As you all surely know, the Senate is not a terribly democratic institution. A voter in Wyoming -- population 533,000 -- has about 70 times more ability to influence the Senate's direction than one in California -- population 36.8 million. And the lack of representativeness can be particularly acute when the Senate is conducting business at the committee level. Max Baucus's Table for Six, for instance, which may very well determine the fate of efforts to reform health care, is made up of members who collectively represent about 6.5 million people, or around one-fiftieth of the country's population.
This in and of itself is problematic for Democrats, since there is a correlation between the size of a state and how Democratic it tends to vote in elections for national office, although the relationship is not as strong as you might posit (Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii are small states too). The bigger and more structural problem, however, may have to do with the ways that small-state senators raise funds, and in turn, whose interests they are beholden to.
The chart below details the 20 current senators who have received the highest percentage of their campaign contributions since 2003 from corporate PACs, based on data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. This data focuses on corporate PAC contributions and individual contributions only; other, usually minor sources of income (self-financing, transfers from other campaign committees, contributions from ideological and labor PACs) are treated as ambiguous and are ignored. Data should be current through roughly May of this year.
What do these senators have in common? All 20 come from states with below-median populations. In fact, you have to go to #26 (John McCain) to find a senator from a state with an above-median population, and #30 (Saxby Chambliss) to find one from a state with an above-average population.
The reason this occurs is because individual contributions are easier to obtain in states with larger populations. Although some people make campaign contributions to candidates from outside their states, most do not, and so a senator from Texas ought to have an easier time eliciting funds than one from Idaho. On the other hand, there is no relationship between the amount of PAC contributions and the population of a senator's state; PACs know that one senator's vote is just as good as another.
What this means is that senators from small states tend to be relatively more dependant on special-interest money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall take. Senators from the ten smallest states have received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the ten largest. There is a tendency to think of senators from small states as being populists, and there are a few instances in which this is accurate -- Jon Tester of Montana and John Thune of South Dakota, for instance, are relatively non-dependant on PAC money. But for the most part, something the opposite is true, and senators from small states in fact have more incentive to placate special interests.
It is worth noting, by the way, that the six senators on Baucus's mini-committee are especially egregious in this regard. They rank #1 (Mike Enzi), #6 (Chuck Grassley), #11 (Kent Conrad), #13 (Baucus), #14 (Jeff Bingaman) and #20 (Olympia Snowe) in the share of contributions received from corporate PACs (an average of 47.5 percent of their funds overall).
One can think of several plausible reforms to redress this imbalance. For instance, corporations might be restricted from donating PAC money to a senator unless they do a material amount of business in her state. In addition, the proliferation of the Internet as a fundraising tool has probably leveled the playing field some, making it easier for populist-ish candidates like Tester or Jim Webb to receive contributions from activists all over the country.
This goes a long way toward explaining, however, why the Senate tends to be more protective than the House of corporate interests -- be they in the form of bank bailouts, tax breaks, or whatever else (consider, for instance, that H.R. 1424 -- the second take on the bank bailout -- was approved with the votes of 74 percent of the Senate but just 60 percent of the House). We don't need vague notions about the "cultural" differences between the two chambers to explain this -- they have mostly to do with where the money is flowing in from.
A complete list of the source of campaign funds for all 100 senators follows below.
8.03.2009
The Real Problem with The Senate's Small-State Bias
@ 7:00 AM
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Nate said
'We don't need vague notions about the "cultural" differences between the two chambers to explain this -- they have mostly to do with where the money is flowing in from.'
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The only rider I would add to this contention is that when you only face the voters every 6 years, your votes tend to get covered over. (Voters struggle to see the wood for the trees). So I think that builds in the ability to take more notice of special interest money than voters, perhaps.
Also I assume campaigning statewide means you need more money than running in a small congressional district? And therefore the money makes more of a difference.
Wow, look at the grouping of R's and D's, we are almost on different sides of the aisle based on this measure.
I think it's telling that out of 40 Republican Senators, 32 of them are in the top 50 for taking special interest money.
Seniority, and the chairmanships that go with it, also seem to explain some of the ordering of the list. Also, new senators, especially those whose ascensions were unexpected, are low on the list, beyond what lack of seniority would explain.
Id be interested to see a run down of the costs of running a re-election campaign in each of these states. Some small states in the N.E. would suffer from expensive media markets; CT, for example, probably has a very high cost for media buys (arguably excusing Dodd for raising so much PAC money); but this probably isn't true for Maine, Montana, etc. Theoretically, it should cost senators from the gas-giant states out west substantially less money to run their re-election campaigns, making their "take" from special interests all the more egregious because they really don't need that much money and are just stockpiling it to distribute to at-risk members in exchange for IOU's down the road. Of course, they could just be raising less money over all.
Could you add the States' population rankings to the table? I think it will make sense either as a number ranking (largest to smallest) or as percentage of average/median State.
Normally I'm the last person to ask for more details from Nate, but not all PACs are built the same. Some are actually the Senators way of trading money amongst themselves. So they don't quite qualify as special interests.
