Subject: CCP Media Update 11/10 To:
*This is a daily media update on campaign finance and political speech developments prepared by the Center for Competitive Politics. If you would like to be removed from this list, or if you know someone who would like to be added, please e-mail [email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');>. For e-mail filters, the subject of this e-mail will always begin with “CCP Media Update.”* *In the News* Wall Street Journal: It’s Shocking How Little Was Spent on the Midterms By JOHN R. LOTT JR. And BRADLEY A. SMITH *Many who express the most outrage about campaign expenditures—liberal interest groups such as Public Citizen, or politicians such as Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi —frequently are cheerleaders for the even faster growth in government spending. If they want less spent on campaigns, then put less at stake: Make government smaller.* *In reality, campaign expenditures are surprisingly small given how much power and influence is up for grabs. The money spent on this year’s midterm elections is less than 0.1% of the nearly $4 trillion in federal spending—one dollar in campaign spending, in other words, for every thousand dollars in federal expenditure.* *By comparison, a single private company, Procter & Gamble , spent nearly a third more on advertising in 2013—$4.9 billion—than all political campaigns combined for federal offices spent in the current two-year election cycle. General Motorscame closer to spending as much, with $3.1 billion. * Read more... <http://online.wsj.com/articles/john-r-lott-and-bradley-a-smith-its-shocking-how-little-was-spent-on-the-midterms-1415405600> NY Times: The Stock Market Doesn’t Care About Elections By DAVID M. PRIMO and TRUNG A. DANG *HOW much do investors care about election outcomes?* *In the wake of Wednesday’s stock market rally, in which both the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average rose sharply a day after the midterm elections, pundits suggested that the answer was “quite a bit.”* *Such things are easy to speculate about — but harder to prove. The main problem is that the buying and selling of stocks at any given moment is a result of many different factors, and you need to somehow isolate an election’s impact on such trading.* Read more... <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/opinion/sunday/the-stock-market-doesnt-care-about-elections.html> *FEC* Wall Street Journal: FEC Seeks Dialogue on New Media By Ann Ravel *As I made plain in my statement, I want to encourage the FEC to begin opening a new dialogue, listening to outside experts and gathering a broad range of views about new and emerging technologies. That’s not censorship, as some alarmists have shrieked. It’s the opposite. I want to hear from the public so the FEC can be better informed when it makes policy decisions on issues with long-lasting consequences. This is what responsible policy makers are supposed to do. * Read more... <http://online.wsj.com/articles/fec-seeks-dialogue-on-new-media-letters-to-the-editor-1415400705?KEYWORDS=%22campaign+finance%22> *Independent Groups* More Soft Money Hard Law: Money in the Midterms, and Beyond By Bob Bauer *Did the outside groups fight off extinction with Republican successes? The New York Times suggests that this was “life-or-death” for Republican-oriented Super PACs and (c) organizations. One question is how “death,” had it occurred, would have been experienced. Would these groups with their right to engage in unrestricted spending have vanished from view if the outcome had been less favorable, and would those behind them have thrown up their hands and returned to more regulated PACs and parties? There is reason to doubt this.* *Did the total amount of outside spending in favor of Republican candidates influence the outcome? Once again, the post-election political analyses, not to be confused with the money-in-politics analysis, have not tied the results to superior resources available to the winning side. Total Republican spending two years ago was also prodigious, but the meager results were blamed to a considerable degree on the quality of the candidates. If, however, the total amount spent in 2012 (in the hundreds of millions) could not overcome deficiencies in the candidates, then money can only go so far in explaining election results.* Read more... <http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/2014/11/money-midterms-beyond/> Daily Caller: A Mayday PAC Postmortem: Lawrence Lessig And The Right To Lose By Paul Jossey *No one ever accused Larry Lessig — cofounder and face of Mayday PAC — of media shyness. Last winter the relentless self-promoter walked across New Hampshire to draw attention to campaign finance reform. But the self-appointed corruption slayer who told his followers to “embrace the irony” of raising tons of political money to rid politics of money wasn’t taking media inquiries two days after his experiment failed spectacularly. Even his public relations flacks were reduced to worn pablum after the PAC spent 97 percent of its money on losing candidates.* *If Lessig is shell-shocked by the public’s failure to embrace his cause, the error is his. Lessig’s hubris was in thinking he could turn a self-serving progressive power play into a national movement. In so doing, he woefully misread the electorate’s priorities. Lessig compounded analysis errors with strategic mistakes that ultimately resulted in the kind of shellacking that produces radio silence.* Read more... <http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/07/a-mayday-pac-postmortem-lawrence-lessig-and-the-right-to-lose/> *Disclosure* Wall Street Journal: Midterm Elections Saw Fewer Donors, but They Wrote Bigger Checks By Rebecca Ballhaus *The 2014 midterm elections were funded by fewer people giving larger sums to candidates, parties and political-action committees, a study of Federal Election Commission disclosures finds.