The NPR Politics Podcast - It Takes Big Bucks To Run A Campaign

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Campaign spending increases each election cycle; this year, almost $16 billion will be spent on races across the country. Who is the money coming from and what do they get in return?This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, political correspondent Susan Davis, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell & Kelli Wessinger. Our editor is Erica Morrison. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Steven in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Today is my 50th birthday and I'm going on the last run of my 500 to 50 challenge in which I ran one mile a day every day for 500 days leading up to the big 5-0. This podcast was recorded at 12.04 p.m. on Tuesday, January 30th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but just know that I will be enjoying the nifty 50 and that I won't be running tomorrow. Here's the show. A well-deserved day off. Smart to prevent injury, too. I like the attainability, too, of that goal. One mile a day. It's not like a marathon. It's just something that a lot of us could do. Walking or running.

It feels very doable. This is inspiring. Also, happy birthday. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Domenica Montaner, our senior political editor and correspondent. Elections in America have become flush with cash. A record $9 billion was spent on ads for elections in this country in 2020, including the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And those numbers just keep climbing. It's expected to climb even higher in 2024. So, Domenico, let's start there. I mean, who is spending how much so far? Overall, we've had $283 million spent in campaign ads. That's digital, broadcast, et cetera, spent on the Republican primary so far.

And Nikki Haley's campaign and the groups that are supporting her, call them Team Haley, have spent the most, $81.1 million. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who's now out of the race, his campaign and the group supporting him had spent about $60.2 million. And former President Trump, about $57.7 million. And they're massive numbers. Most of it's coming from super PACs instead of the campaigns. They can raise a ton of cash on their own without us having to know who their donors are or how big the checks were.

So it's just a lot, a lot of money. So Sue, before we go any further, I want to talk a little bit about the rules and some of the definitions that we're going to be talking about around campaign spending. We've got the campaigns themselves and then, of course, these massive super PACs with lots of money. What do we know about where the money is coming from, where it's going, and how these two different kind of pots of money work? Sure. And this is a really important distinction. If you think about every single candidate for office has an official campaign committee. And these campaign committees are governed by a much more strict set of rules of disclosure and limits for how much money they can accept from individual

donors. Super PACs can take unlimited sums from corporations, from labor unions, from rich donors, and spend unlimited amounts of money in campaigns. Almost all candidates, certainly on the presidential level, will now have both. They will have an official campaign account and an affiliated super PAC. What is important here is that technically, by the letter of campaign finance election rolls, nary the two should meet. They're never supposed to coordinate in any capacity. There should be sort of an iron curtain between the two. They can't coordinate messages or ads or get out the vote operations, anything. But, you know, I think Domenico can speak to this too. Those rules, one, they're not strongly enforced by the government. And also, oftentimes, super PACs are staffed and run by close political associates of the said candidate.

So the idea that there is no technical coordination, but certainly there are two outfits that have the same ultimate goal in mind. They may not coordinate, but they may go out to beers later and have a chit chat, right? Exactly. There's no official coordination, but you understand exactly what the campaign wants you to be doing with the money that you have raised in your super PAC. And what does all of that spending get them? I mean, we know what the objective is, but what does it achieve? Well, I mean, it puts you on the airwaves. And the two things that you really need in politics are name ID and money. And ads are kind of a great coming together of both of those things. People need to know who you are, what you stand for, and they need your

name to be out there more and more. And you know, for as much as people talk about how they don't like campaign ads or whatever, there's a reason campaigns continue to spend the kind of money they do. It's because it does move the numbers. Unfortunately, in this Republican primary for the candidates not named Trump, this is a Trump party and the campaign has been centered around him. You know, one of the things that I think does distinguish campaign ads and super PAC ads is that oftentimes the campaign that's run by the candidate themselves uses those ad dollars to sort of run ads that boast or tell their biography and run more positive messages about who they are and what they would do. And super PACs exist to sort of kick the teeth in of your opponents. Super PACs almost overwhelmingly run negative ads, attack ads against the candidates that they're not supporting. And it's a real contrast in sort of tone. And a lot of times I can tell when I just hear an ad on TV, whether it's run by the candidate or the super PAC,

just by how positive or negative it is. Yeah. And the person who's spending a lot of money right now in South Carolina is, of course, a former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, who's fighting hard. It's a very high stakes race for her. Yeah. In fact, she's the only one spending any money right now on the airwaves in South Carolina. About three and a half million dollars has been spent since New Hampshire on the airwaves in South Carolina. About three and a half million dollars has been spent since New Hampshire on the South Carolina airwaves, and all of it has come from either the Haley campaign

or from groups supporting her. Notably, the super PAC that has been supporting her and has been the biggest spender of this entire campaign has only poured in about, you know, half a million dollars or so. The Haley campaign is pushing what they want voters to hear from her. Nikki Haley delivered thousands of jobs, lower taxes, tough immigration laws. She wants to remind South Carolina voters, people who she was the governor of, that, you know, she did good things for them and that they may love Trump, but that they should give her a chance. Sue, bigger picture, you know, we talk a lot about money in politics and the influence it has.