Assuming this shows the influence of corporate/special interest money on the Senate, it's a pretty good illustration of perverse incentives. The framers intended the Senate to be august, reserved and a place where national concerns were more important than narrow, parochial interests. They also wanted to ensure robust national corporate interests and trade (arguably the primary iinterest of the Constitution). The equality though, seems to have led to a desire to be equal in personal power and prestige (ie money to wield as donations to others - because there's no way Grassley needs 7 Million for his next campaign through the corn). At the same time, corporations (and even the NRA is a corporate entity) have become truly national citizens with a greater ability than any person to have influence wherever its cheapest/most readily available. Apparently a number of Senators won't even speak to individuals who don't live in their state about issues - I don't think any lobbyist faces the same restriction.
Since the Senate has such wide ranging authority and Senators are responsive to a whole state, not a small area, its also much easier for them to get away with adopting a position which is in the interest of a lobbyist on any particular bill (since there will likely be opponents and proponents somewhere in the state). Its also much easier to get on committees with no direct links to the "natural interests" of your constituents (Baucus on health care for example) and then eat at the corporate trough based on that membership.
Nate's proposals to regulate this, while interesting, are probably doomed. The Supreme Court is taking up the issue of restrictions on commercial/political speech, and with its current makeup I suspect, 5-4, we will be told all speech is equal, good, and we need to be good little citizens and watch hours of corporate funded campaign infomercials. Yaay.
JFisher: while rural states have cheap media buys, they have difficult door-to-door canvassing, which makes it harder for candidates to make use of grassroots volunteers as a substitute for money. In larger states, the swing votes are typically in the suburbs, where it's easier to have a coordinated campaign of volunteers walking from house to house - this was a crucial part of Obama's ground game, one that McCain couldn't match with his anti-urban strategy.
@Berkeley Bear:
Yes, one of the gravest errors ever made in this country was giving corporations rights like people. I am serious about that; this idea that a corporation is a person is insidious. You cannot jail a corporation, the only punishment you can give it is fines, and once they reach a certain size they are effectively immortal; or at least have lifetimes many times that of a person. All while being richer than any individual person. It is ridiculous to me to claim a corporation has any "right" to free political speech.
If a corporation is ever in favor of regulating itself, it can do it. Thus 100% of their "speech" is in favor of deregulation or in favor of regulation that impairs the competition.
Letting corporations be involved in politics is idiotic; it gives them an easy way to make more money without benefiting the consumer in any way, and often by directly harming the consumer, by deregulating safety or health standards for workers or products, by suppressing competition by adding taxes to them or fines or tariffs, and by getting massively overpaid for government work and draining our tax dollars without any say from us. Corporations should not be allowed to donate one dollar to any politician for any reason, and should not be allowed to fund any political speech in any way. We can't stop corporate officers from doing that, but let them do it with their own after-tax take home pay.
If a corporation is ever in favor of regulating itself, it can do it. Thus 100% of their "speech" is in favor of deregulation or in favor of regulation that impairs the competition.
This logic applies equally to individuals though.
Take smoking. If I want to not smoke I just stop. If I want to smoke more than is allowed by government regulation, or to increase regulation on how much other people can smoke then I have to petition the government.
Or take taxes. If I want to pay more taxes I just cut the government a check, so I only need to contribute to a Sentorial campaign if I want to cut my taxes or raise them on other people, ie the rich.
As you can see, liberals are totally OK with individuals living by the rule you have outlined. Your problem is not with anything other than the fact that you don't like corporations. I think that is silly, but you are certainly not alone in your feelings and are of course entitled to them. But this logic you attempt to employ is just not limited to corporations in any way.
Bravo, Nate, for a substantive and fascinating post. One of the reasons fivethirtyeight is near the top of my list of web sites to check daily is the fact that you actually do crunch the numbers, not just pull hypotheses out of thin air, and that you actually show the detailed numbers, so that we can all make informed judgments as to whether we agree or disagree with your conclusions.
Often this inspires readers with special knowledge to offer equally substantive remarks in the comments.
I very often agree with you, but even when I don't, I usually learn quite a lot about the topic under discussion.
Keep up the good work.
Tony C…
The problem, as I see it, is the way PACs are permitted to operate. Since donating to a PAC circumvents all the rules for individual donations, they can suck up cash of any amount and from any direction. A corporation that can flood its corner offices with hundreds of millions in bonuses even during years when they lost billions is not going to even sneeze when asked for a million for so-and-so’s PAC. I’ll bet such checks are so routine they don’t even need to be countersigned.
The greatest evil this does was exemplified during the Bush-Cheney years, when virtually every environmental, health and safety regulation that had been painstakingly put in place over twenty years or more was repealed, willfully misinterpreted or simply ignored in favor of what business wanted. It will happen again, folks, the very next time the GOP controls the government.
Something to think about, although I’m sure most people won’t.
Indeed, the founding fathers' wisdom in structuring a bi-cameral legislature is again validated. Thus, the US will largely be able to fend off waves of irreversible socialism that plague other democracies that don't have the built-in regulator.
These money rankings are biased in design. Corporate PACs are not the only composition of "special interest" money, just the component that tends to favor Republicans. That should not be surprising, nor undesirable.
