Chris Fitzsimon
Supporters of clean and fair elections are coming to Raleigh Wednesday to urge state lawmakers to expand public financing to more Council of State and local government races.
You would think providing campaign funds for candidates who’d rather not owe special interests anything after they are elected wouldn’t be that controversial.
But that’s why they call them special interests. They don’t want to change a system in which their money dominates. A lobbyist for the N.C. Home Builders Association told legislators earlier this session that “people believe in the current PAC election system,†so there’s no need to change it.
The donors to the Home Builders PAC sure believe in it. The PAC gave $444,000 to legislative candidates in the 2008 election. That’s a lot of money and a lot of strings. The home builders and realtors also pour money into local races, so they don’t want local public financing either.
Candidates for three Council of State offices can now elect to participate in the clean-election system and must collect a set number of small contributions to receive public funds. Both Democratic and Republican candidates have elected to take part, freeing them from raising money from the people they regulate.
Legislation to expand public financing to all Council of State races except governor and lieutenant governor is pending in the Senate.
The Town of Chapel Hill is the only local government that gives candidates the option of clean money. Legislation that would allow any city with a population of more than 50,000 to establish a public financing system has passed the House and is before the Senate.
Those are the bills the clean-election supporters are coming to Raleigh Wednesday to talk about with their legislators.
The opposition isn’t just the special interests who benefit from the current system. The anti- government think-tankers are against it too because they are against almost everything government does.
They claim that it is wrong to ask taxpayers to financially support candidates with whom they disagree. But their rabid opposition runs deeper than that. Bob Phillips with Common Cause North Carolina has it about right when he says, “Their simplistic message is the same: Public financing is another threat to free markets, lower taxes and limited government.â€
They robotically recite the talking points and embellish anecdotes from one of the states that had the sense to expand public financing to legislative races.
They don’t often mention Connecticut, where 75 percent of the candidates for the General Assembly in 2008 ran publicly financed campaigns. Eighty-one percent of the current members of the 2009 Legislature there did not have to rely on private special-interest money to get elected.
Pro-democracy forces in Connecticut also fought off Republican attempts this year to raid the public-financing fund to address the state’s budget shortfall.
Imagine a North Carolina General Assembly where members of the House and Senate were not bound by a system that almost requires them to provide special access for donors and fundraisers, the people they need to get re-elected. It’s possible.
A handful of wealthy special interests controlling campaigns isn’t a problem for the big-money Right. They’d rather turn it all over to the market and let public offices go to the highest private bidders.
That’s no way to run a democracy. It’s not democracy at all, really.
Lawmakers need to continue North Carolina’s progress toward public financing so the only people public officials are beholden to after the election are the people they represent.
Chris Fitzsimon is executive director of N.C. Policy Watch.