So this first post could be typical of future posts, in that this will be a multi part series. Each of the initial topics presented may appear disparate, and the initial material covered will seem only vaguely related. Along the way, we will bring in new topics, and try to hopefully tie it all together. There will be relatively few policy prescriptions, because solving most of these problems is simply hard, and my certainty on them isn’t quite high enough.
We will start this with one obvious point. The cost of running for office has gone up over time, and is extraordinarily expensive now and will continue to stay that way for at least the immediate future. You could credit some of this to the laws (or lack thereof) around campaign finance reform, or you could credit court rulings. These factors though might have only reduced the trend, but certainly not eliminated it.
The simple issue is, as a society we have grown more prosperous on aggregate, over our history across any meaningfully long time frame. Our population has increased. The distribution of wealth has changed, but as technology has gotten better each of us on average can produce more. The number of legislators at the federal level has not increased nearly as fast, and we’ve had 435 people in the house and 100 in the senate that can vote for as long as I have been alive. Each of those individuals, plus the president, which there is still one of, has more influence compared to fifty or sixty years ago. Every budget vote contains greater weight. A decision to change the tax rates by one percent has a bigger amount of revenue associated with that than fifty years ago. Even issues that are not obviously finance issues, such as, legalizing or prohibiting certain activities is a decision that will influence the outcome. Footnotes in bills today would have at least merited more of a debate fifty years ago, and things that merited more of a debate today might have been entire bills back then. It’s no surprise as such that so much money is flowing into these campaigns and the seats are often contested so fiercely
There is simply put, a ton at stake, more than ever. This seeps down to every level. A casino proposal in a state will be fiercely lobbied not only at the state level, but also potentially at the city level. And when such things are fiercely lobbied for, that often means campaign dollars one way or another if the race is even slightly expected to be competitive.
We have numbers that back this of course. This only goes back over twenty years, but you can easily enough see the general trend just looking at the non-green coloring: https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php?display=T&infl=Y
I think we have now said enough about how money is absolutely rolling into these campaigns. The next question is where exactly does it go?
Some of the campaign funds go to the same places they always have, the grass roots efforts. Campaign funds hiring part time workers, in conjunction with pizza and other amenities for an army of fresh-eyed, idealistic high school and college kids who are sealing envelopes, knocking on doors, manning phone centers, and the like. I have no idea how much this has changed, but one of the limiting factors of course is the number of volunteers available for such an endeavor, not just the cost of renting the office space and whatever else is needed to do their job.
The bigger piece of money, of course, involves spending on advertising. Some of these strategies have remained relatively timeless as well. A yard sign is a yard sign is a yard sign, for example. The bigger piece of advertising, however, for the biggest races, has been television. In the past this meant purchasing the local advertising rights on an affiliate and pounding the market with ads. Election season was often a boon to some of these markets in competitive races, and the cost of running a race was often driven by some strange quirks. Take the state of New Jersey, as a prime example. It’s a small, but relatively populous state. It is not one of the five most populous states or anything, but has easily been one of the most expensive to run a race in, in competitive races in the past. Why is that, do you ask? Simply put, New Jersey has no major TV market of its own, but instead, a big chunk of the population would be dependent on New York City networks for their news and such, with most of the remaining chunk being covered by Philadelphia markets, which are both massive population centers and therefore very expensive to advertise on. So to run a traditional television advertising campaign, you’d have to reach out to not just one but TWO major media markets and buy ads on each of them, many of which, would reach people not even living in that state.
One of the big winners in all of this of course were the networks and the affiliates during election season as they raked in that dough. In a related story, it behooved the networks to paint races as close and up for grabs for all sorts of reasons, but at least one of these reasons was very self-serving.
As I write this, the first pattern we talked about, about elections being already expensive and gradually more expensive, continues. The second pattern, however, of people consuming Television by sitting down and watching whatever NBC shows come on as they air and certainly not missing that key 8:30 slot to watch Seinfeld or whatever, has not continued.
Simply put, the way we watched television has dramatically changed. First it was TiVo and DVR. Now it’s Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime. People simply are now not only choosing these formats for convenience, but also to avoid
Even in new forms of media, the option to watch something when you want AND pay a premium to avoid ads in the form of something like YouTubeRed has significantly changed the value of a 30 second video spot. Even live sports, once considered somewhat immune to these trends is getting somewhat crushed by a growing number of cord-cutters, who are simply opting out of the experience altogether. ESPN is down something like 12 million subscribers over the last six years.
As we are accelerating through this crossroads of elections mattering more than ever from a monetary standpoint, and the changing of how we consume content, there are bigger questions to answer regarding the future of this experiment we call democracy.
Thinking With Dan 