While it's rare for me to defend Republicans, I think the party breakdown in the list of corporate donations has more to do with the fact that these donations go to Senators from smaller states, which tend to have Republican Senators, while larger states tend to have Democratic Senators
Nate totally misses the point here. The U.S. Senate was never intended to represent "the people" in the states. Rather, they were established to represent state legislatures. Now, states are burdened by unfunded mandates and federal directives with no way to speak out in Washington. Thanks to so-called "Progressives" who touted "democracy" for hurting state governments.
Matthew Hurtt
http://www.matthewhurtt.com
Just couldn't help myself...
I OCR'd your table and added population numbers to it (via Wikipedia- should be good enough). The interesting result is that about 60% of the per-capita corporate contributions to a Senator (a few stragglers aside*) can be explained by the inverse of the State's population (R-squared=0.596, power=-0.905), and almost 50% of per-capita individual contributions can be explained by the inverse of the square root of the population (R-squared=0.486, power=-0.55).
The difference between these power laws explains the divergence between small-state, corp-heavy and large-state, corp-light senators. I can try to pull some explanations for these differences out of my sleeve, but I'll leave that to the readership (and writership) on this blog.
*Stragglers: I excluded Kaufman from my analyses, since Nate didn't provide his fundraising numbers. Burns and Kohl were eliminated from both regressions as their fundraising is too low to represent anything, and Cantwell and Franken were excluded from the Corporate PAC regression for similar reasons. When all are included, the R-squared values drop to around 0.3, which I believe is a gross underestimate.
That should have been Burris above. Reading from the screen acan be a b***h...
I like Burris' numbers. Power to the, uh, person!
Seriously, though, Hurtt Pride is right. The Senate was never designed to be elected. It was designed to keep big states from bullying smaller states, and most importantly to keep the Federal governent from seizing too much power from the states.
Senators are supposed to be a thumbs up or thumbs down from the states themselves. This is why treaties have to be approved by the Senate- it's an easy way to have the states ratify a treaty (since it would take months for a treaty to actually be passed around to each state and argued and signed in the 1700s).
Now it's just a mess. The House works as expected, but you can't make that big a change to the Senate and expect it to still work the way the framers intended. With the Senate's original check on Federal power destroyed, we're quickly finding the Federal government seizing too much power.
We'd be better off if we switched back. If the states got a vote in these dealings, things would be a lot better. Oddly enough, I expect that both liberals and conservatives would agree with me, since each group claims to be speaking for the 'little guy'.
Eh.
- Jake Yenor
Paradoxically, our political system might get closer to the aristocratic conservative ideal if we imposed a property ownership requirement on Senate members and converted the Senate into the "House of Billionares." Don't most billionares live in the big cities?
Look how high up Franken and Thune are on the "individual contributions" list.
Both were involved in very high profile second campaigns. Minnesota is a medium-sized state, but Franken was a nationally known candidate. South Dakota is a tiny state, but Daschle was a high-profile incumbent.
Does the chart imply those two campaigns were both "grass-roots funded"? That PAC's had very little to do with them?
"As you can see, liberals are totally OK with individuals living by the rule you have outlined. Your problem is not with anything other than the fact that you don't like corporations. I think that is silly, but you are certainly not alone in your feelings and are of course entitled to them. But this logic you attempt to employ is just not limited to corporations in any way.'
wow, if you can't see why a corporation and an Individual should be classified as different, you're an off the reservation kind of stupid. Other than that, there would really be no issues in the senate if it didn't have this 60 vote rule that lately sems mandatory for anything to pass. It's a complete farce. The fillibuster historically was used in grave circumstances, now appointments for the undersecratery to the undersecratery seem to need cloture votes. It's a blatant misuse of the procedures set forth.
Intersting Data
The Senate has always been less radical then the house and serves as the more mature older sibling to the rambunxious house. Good thing too the house has too many crazy progressives and conservatives. and when their party gets control its nice to have some level of sanity still in the Senate.
John gues what
Corpoartions are made up of individuals.
Its pathetic how many liberals think corportations and profits are somehow evil. Guess who funds most of the D candidates as well (even Obama) individuals with wealth from you guessed it businesses aka corporations.
I think though Nate you are not accounting for 1 huge factor.
Media Market.
You might be able to raise money in Texas easier but it also costs more to play there.
And while the data is interesting until that is accounted for I think you are missing something
To Hurrt Pride :
Your assumptions on the genesis of the Senate and the bicameral legislative are overly simplistic. The arguments for the bicameral legislature were varied and exhaustive. Not only was the Senate to be the "disinterested" house, but it was to be the speaker of the state. This was a part of the Federalist platform. Like it or not, some of the reasons for the original creation of the Senate are not applicable anymore. There is no chance of a state leaving the union. There is no need to believe that the people are more ill-equipped to judge potential legislators that state legislatures.
Also, your assertion that "progressives" brought these unfunded mandates and federal directives spurs from a restricted view of history. This ignores precedent from Democrats and Republicans alike. Even some "small government" presidents have produced these programs and mandates to suit the times.
