Primary season 2022 is almost over. Seven months of election contests have left the American public, at least those paying attention, exhausted. Yet, there are still more than two months to go before the November general election. Can the American public maintain focus?
Primaries have become ingrained throughout every level of the American election system. The original impetus for primaries came about in the late 19th century and was concerned with the presidency. Part and parcel of the Progressive agenda, the intent was to transfer control of presidential nominations from party leaders to individual party members.
Today, not only is the primary system used to nominate party candidates for president and for congress, but we also resort to primaries to choose party nominees for many state and local offices, including school boards, water, sewer and fire districts as well as some other special purpose bodies. Americans are asked to vote virtually every year in some contest for a public office, usually through a two-step process, primaries plus the general election.
Unfortunately, the primary system is not doing its intended job very effectively, or efficiently. Let’s look at takeaways from the 2022 primary season to see how things are working out.
The capacity of party leaders to dictate nomination choices certainly has been diminished, but the average party member has not been the recipient of their declining power. While money has always been the “mother’s milk of politics,” two developments have resulted in a torrent of cash being pumped into the election process, out of the control of party leaders or the parties in general. One is the concentration of wealth in the United States over the past three or four decades and the other is the 2010 decision of the US Supreme Court (SCOUS), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), which allows corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited money on elections. As a result, campaign expenditures have exploded, fueled by super PACs and other sources of “dark money.”
As independent committees, super PACs raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from corporations, nonprofits, unions and individuals in support of their political activities, but they are not allowed to give money directly to candidates and are prohibited from coordinating their expenditures with those candidates. Theoretically, super PACs must identify their donors, but there are caveats.
Some super PAC donors are shell corporations or they are nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. Some super PACs are run by individuals with close personal ties to a candidate or the party in question. Both Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi lead super PACs. And finally, there are “pop up” super PACs formed shortly before an election, or primary, which allows them to avoid revealing funding sources until after voting is over.
The term “dark money” relates to political spending where the source is not disclosed. Much of this form of spending flows through nonprofit, tax-exempt groups created under section 501© of the Internal Revenue Code that may engage in political activity but are not technically political organizations.
The resulting flood of money is evident in the 2022 primaries.
Since there is no presidential race, one might expect campaign expenditures in 2022 not to be higher than 2020, but that is not the case. Spending on political ads thus far has reached $9.7 billion. That is more than the $9.5 billion spent on political ads in the total 2020 campaign budget of $14.4 billion. It is already more than double the $3.9 billion spent on political ads in the 2018 campaign budget of $5.7 billion.
Driving these expenditures are incredibly wealthy individuals like Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, who has given more than $15 million to groups supporting J. D. Vance, the Trump-backed senatorial candidate in Ohio, and $13.5 million to a super PAC working to elect another Trump-back senatorial candidate, Blake Masters. Masters is trying to unseat Democratic Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. Kelly, however, is not defenseless. According to OpenSecrets, the website for the Center for Responsive Politics, Kelly has a $52.4 million war chest and is receiving support from several super PACs.
Bottom line? Total campaign expenditures in 2022 will dwarf those of any previous election, and the influence of party leaders is being replaced in part at least by wealthy individuals with money to burn and anxious to be “kingmakers”.
As indicated, much of this money will finance political ads on television stations, cable networks, and social media platforms. Such ads contribute little to the discussion of campaign issues. T
hey generally are designed to reinforce existing opinions and to remind the faithful an election is at hand. Ads on social media platforms also raise concerns about their capacity to target recipients for partisan messages or for appeals related to an identified bias. Outfits like Meta, Facebook’s parent company, claim to be working on the targeting issue, but there appears to be little progress in reducing the exploitation of their users.
Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party seems to have been confirmed by primary outcomes. The former president endorsed more than 230 candidates in 39 states and 179 have won. Many of his winners, however, were either incumbents or candidates running unopposed. Still, according to The Economist, candidates endorsed by the former president have won the GOP nomination in four of every five races for open seats in the US Senate and US House.
However, Trump’s problems with the National Archives and the US Department of Justice may have lessened the value of his endorsement. Initially, Republican officeholders were vehement in their denunciation of the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, but as the potential damage from his inappropriate treatment of classified materials has become more apparent, the tone of comments, if any, has moderated.
On the other hand, concern about the impact of President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings on Democratic candidates has subsided. His rating has increased six points from July’s record low of 38%, the result of several recent policy successes. Gallup credits improvement in Biden’s rating among independents as the source of the new 44% rating. This should bode well for Democratic chances in November.
A couple of closing takeaways from 2022 primary results: one, the impact of the excessive spending is hard to read; turnout in the recent primaries does not appear to be much higher than is traditional---between 14-35% of eligible voters depending upon whether or not there were competitive races on the ballot; and second, the Dobbs decision issued in June by SCOUS, ending the protections of Roe v. Wade, has energized women voters to support Democratic candidates. The question is will the momentum carry over to the general election?
In any case, American voters can expect a ramping up of political ads between now and November 8. The political arena is awash with money, much of it from undisclosed sources, and the owners of television stations, cable networks and social media platforms are salivating over their impending windfall. It’s a shame all this money could not be spent in a manner more productive of a better America.
www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/basics.)
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/03/2022-midterms-online-political-ads-00049373
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/trump-endorsement-primaries-election/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/trump-search-republican-reactions.html
https://news.gallup.com/poll/398117/biden-job-rating-rises-highest-year.aspx
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/24/politics/special-elections-democrats-abortion-roe/index.html