Campaign finance reform is often promoted as a method to ‘level the playing field’ by reducing the role of individual political action, typically by outlawing spending on political campaigns. People point to the Democrat’s record breaking spending on this past election cycle as evidence of hypocrisy on the matter, but I find that to be a bit unfair. Just because they want to change the rules of the game doesn’t mean they can’t play by the current rules. Let’s set aside the moral questions of money and speech and focus on the more tangible complaints. These typically take the form of, ‘it allows the rich to purchase elections.’ Ironically, this stands in stark contrast to the Democrat’s spending deluge and their paltry electoral results. Why is this? Because of two seemingly contradicting truths. Money is extremely important in running a political campaign and money has a limited effect on the end results. In 2012 UCLA professor Lynn Vavreck gave a presentation on the impact of money on voting. Her research found that the economic principle of diminishing returns held true for campaign advertising. Essentially, the first dollar spent on the campaign has a bigger effect than the next dollar spent. The stunning part was the rate of decline. Spending quickly reaches a point where the next dollar spent makes virtually zero impact.

So why does this matter? It makes it very clear that limiting campaign financing does not protect the little guy, but instead provides a huge hurdle to challenging established politicians. Well known politicians have a much wider base from which to raise funds in small parcels. The restriction on donation amounts forces challenges to spend an inordinate amount of time fund raising from a wide range of sources and limits their ability to raise a sufficient amount of funds to compete. Allowing larger donations would promote more challenges to incumbents because more campaigns would be able to reach the necessary funding levels to counter spending by the other party. The fear that ‘unlimited’ money would purchase elections is undercut by the very minimal impact those ‘unlimited’ dollars would have. So next time people talk about campaign finance laws, realize they’re effectively advocating for incumbency protection.