Yes, the founders envisioned the Senate as repping the states and hence the legislative choice model (which hosed Lincoln back in the day, but maybe he'd never be President if the Whigs hadn't blocked him from the Senate). At the same time, they specifically considered and rejected supermajorities for normal legislation. While the former was changed by amendment in keeping with the Constitution, the latter was changed by rule, then made darn near irreversible by a process that cut the people out entirely. I suspect its the 60 for passage (plus the fact that so many issues in the Senate matter to some PAC or lobby but not to a Senators home state) that has created a feeding frenzy atmosphere reflected in these numbers.
I don't dislike corporations of any size, by the way. I made a lot of money working for them. But I know that they, unlike me, can really claim to be national citizens and get a lot more play from representatives accross the spectrum because they are often incorporated in one state (DE), have a headquarters in another (NY, NC, CA), have a shipping center in yet another (IN, OH) and maybe a manufacturing plant in another (GA), and belong to several national business groups who are basically lobbying fronts. If there speech is put on the same footing as mine, I'm going to lose an awful lot of the time - much less if they have the same speech rights and their greater access. I doubt the framers, conservative and liberal alike, forsaw that particular outcome.
nova_middle_man said... John gues what. Corpoartions are made up of individuals.
So does that mean you advocate the prosecution of all employees of a corporation when the corporation breaks the law? Because if you don't, then you are essentially advocating that corporations get all the rights of the individuals with few to none of the responsibilities.
Since you can't jail a corporation when it breaks the law, it can not have the same rights as individuals. Of course, if you advocate that senior management be the prosecutable proxies for when a corporation breaks the law, well maybe then you'd be on to something.
@Hawksmoore:
How are you making any sense? If you petition the government to control smoking by others, or tax others, the rules will apply equally to all people.
The difference is that individuals are not in competition with each other, while corporations are, by design, in competition with each other and adversarial to any law or mandate that demands they be more honest with consumers, provide more safety to consumers, or reveal more to consumers, or not exploit consumers or the corporations informational advantage versus consumers, or investors, or their competition.
I am a liberal and I am not okay with individuals endangering my safety, ripping me off, using lawsuits to prevent me from exercising my rights, or bribing congress to protect themselves from fair competition by me. In fact, individuals can almost never do that; while corporations can.
My problem is not that I dislike corporations, my problem is that allowing corporations to influence politics gives them a route to influence the one and only thing they care about, the market, in ways that harm consumers. This harm occurs directly through deregulation and less safety and more pollution, and indirectly by restricting choice through suppression of competition that could produce cheaper and better products and services, better science, new inventions, and happier consumers.
It is ironic that the big defenders of the "free market" are so willing to let companies compete on non-market points, so willing to permit exploitive monopolies and cartels, and so willing to let corporations write laws and soak taxpayers for breathtakingly lucrative subsidies and non-compete contracts that give the corporations massive advantages they could never get if consumers actually voted on them individually.
Back in 2006, I did a calculation of the representation of the 58 senators (nearly a party-line vote)who voted for Sam Alito to join the SCOTUS. Would you believe they represented fewer people (49.8%) than the 42 senators who voted against him? This always made me chuckle whenever I heard some Republican talk about the "will of the people" when it came to allowing a simple majority vote to pass something. What a crock!
I always thought every SCOTUS nominee should require at least 60 votes (i.e. filibuster-proof) to be confirmed so they would at least (probably) represent a majority of the people.
I think Tony C. has it cold. What a corporation wants, for maximum profitability, is a deregulated monopoly. Throw in a gov't backstop (see Goldman Sachs), and you have a trifecta!
This, by definition, puts it at odds with the rights of individuals.
Personal reposnsibiltiy. One would think and hope individuals would educate themselves. Also if corporations do mistreat their customers over time they will go out of business. Humm customers are wait for it.... Individuals
Liberals like having government think and act for them and prefer more government control.
Conservatives prefer choice and freedom from a variety of corporations
Wait a minute kind of sounds like the whole healthcare argument :-p.
So how about we take the best of both worlds. Allow health insurance companies to still exist and function and provide a government option.
If only it were that simple. Both sides won't back down because that isn't the goal for either of the partisans. Its one or the other.
Personally I tend to side on the consevative side of the camp. The government plan has to rely on susbsidies to exist and is not truely participating in the market.
@Will in STL -
"overly simplistic" or "easily digestible" - whatever you want to call it. You said the same thing I said, only I said it at a level at which newspaper readers could understand it. I actually don't know what you're arguing in the first paragraph that I hadn't already stated in my original post.
Furthermore, I didn't connect "Progressives" and "unfunded mandates" - however - I did suggest that, due to the actions of Progressives in the early 20th century, states are now under-represented - nay, unrepresented altogether - at the federal level. I would agree that Democrats and Republicans alike have burdened the states with unfunded mandates - and true, Progressives were found in both major parties in the early 20th century.
Your response is largely irrelevant, and I wonder what position you're attempting to argue here, as it seems to me that you've disagreed with me on my most basic argument, yet espoused by exact assertion just a few sentences later.
Or, in lamen's terms... WTF?
;-)
You kids have fun now.