* *The study by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that the number of individual donors declined by nearly 20% from the prior midterm election, in 2010. Nearly 667,000 donors contributed more than $200 this election cycle through mid-October of this year, the analysis found.* *Meanwhile, spending by candidates and groups remained fairly flatthis election, at about $3.6 billion. Taken together, those findings indicate that donors increased the dollar amount of their contributions.* Read more... <http://online.wsj.com/articles/midterm-elections-saw-fewer-donors-but-they-wrote-bigger-checks-1415556647?KEYWORDS=%22campaign+finance%22> *Candidates, Politicians, Campaigns, and Parties* Huffington Post: Mitch McConnell's Triumph Strikes Worry In The Hearts Of Campaign Finance Reformers By Paul Blumenthal *The Senate will likely be led next year by the primary antagonist to campaign finance reformers, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Over three decades, McConnell has made it a top priority to disrupt and degrade campaign finance regulations. With a firm belief that limits on campaign funds are a direct impediment to the First Amendment right of free speech, he has opposed past reform efforts, including challenging in court the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, the passage of which he once called the worst day in his political career.* *With McConnell's ascendance and with Republicans increasingly unified in opposition to campaign finance reform, its advocates expect a full-frontal assault on the few areas where they had hoped to enact new rules in the post-Citizens United world.* Read more… <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/08/campaign-finance-mitch-mcconnell_n_6122180.html> Washington Post: Left struggled to move voters with Koch attacks and other big-money messages By Matea Gold *Democrats and their allies made the topic one of their central lines of attack this year, featuring the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch in nearly 100 different political spots that ran in states from Alaska to Florida. But the issue failed to gain traction, and most of those Democrats lost. * *The difficulty they encountered in transforming the public’s disgust with rich donors into political action speaks to how hard it is to move voters who view both parties as captives of wealthy patrons.* *Even as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) repeatedly railed against the Kochs in speeches on the Senate floor, billionaire hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer commanded attention this year for the tens of millions he poured into a super PAC backing Democratic candidates.* Read more... <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/left-struggled-to-move-voters-with-koch-attacks-and-other-big-money-messages/2014/11/09/185b32ea-669b-11e4-bb14-4cfea1e742d5_story.html> Wall Street Journal: Christie’s Contacts Deliver By Heather Haddon *New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tapped his local network of donors for more than $300,000 in political contributions for Republican governor candidates across the country, building more goodwill as he weighs a bid for president.* *The donations were separate from Mr. Christie’s record fundraising haul of $106 million for the Republican Governors Association and significantly helped some candidates. For example, Mr. Christie’s breakfast event for Maine Gov. Paul LePage in September helped raise roughly $100,000, or 5% of his total donations of $2 million, according to an analysis of contribution records by The Wall Street Journal.* Read more... <http://online.wsj.com/articles/christies-contacts-deliver-1415584474> *State and Local* Colorado –– LA Times: No end to campaign in swing state of Colorado By Kurtis Lee *Both major parties, along with a host of outside groups, are now gearing up for 2016, when this swing state will be back in the spotlight with a presidential race at the top of the ticket, and another U.S. Senate contest on the ballot as well.* *"We're not going anywhere," Ryan Call, the state's Republican chairman, said in a recent interview. "We'll keep a substantial presence here in Aurora and around the state. But specifically here in Aurora — if this party wants to excel in elections and be relevant in 2016, we need to forge relationships with growing numbers of Hispanic and Asian American voters — that's what we're prepared to do.”* Read more... <http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-colorado-politics-20141109-story.html> Wisconsin –– Wisconsin Reporter: Vos: There will be reforms to John Doe, GAB By MD Kittle *“If the goal is to take the investigation outside the political process, if anything our law is broken and needs to be fixed,” Vos added.* *The law provides for investigations overseen by judges who are vested with extraordinary power to compel testimony from witnesses. Oftentimes, the investigations, led by district attorneys, are conducted in secret, with gag ordors preventing probe targets from speaking publicly on penalty of being jailed.* *Such was the case in the latest politically charged John Doe investigation into 29 conservative groups, launched nearly two years ago by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a Democrat.* Read more… <http://watchdog.org/181745/john-doe-robin-vos-gab/> *BNA: Money & Politics Report ($)* Joe Trotter Center for Competitive Politics 124 S. West St., Ste. 201 Alexandria, VA 22314 www.CampaignFreedom.org <http://www.campaignfreedom.org/> [email protected] <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');> -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. 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