equally across the board: if the minimum wage isn’t raised, or the poor are deprived of adequate school lunches or housing subsidies, members of Congress can rest assured that no great amount of super PAC money will come in against them as a consequence.

If people feel that the system is rigged and are upset about the growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, with the middle class getting nearly wiped out, if they feel that “Washington is out of touch” with their daily lives, they can look to the unbridled and increasingly secret campaign finance system for a large part of the explanation. With the Senate now to be led by the foremost congressional opponent of campaign finance reform, action to fix this completely broken system is more remote than ever. Notwithstanding all the nice talk on the part of the president and the Republican leaders in the days following the election, we’re facing a long and nasty struggle among hard-bitten and cynical politicians with divergent needs, a wounded president desperate for a positive legacy, and the numerous figures positioning themselves for the next election.