I find it curious that everyone here hates PACs, but the largest PACs are those who favor the Democrats, i.e., the organized labor PACs. Organized labor's influence in politics also harms the consumer through higher costs. To me, the irony is that those against big corporations don't also see the harm big labor causes.
I'm not in favor of big corporations. Their influence on politics should be restricted. But lets also focus on the fact that big labor also harms competition and the consumer too. The same restictions placed on big corporations must also be placed on big labor.
Oh, and the Goldman Sachs PAC actually gave significantly more money to Democrats than Republicans.
Tony C.:
Would you apply your restrictions to only profit-seeking corporations? What about asset-rich not-for-profits?
Not a leading or loaded question. Genuinely interested in your view.
nova_middle_man said... Also if corporations do mistreat their customers over time they will go out of business.
So if enough customers shun a company that is doing things that are illegal, well then they'll get theirs. Great! Let's extend that mantra to personal responsibility. If somebody does enough bad stuff, and a group of people decide to make them pay for it, then that's just fine ... never mind all that police and court system stuff. What a great system you have there!
And thanks for at least admitting that corporations have significantly fewer legal responsibilities and ramifications than individuals, and that often the only real solution occurs when huge numbers of people act independently against them. Like I said, what a great system you have there!
Nate's charts put a rather different complexion on the Red (and Blue Dog) State-Small State alignment.
It is perhaps not so much that this is simply a reflection of natural rural political values, but that corporate PACs find such Senators their best buys in politician shopping. Big corporate bucks are a political "nuclear weapon" in a small population state, overwhelming local sources of contributions, and also giving the politician devastating advantages in campaign funding over challengers.
As the old saying goes: the best legislators money can buy.
@nova:
As always, your stance is completely unrealistic and therefore either childish or idiotic.
First, people have zero chance of personally inspecting factories and food processing plants and manufacturers, and zero chance of testing food for mercury content, arsenic content or five thousand other dangerous chemicals, or any of that. If this is left to people it won't be done, not because they don't want it done but because there is no practical way to get it done without the force of law and collective action. This is proven by history.
Your claim that "conservatives prefer choice from a variety of corporations" is a lie; they might like the idea of choice, but they don't get it. You don't get to choose your OS from a "variety of corporations", you take Microsoft or suck it up and learn Linux, and if you work for a corporation there is a 98% chance you will use MS Windows or be out of a job. I don't get to choose your health care from a "variety of corporations", I get to choose the one my employer offers or pay four times as much in the private sector; that is not a practical "choice."
The goal of corporations is the engineer away your "choice" and prevent true competition. One way of doing that is to form an implicit cartel, a de facto monopoly that maximizes profits for all by an implicit agreement to not compete on price and not undercut each other on price. When consumers cannot walk away, this works. Health care falls into that category, and that is why it must be regulated.
This is a very scary blog post. It totally ignores the the intent of the senate structure, which is to prevent mob rule. The senate preserves the value of ideas from all walks of life. Not the demagogue.
The inter-state comparison is equally interesting ... make a note of IA and MT. competing parties with competing interests, or same party with competing interests. perhaps we should rename conservative vs liberals as PAC vs IND. What would votes on key reform measures look like with this distinction?
Nova said
'So how about we take the best of both worlds. Allow health insurance companies to still exist and function and provide a government option.
If only it were that simple. Both sides won't back down because that isn't the goal for either of the partisans. Its one or the other.'
-------------------
Actually I have not heard 1 liberal argue for a state run monopoly of healthcare, which is what you seem to suggest is the left's position. I think most Democrats would argue exactly FOR your preferred option, a public option, with insurance companies continuing to exist.
@The Daily Pander:
I have worked on the accounting systems of a large non-profit hospital chain; my former business partner worked for years on the accounting system of a large non-profit blood bank.
YES, my comments apply to them just as they apply to corporations. The officers at the top of both of these "charitable" organizations (which are both still going strong) were blood sucking leeches, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct salary, bonuses, and as much again in perks, travel, cars and private jets.
If a non-profit is asset-rich, as you describe it, I'd bet dollars to donuts it is run by a parasite on society; whether it does any actual good or not.
My charitable contributions go to local charities. For example, I donate to a local abused women's shelter, $100 a year for several years now. None of the staff there take any compensation of any kind. I was recruited to this charity, btw, by my attorney, one of several attorneys that provide the abused women with pro bono legal aid.
Richard said, "I find it curious that everyone here hates PACs, but the largest PACs are those who favor the Democrats."
I don't think any of the liberally minded people who have posted here are suggesting that only "republican PACS" are undemocratic. I think most of us would be thrilled to see most, if not all, PACS go the way of the dodo. From my perspective that includes organized labor as well as the corporate interests that have been favoring democratic senators of late.
As for the question of who is more corrupted by PAC money, it seems clear that both sides are heavily influenced. Although, according to the above tabulation, it would appear that on the whole republicans are substantially more dependent on special interest money than their democratic counterparts.
@Saint Dude:
I am a liberal, and although I do not have a problem with unions (unless they ALSO become a monopoly on labor and thus able to exploit the employers), I do have a problem with union PACs and would like to see them banned.
