Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) bemoans the difficulties of running for Senate in today’s “post-Citizens United” world.
In an event hosted by the Sunlight Foundation and ReThink Media on Tuesday, Tester declared that the “lack of transparency” in campaigns “is real and it is hurting democracy.” All of this “dark money,” he lamented is causing a “hyper-partisan system” where “big things just don’t happen.” In short, according to Tester, any problem you might have with Congress can be traced back to not knowing the individual donors to nonprofit groups that are funding a minority of campaign ads against incumbent Senators.
That “darkmoney” has become the bogeyman of some on the Left is nothing new. But perhaps Senator Tester, who won re-election in 2012 with, according to him, “a pile of dark money against me” has better understanding of the impact that money has than most. After all, he was one of the most direct victims of its supposedly-ill effects.
It turns out, however, that these undisclosed “moneyed interests” that were fighting Sen. Tester’s re-election bid were well-known, ineffective, and more poorly funded than Sen. Tester himself.
During the 2012 Montana Senate election, Senator Tester spent over $13.3 million to support his candidacy, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He also received at least an additional $12 million in support from independent groups (some of those the supposedly-evil “dark money” organizations). If over $25 million was needed to defend Tester from the horrors of “dark money,” one might imagine that those scary groups would be spending at least that much in opposition to Tester. In reality, less than $5 million was spent by independent organizations that don’t disclose their donors in opposition to Tester’s Senate run. Put another way, for every “secret” ad opposing the senator, there were more than five “properly disclosed” ads supporting him (or attacking his opponent).
This is something of an unfair comparison; Senator Tester’s opponent also spent millions of dollars and had additional millions of independent support that was disclosed. The point is not that Tester is being hypocritical – it is that he is exaggerating the extent of “dark money’s” influence on the electorate.
But, you might say, almost $5 million is still a lot of secret money, and we have no idea where it comes from! That is simply not the case. The vast majority of that $5 million came from two well-known organizations with well-established interests. $1.36 million came from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the pro-business trade association that has been a force in Washington for decades prior to Citizens United. And $3.2 million came from Crossroads GPS – the much-maligned nonprofit organization founded by Republican strategist Karl Rove whose positions and interests are notorious in Washington, D.C. Tester was not faced with defending himself against, as he claimed, some secret group with an innocuous name like “Montanans for a better Montana.” Rather, his re-election battle was against the standard partisan interests – the same forces he squared off against in his pre-Citizens United 2006 campaign, just with a different tax status.
And perhaps most importantly, these groups failed to translate spending into votes, even in solidly-red Montana. Regardless of whether the ads were ineffective, fell on deaf ears, or were less persuasive than similar ads by groups supportive of Tester’s candidacy, Montanans decided to re-elect the Senator with 49% of the vote.
The politics of “darkmoney” are advantageous, given the emotional response the phrase evokes. But it is disappointing that those, including Senator Tester, who advocate for more transparency attack this convenient fiction instead of dealing with the readily available facts.