But we know that former President Donald Trump is by far the Republican frontrunner in this race. So I guess it begs the question, how much does it really matter? Yeah, I mean, this is sort of one of the existential questions of politics that I think is going to be very true in 2024. But true overall, like, look, if you're a candidate for office, you certainly need a certain amount of money to keep your head above water to compete. But at a certain point, you could have all the money in the world, and it's not going to move the needle on the race. Nikki Haley might be outspending Donald

Trump in South Carolina, but is it fundamentally going to change the direction of this race? Probably not. You can even look back in history at people who have spent hundreds of millions of their own money in presidential campaigns and didn't get a single delegate. Is there such a thing as too much money? Yeah, I think there is. You need to have – and this is a thing about money in politics that I do still look at with campaigns. Yes, you have super PACs who can write unlimited amount of checks and who can raise unlimited amount of money and run all kinds of ads. But one thing to really look at for campaigns is grassroots donors. These are the people that regular people who give less than $200, oftentimes less than 100 bucks.

And a significant base of small dollar donors often does tell you the kind of support a candidate has. And Biden had more small dollar donors in 2020 than Donald Trump. But that's one thing to look at going into 2024. Does Donald Trump still rely on a significant group of small dollar donors? And frankly, can Biden, who has had a lot of lagging popularity, can he still keep those numbers up? Do you feel like those small dollar donors move the needle, like collectively put together? Or is it more about sort of signaling who has grassroots energy and momentum? Yeah, the small donors also in this campaign, I mean, Trump has been dominating with them in the Republican primary race so far. And that's not likely to change. Nikki Haley is getting a lot of money from people who are bigger donors

who don't like Trump. I mean, Trump is actually pushing to get some bigger donors now and has kind of peeled off some one bigger donor, at least from the DeSantis campaign. He needs that too, because he needs to fund what's going to be, if he's the nominee, a much longer campaign where billions of dollars are going to be spent. But you know, it's interesting too, because Trump has also not done very well with independence in these first couple states. And we know that his performance in the past two general elections that he ran in, where he did not do very well with independence either. And Haley is the one who's done did very well with them in New Hampshire. And it is a bit of a warning sign for Trump going forward in the general election. And it's part of what's fueling Nikki Haley's ability to stay in the race, ironically.

Here's a little bit of Trump, for example, going after Haley on the campaign trail. Nikki Haley, have you ever heard of her? I didn't know she was still campaigning. She's still campaigning? And why is she still campaigning? I mean, the delegate math looks so tough for her, Domenico. What's she trying to achieve at this point? Yeah, I was just going to say that he has to be careful, though, on how he goes about attacking her and walking a line because he can't afford to alienate those Republican-leaning independents

who want to vote Republican but are listening to how he talks about her. You know, she's staying in this race right now. You know, she'll say to give those voters a voice. She doesn't have an insignificant number of those voters. Plus, it can also increase your power in the party, depending on how long she stays in and what her attacks are like, where Trump is going to feel like he might need to offer her something to, you know, edge her out of the race or to, you know, acknowledge the voters that she's gotten on her side. Also, candidates get out of races when they run out of money. And that's not a problem that Nikki Haley is facing just yet. She has actually been able to keep raising money to her campaign because I think a lot of the attacks against her does fuel certainly female voters and

independent voters who have been supporting her campaign and big dollar donors. You know, the Koch Network is still supporting Nikki Haley. They have obviously tremendous financial resources. And a lot of times when candidates get out of a race, it's because they simply don't have the funds they need to continue running a national campaign. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back in just a moment. Hey there, it's Sue Davis. Check out our latest bonus episode in your feeds now. It's our trivia game for politics podcast plus listeners, where we test your knowledge of the latest political news. St. Paul, Minnesota. Oh, that is correct. I didn't know that one.

You could be a contestant in a future bonus episode by signing up for Politics Podcast Plus. If you already have, thank you. And now we've made it possible to give NPR Plus as a gift. Friends, parents, kids, fellow fans of the Politics Pod, you can give them the perks of NPR Plus, like bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. And who doesn't love sponsor-free listening? To check that out, please go to plus.npr.org. And thanks. And we're back. We're talking a lot about Republicans because, of course, that primary is ongoing.

But let's also talk about the Democrats. What kind of fundraising numbers is President Biden putting up? And does he also have this kind of super PAC backing that we've been talking about? Well, when it comes to how much money he's actually spending on the airwaves, it's funny because they're not running like a real heavy campaign. He wasn't even on the ballot in New Hampshire, even though people wrote in his name and he wound up winning anyway. But Democrats have spent about $68 million so far in this cycle. The biggest spender has been Future Forward USA Action, which is going to be the main super PAC that backs Biden's campaign effort.