And you are correct; at the median point of PAC support (18.8%), if you presume anybody getting above that level is a Republican and anybody getting below that level is a Democrat, you will be correct 76% of the time.
That is MUCH more than the 50/50 proposition, and still more than the 60% correct you would get if you just assumed all Senators were Democrats (because Democrats are the current majority).
This indicates the measure, the ratio of PAC financing, carries real information about the political party of the recipient.
My issue with the Senate is quite simple:
Take the 12 biggest states. They represent over 60% of the U.S. population, but only represent less than 25% of votes in the Senate.
If that doesn't strike you so much, look at it the other way: 40% of the population controls 75% of votes in the Senate.
Richard said, "I find it curious that everyone here hates PACs, but the largest PACs are those who favor the Democrats."
I learned long ago never to take a right winger's statement of "facts" as being correct. What is that word that describes the right's attitude toward facts? Oh yes: "truthiness".
The most recent comprehensive ranked listing of PAC contributions I can find right now is this one:
http://pac.leadershipinstitute.org/20052006/index.cfm?sort_id=alpha
And it shows that of the top 10 PACs (in contributions in the 2005-2006 cycle), 9 of them (90%), including all of the top 8, favored Republicans. In the top 70 PACs, the number favoring Dems increases to only 2 (97% Republican favoring); and the top 100 beings the Dem favoring PACs up to 4 (96% Republican favoring).
So the axiomatic claim that the biggest PACs favor Democrats would appear to be a stupendous whopper.
Off. Topic. /Message.
Well, this would be more revealing had you included union donations and trial lawyer donations -- which almost entirely go to Democrats -- which in many of these cases would tend to give a different picture in terms of where the Congressman stands.
For example, Al Franken "only" received about $26K from corporate PACs -- but he received $1.1 million from law firms.
Bob Casey "only" received $496K from coporate PACs -- but he received $3.4 million from law firms.
www.opensecrets.org
Nate, you hypothesize that the availability of in-state fundraising is responsible for higher shares of PAC money in low population states. What about an alternative hypothesis concerning the PACs' motivations? If low population states generally have less expensive Senate races and if legislative influence is roughly proportional to the share of a senator's campaign a PAC is willing to subscribe, then a PAC seeking to guarantee a certain number of votes--say 41 votes to block health insurance reform--can do so most cost effectively by investing in Senators in low population states.
Okay. I know that Sen. Kohl (D-WI) tends to run unopposed because of his massive personal wealth, but really? Less than $20,000? That puts him several orders of magnitude below any other senator who's been in office since 2003. Can anyone offer an explanation for this? Is it just a different set of rules for the super-rich, even in the Senate?
Thanks.
Nate have you seen this brief analysis on the impact the 'Table for Six' has had on the stock of some major health insurance companies? Worth a look and it would be interesting to see what your take is.
http://baselinescenario.com/2009/07/31/the-value-of-not-having-the-public-plan/
PND,
Don't recite dittohead talking points. Its bad for your IQ.
Trial lawyer, for example, is both a misused term by the GOP and not a synonym for law firms. Every trial has lawyers on both sides, some who represent individuals but many more who represent corporate interests. Personal Injury and consumer protection law is just a small segment of cases, and the defendants in those cases use trial lawyers to protect corporate interests (mainly insurance companies and manufacturers). The membership of the American College of Trial Lawyers, the highest self-selecting organization, is composed mainly of people who do trials between companies over IP, antitrust and other issues that have nothing to do with the supposed evils of the GOP boogeyman.
Even if "trial lawyers" were all scumsuckers, there's no link between them and law firm donations. For every guy advertising on the side of a bus, there are a dozen "white-shoe" firms in NY, SF, LA and cities big and small all over this country that have nothing to do with that kind of work. Law firms (and their donations) lean depending on what they do, where they are and who makes up their membership. Those with lobbying arms almost universally give to both sides today, and gave heavily to GOP candidates during the heyday of K Street. The big firm I worked with was well known as supporting GOP candidates (the managing partner was a Pioneer for W), but there were also some prominent Dem supporters.
From profnickd:
For example, Al Franken "only" received about $26K from corporate PACs -- but he received $1.1 million from law firms.
The claim that Al Franken received 1.1 million dollars in donations from law firms is an out-and-out lie. Opensecrets clearly shows the 1.1 million dollars as "Lawyers/law firms", and breaks it down by individual and corporate donations. Corporate donations account for only $17,000 of that. Al Franken received 1.1 million in contributions from individual lawyers.
But hey, why not lie to complete strangers in order to indict another complete stranger's opinion?
PND, I think you are missing Nate's point. Obviously all politicians raise money. Its part of the game after all. Obviously not all that money comes from PACs, but lets not forget that PACs exist solely to extract political advantage for there causes.
Perhaps one way to reform the Senate to make it representative (but still retain it as an institution, a smaller counterpart to the House) would be to derive its composition from the share of the total popular vote each political party gets.
Electing the POTUS and the House would stay the same. And every two years, 1/3 of the Senate comes up for election, and across the nation voters can choose which party they want to see control the Senate.
