It’s easy to forget that one of the proposed prescriptions for treating a distorted campaign finance system already exists. But public financing, as it stands, just doesn’t work.

Even the candidates who advocate for an overhauled public financing system won’t take what the government already offers them.

Candidates on the Democratic side are integrating public financing for elections into their money-in-politics platforms — but both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders declined to use public financing themselves. Only former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley opted to use the money, accepting $846,365 of federal matching funds for the Democratic primary. A Democratic operative told Buzzfeed News it was “effectively the end of O’Malley’s campaign.”

The reason, the operative said, was that no candidate can win using that money because of the restrictions on deploying it.

“The program was way too restrictive on how candidates could spend funds once they received them,” Brett Kappel, a Washington, D.C.-based elections lawyer and expert on campaign finance law, said.

Under current rules, candidates who accept matching funds in the primaries must also agree to limit their campaign spending for all of the primaries to $10 million (plus a cost-of-living adjustment). Within that, they must limit spending in each state to a dollar amount based on the state’s population, and they can’t use more than $50,000 of their personal funds. “It doesn’t help you as a candidate to be able to spend a great deal of money in California in June if you finish fifth in New Hampshire in February,” Kappel said.

What’s more, candidates who take this money for the general election portion of the race must agree to limit spending to the level of the available public grant — $20 million — and not to accept private contributions at all.

There are up sides, of course. Free money, especially for underdogs, isn’t something to sneeze at, and it can add up. In order to get it, in the primary season, candidates seeking a party’s nomination must demonstrate adequate public support by raising more than $5,000 in each of at least 20 states. The Presidential Election Campaign Fund will match the first $250 of each donor’s total contribution to the candidate.

Yet almost all of even the underdogs decline to utilize it. In a presidential campaign cycle that has already seen well over $500 million raised from donors, the conditions on how the funds are spent look especially unworkable for a candidate hoping to win.

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The limits on public funds were not always dealbreakers for presidential candidates. Between the 1976 election following the fund’s creation through to 1992, almost every single qualifying candidate accepted the matching funds in the primary, and no general election nominee declined federal funding until Barack Obama in 2008. By 2012, both party nominees declined to use public funds. Obama wound up spending $721 million, all contributed by individual donors, and GOP nominee Mitt Romney spent $449 million.

The biggest blows to the viability of public funding came in 2010, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and other rulings from the federal bench spurred the creation of super PACs and allowed them to raise unlimited funds from both corporations and individuals.

It’s the system Clinton and Sanders are now railing against on the campaign trail. Both want to overturn Citizens United — and make public financing a much more viable prescription.

A major part of Clinton’s proposal to change the campaign finance landscape involves promoting gifts from small donors by matching those contributions with additional federal funds. Combined with new restrictions on larger gifts, the plan is intended to reduce the influence of larger donors.

The proposal has been praised by supporters of tighter campaign finance regulation but panned by critics as lacking important specifics such as how much would be available in matching funds. The decline in taxpayers who choose to have $3 of their taxes transferred into the Presidential Election Campaign Fund — at no extra cost to the taxpayer — has left it seriously underequipped to make a dent in the cost of a modern campaign and thus has also provoked questions about the cost of Clinton’s revisions.

Sanders continues to advocate for the proposals in the Fair Elections Now Act he has sponsored in Congress. The bill would take the framework of the system that currently exists for presidential candidates and apply it to the House and Senate,with some modifications: The threshold of eligibility for public funds would be lowered; joint fundraising committees between candidates and their parties would be prohibited; and broadcasters would be required to lower their rates for candidate ads while candidates would receive media vouchers good for additional cash, changes meant to help lower the cost of campaigning over the airwaves.

The current Congress would be unlikely to smile on either proposal, though that could change if November brings significant shakeups on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, though, in the end, under the current system, both Democratic White House candidates — not to mention all the Republican contenders — knew what they needed to do to win: Stay away from the free money.



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