They've spent about $20 million so far. Biden's campaign himself, they've spent about $13 million. A lot of these ads have been run in swing states, in the typical places you would expect, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, places like that. And a lot of what they've been spending money on has been trying to tout some of the achievements that the Biden administration has accomplished so far. That's why he's lowering insulin prices, fighting for the child care tax credit, and delivering more clean, renewable, American-made energy. And it's interesting because when I talk to Democratic strategists about this, some of them are scratching their heads about what the strategy is here because they feel like this is more to satisfy Biden, to make him feel like there's something that they've done, that they've accomplished. And he wants to tout that for people when really what the campaign is going to be based on what they're running on, what they've already told us is about Trump and about abortion rights. And they really haven't

done a full court press on the airwaves with that yet. If there's one thing you can be absolutely certain about now in modern presidential campaigns is both candidates will have enough money. It's too easy to raise it. It's too easy to have super PAC money. It's too easy to raise it. It's too easy to have super PACs. It's too easy to have a single person put up the money they need. That the idea that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be short financial resources in 2024 just seems like the most incomprehensible outcome of this presidential election. The one thing I do think is important to remember, another distinction, though, between official campaign committees and super PACs is that campaign committees have, certainly as it gets closer to the election, they have an edge. They

get a preferred status, certainly on broadcast channels, to run their ads and at better rates. So it's often more expensive for super PACs to spend. They don't get the same bang for their buck in the closing stretch of races. But already there was news today that the super PAC, as Domenico mentioned, Future Forward, is already laying the groundwork to run a quarter of a billion dollars of ads in swing states leading up to November. So you almost have to feel bad for the people of states like Arizona and Pennsylvania and Michigan, because not only are they going to be dealing with an absolute flood of presidential ads, but these are also states that could have competitive Senate races that could have competitive congressional races. At a certain point, you're just going to reach maximum

saturation on the airways where there's literally nowhere else for these ads to go. The upside is in the modern world, there's now digital, there's streaming platforms, there's social media campaigns. So there's so many more ways to hit a voter that if you're trying to tune out the 2024 presidential campaign, I'm almost certain you will not be able to do that as any kind of consumer of television or social media. And we're talking about the presidential race, but there's expected to be somewhere between 10 and 16 billion dollars spent on all of the U.S. elections combined in this 2024 election cycle, which would be a record. You know, I mean, members of Congress spend hours a day dialing for dollars. It's really

at this point, especially in presidential elections, like everyone needs a billionaire, you know, somebody who can prop up a super PAC, spend as much money as possible, because it's just been a ridiculous amount of money. And this arms race that's just continued. And you think about the arms race that's happened in a place like Iowa, $124 million were spent on ads in Iowa. And really, the outcome was exactly what the polls had shown it to be way back at the beginning of this race. I think we all know that money equals influence in politics. But I guess to be more specific, what are the billionaires, the multimillionaires who are making these investments, shall we say, what are they getting out of it in the long

run? I mean, look, it's about access. I mean, if you're going to give that kind of money and you're going to back up a campaign to that level, you're going to have a president's ear if the person becomes president or governor or whatever. And all these billionaires are different. Some of them want climate change initiatives to be passed. Some of them want more oil drilling. It just depends on how they've made their money and what their interests are.

But it is increasingly the case that these candidates, there's more potential for them to be influenced by these billionaires because of how much money they're pouring into these races. These candidates raise so much money as we've established here. What happens when somebody like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis drops out if he has money left? Where does it go? Well, if they have debts, a lot of times it goes to pay off those. A lot of times candidates sit on that money. You know, Ron DeSantis might want to run for president again in 2028. And you can sit on the money in your campaign finance accounts for a very long time. There's no expiration date on that. So it can be transferred into a new committee and especially to run for the same office. And that could technically be the seed money that Ron DeSantis uses to launch his next presidential campaign. Yeah, and they're not supposed to use the money for personal use, right? I mean, they can use it and transfer it over to another committee to fund a future election.

What some people have done, and there have been some real ethical questions around this, is they've created foundations in their own name. You can do that, and you can transfer the money to that. People can also pay family members by employing them on campaigns. And we've seen that cause some ethical problems. And foundations. Absolutely. And I think that that can really muddy the waters, especially when you have so much money floating around. And an FEC, a Federal Election Commission, that has no teeth. We touched a moment ago on some of this other spending. And I want to

talk a little bit more about congressional as well as gubernatorial races, because those are happening too. There's a lot of money happening there as well. How does funding for those kinds of races compare to the presidential election, which gets so much attention? It's certainly not as much money, but to scale, it probably it would be pretty close. Just one example. You know, I recently did some reporting on Senate races. Control of the Senate is up for grabs. Republicans have a lot of advantages and may well500 million spent in it. And to everyone that I talked to in the Montana races, I don't even know how you would spend $200 million in Montana. It is a small, mainly rural state. It only has so many broadcast networks. But there is almost, like I said, more money than you can spend. So you get absolute saturation. I also think,

Sarah, frankly, this is one of those issues where there's a real disconnect between what's happening and what the country says they want. If you poll people about campaign finance, it is overwhelmingly popular for people to say they think there should be less money in politics, there should be tighter limits on who can spend. Like the country really does seem to want a more restrictive, more clear campaign finance spending system. But when I tell you there is virtually no chance of that happening anytime in Washington, that is one of the safest bets you can make. There's no momentum. There's no interest in changing the current structure of campaign finance. Well, I think that's where we'll

leave it for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.