This is a very interesting analysis. But I would offer an alternative explanation: it is not that small-state senators must rely more on PAC money. As many pointed out, it also costs less to run in a small district.
I think it is more the case that small-state senators are cheaper to get! A given amount of money means 10 times more to them than to a big-state candidate who needs a much bigger war chest overall.
@Dave
"Back in 2006, I did a calculation of the representation of the 58 senators (nearly a party-line vote)who voted for Sam Alito to join the SCOTUS. Would you believe they represented fewer people (49.8%) than the 42 senators who voted against him? This always made me chuckle whenever I heard some Republican talk about the "will of the people" when it came to allowing a simple majority vote to pass something. What a crock!"
The next step would be to look at the margin of victory for each senator to get an idea of how many people in that state agreed with their senator's vote. Cuius regio, eius religio is soooooo 16th century.
The next step would be to use divination to parse this issue from the hundreds of others that influenced each individual's vote, and then correct for factors like lower turnout in less competitive races and the fact that some Americans are not psychic and didn't know what their Senator would do if Alito came up for confirmation and that Senator was whipped by their party...
I agree that arguing for passage of something based on its being "the will of the people" is dubious; this being a representative republic pretty much enervates both that type of analysis and your attempted rebuttal of it.
Furthermore, a large percentage of people believe some 9/11 "trufer" theory or a "nirther" theory, or doesn't believe in evolution, or believes crap about fluoridation or vaccination or economics...something being the will of the people isn't as compelling as it could be if the people were different!
Railing against the tide just isn't going to make a difference. The Senate is what it is.
Ergo, if it's about the money, then that's where we should be focused, not on trying to change the way Congress is set up!
Yet Vermont seems to point to the flaw in your trend.
Sanders, from a very small state, has one of the lowest percentages coming from PACs: 2.3%. His colleague in the Senate, Leahy, likewise has lower PAC contributions than the median.
In fact, I'd posit that Sanders would be unable to get elected in a bigger state, since very few corporate donors subscribe to his politics. It is only in small states that more radical progressives can even run a viable campaign, given their general lack of corporate support.
Clearly, your trend of attacking small states isn't based entirely on reality.
Ten (of 23) of the Top 30 in PAC ratio are members of the Finance Committee. I'm sure a clever formula could be developed to assess which Senate Committee's were more under the sway of PAC money, I'd bet Finance wins going away.
A quick look at opensecrets data suggests as much, but a more sophisticated evaluation that included time served on the committee (and considered that members serve on multiple committees), might indicate more.
Proportionally-elected Senators would offer no easy targets for special interest money.
If the money problem derives from the Senate's structure, then we can a) fight an endless battle of reforming the money problem, with lawmakers and campaign contributers each trying to outthink the other, or b) change the way Senators become elected.
I don't think the former is workable; see 527s. I don't think the latter is unworkable; after all, there is already a growing movement for popular instead of electoral selection of our POTUS.
Isn't that striking to see how red the top of that list is and how blue the bottom is? I particulaly love seeing Franken on this list at the bottom. This certainly is a telling visual representation of where the influence of special interest money goes.
Nate is not only the numbers wizard, he's a visual artist, too.
And in terms of objective amouints of corporate cash, Max Baucus, "The Montana Betrayer", takes in more than nearly all senators, competing only with Mitch McConnell and Jon Cornyn. He need never dine alone, as the saying goes...
Carey said: "The most recent comprehensive ranked listing of PAC contributions I can find right now is this one:
http://pac.leadershipinstitute.org/20052006/index.cfm?sort_id=alpha" and "So the axiomatic claim that the biggest PACs favor Democrats would appear to be a stupendous whopper."
First, Carey, I'm not a Republican. Second, I was using the same site that Nate used http://www.opensecrets.org/
If you went there you would see that out of the top 20 PACs, seven are union and 17 of the 20 heavily support Democrats over Republicans. This is data for FY 2010. It makes sense too, since Democrats are in control of both the House and the Senate.
Hawksmoore said...
If I want to smoke more than is allowed by government regulation,
Either you are parroting some quack's talking point, or you don't know what you are typing.
Can you tell us where any government regulates how much a person can smoke (I presume you are discussing tobacco products?)? Citation of such regulation would be of great assistance.
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/0284889341225109596
rosmer said...
it is not that small-state senators must rely more on PAC money. As many pointed out, it also costs less to run in a small district.
Tell that to the politicians in Delaware, where at least 60% of the population lives in the Philadelphia media market, one of the ten largest media markets.
Tell that to the politicians in New Hampshire, where the overwhelming media market is Boston, one of the ten largest media markets. Oh, and about 60% of the New Hampshire population lives in that Boston media market.
West Virginia? A bit more spread out - northern West Virginia is in the Pittsburgh media market (one of the 40 largest media markets), eastern West Virginia is in the Washington, DC, media market (one of the ten largest media markets). but, but, but, central and southern West Virginia IS in a small media market = the Charleston media market (if you don't count the parts of southern West Virginia in the Roanoke, Virginia, media market).
And then there are the larger states that have multiple media markets that require a LOT of money to effectively campaign in the entire state:
Florida has multiple media markets - Jacksonville, Orlando, Tallahassee, Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale, to name a few.
