Political spending: Why the Super PACs flopped

last updated 8 January 2015

“Money can’t buy happiness,” said Michael Isikoff in NBCNews.com, and apparently, it can’t buy an election, either. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s controversial decisions to strike down campaign-finance laws in such cases as Citizens United,the recent presidential election was the first in which wealthy contributors and corporations could donate unlimited sums of money to Super PACs—political action committees set up to advocate for candidates and parties. Big checks flooded in, but, it turns out, “the super donors didn’t get much for their money.” The pro–Mitt Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future, spent $143 million on a losing cause. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson threw away $20 million on Newt Gingrich’s failed primary campaign, and then another $33 million on Romney’s campaign and nine Republican congressional candidates—eight of whom lost. GOP strategist Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group spent $175.8 million on attack ads this cycle, but only one of the 10 Democrats he targeted lost. All told, said Dan Eggen in The Washington Post, the Super PACs wasted more than $1 billion trying to influence voters. “Never before has so much political money been spent to achieve so little.”

The Super PACs’ failure doesn’t prove that money can’t influence elections, said David Weigel in Slate.com. It only proves that money spent on really “stupid” attack ads doesn’t influence elections. Voters in Ohio, for instance, were bombarded with amateurish cartoons in which caricatures of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown rubber-stamped supposedly “job killing” legislation while sitting at a desk with an “I Love Taxes” coffee mug. Many other Super PAC attack ads were just as “lazy and patronizing.” There were also far too many of them, said David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times. More than 1 million ads were aired in total, and in Ohio and other crucial swing states, “the colossal spending spree reached a saturation point after which voters simply could not absorb any more negative advertising.”

If you think that means Citizens United doesn’t matter, said Eric Posner in Slate.com, you’re mistaken. When a partisan billionaire like Adelson donates tens of millions to a Republican Super PAC, what he’s really buying is influence over the entire party, including incumbent senators and congressmen who want Adelson’s backing for their own next campaigns. “More insidiously,” Adelson is also potentially influencing Democrats in Congress, who know that if they’re too aggressive in promoting policies Adelson doesn’t like, he might start writing fat checks to whoever runs against them.

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Money will always find its way into politics, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. So let’s stop playing Super PAC games, and let donors contribute unlimited amounts directly to candidates. In hindsight, the presidential race was won in the early summer, when the Obama campaign spent more than $100 million in swing states “to portray Mitt Romney as Gordon Gekko without the social conscience.” Romney’s campaign was low on cash after his primary battle, and he was forbidden by law from coordinating with the Super PACs that could have fought back on his behalf. “The real problem this year wasn’t too much campaign spending but too little.” Liberal Chicken Littles said all that spending would make the sky fall, but it didn’t, said George Will in The Washington Post. Voters in swing states were engaged and informed, and the election was hotly contested and highly competitive. “More spending on political advocacy means more voter information and interest,” and that’s always a good thing for our democracy.