Ohio has multiple media markets - Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton, Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania), Detroit (in Michigan), Fort Wayne (in Indiana), to name a few.
Indiana has multiple media markets - Chicago (in Illinois), South Bend, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Lafayette, Columbus, Bloomington, Evansville, Terre Haute, Cincinnati (in Ohio), Louisville (in Kentucky), to name a few.
A simplistic 'small population state means low cost campaign' is, well, simplistic and has little to no basis in reality. Those simple little things called FACTs, maybe?
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/0284889341225109596
Why is public financing of campaigns not being discussed as a solution to this problem?
http://www.publicampaign.org/ has a lot of information on the Fair Elections Now Act.
bradams said...
Why is public financing of campaigns not being discussed as a solution to this problem?
Mainly because the SCOTUS won't allow it - that 'freedom of speech for corporations' thinking.
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/0284889341225109596
Nate, this won't do:
"there is a correlation between the size of a state and how Democratic it tends to vote in elections for national office, although the relationship is not as strong as you might posit (Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii are small states too)."
It's not the size, per se, of a state that matters. The greatest predictors, as far as I can tell, is whether the state contains a big city or collection of cities that dwarfs the rest of the state.
(My argument is not valid for the South or Utah or Texas or New England, where other factors work heavily against one party. But smart folks have documented those realities far better than I ever will.)
CA - SF plus LA plus SD
OR - Portland
WA - Seattle-Tacoma
NV - Vegas
NM - Albuquerque, plus medium-sized liberal bastion Santa Fe thrown in for good measure
CO - Denver, and Boulder acts like Santa Fe, only more so
IL - Chicago
NY, CN, NJ - The Big Apple
PA - Philly and Pitt
HI - Honolulu
RI - Providence
MN - MSP area
All those states are highly Republican-leaning outside of their large cities. The thing is, those population centers totally dominate the state, turning them into so-called "blue states" when really they're just blue-city-dominated states."
(I live in WA. Seattle is bluer than the sky, but the rest of the state is purple or blood-red.)
True swing states like FL and OH and IA and MO and now VA have their own category. They're special.
Like I said, discount TX and GA from my list. For now. Still, they're trending blue, it seems.
WY, ID, MT, Dakotas, - no truly big cities.
Someday I'll back this up with numbers. When I get some free time.
Just John,
MARYLAND.
One big city - Baltimore City
Several high population counties/cities, but in one corridor (w/% for Kerry in 2006/ % for Obama in 2008):
Baltimore County - 51.6/56.2
Baltimore City - 82.0/87.2
Howard County - 54.0/60.0
Montgomery County - 66.0/71.6
Prince George's County - 81.8/88.9
Although Baltimore City is the 'big city' in Maryland, it actually is only the fourth largest jurisdiction in the state, with Montgomery, PG and Baltimore counties all larger.
The GOOPer areas of Maryland are low population areas - the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland.
Even Anne Arundel County (fifth largest jurisdiction w/more than 500,000 pop.) is showing some signs of trending Dem: in 2000, it went 44.7% for Gore; in 2004, it went 43.1% for Kerry; in 2008, it went 48.2% for Obama.
Also:
Delaware does not have a 'major city' within the state, but more than 60% of the state's population is in New Castle County, within just a few miles of Philadelphia.
As for New Jersey, it is split between Philadelphia (in the south) and NYC (in the north). As an example, south of Trenton, you'll find many more Eagles fans than Giants and/or Jets fans.
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/0284889341225109596
@Just John:
You could be on to something. I have long thought that when people work in a city (as I have most of my life) the wider range of people, cultures, religions, crime, wealth, and power (from zero to scary) does a great deal to convince one of liberalism and some form of social safety net.
Spend time in NYC or Dallas and you realize poverty and bad education and lack of medical care all breed crime, gangs, and hopelessness that ends in drug addiction or prostitution, and it is all in a self-perpetuating feed back cycle.
And it doesn't take long to see that simply more police force is treating a symptom and not a cause, and the people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps because --- They are poor, uneducated, sick, powerless and defeated.
One reason I am a liberal is not because I am a bleeding heart, it is because I am a mathematician and engineer. I have worked with smart people of every race and gender, and what I see in these defeated denizens of the city is wasted potential. A better safety net could have saved them, and made them productive members of society, or at least not criminals.
Perhaps those rednecks that don't live in cities, or only see them on TV, are simply unexposed. If they lived here, and saw the magnitude and effect of the problem, perhaps then they would realize their standard prescriptions for solving it (religion, self-reliance, etc) have been tried and are ineffective, and perhaps with a little personal witnessing of the suffering they wouldn't be as detached and dismissive of the problem as they seem to be.
I'm rather curious why Sen. Thune (R-SD), who comes from a state that has just over 800,000 people, has raised nearly $20 million.
Herb Kohl runs for Senate on $20,000. That's two orders of magnitude less than the next cheapest campaign (not counting Burris). Oh, and the money he finds under the cushions in his couch.
This is CRYING for a scatter plot. State population vs. special interest fund %. Dots colored by party. PLEASE
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