 For those of you who don't know about the Center for Election Science, maybe this is one of your first events that you've attended. The Center for Election Science is a non-partisan non-profit and we are dedicated to empowering people with voting methods that strengthen democracy. And so the main voting method that we advocate for is called approval voting and it allows you to vote for as many candidates on your ballot as you like and the candidate with the most folks wins. We helped folks in Fargo, North Dakota and St. Louis, Missouri to implement approval voting in their cities and we're working with activists across the country who want to bring it to their communities. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in, you can check us out at electionscience.org. But today we're going to be focusing on campaign finance. So we have a special guest today with us, Pete Quist. He is the Deputy Research Director at Open Secrets. He joined Open Secrets in the 2021 merger between the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute. Sorry, somebody's still unmuted here. Sorry, one moment. I think I got it. Oh, thank you. Okay. So he joined Open Secrets in the 2021 merger between the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money and State Politics. And Pete had been the Research Director at NIMP since 2013, after serving five years as a researcher. At NIMP, he focused on best practices for disclosure of money in state politics. Before joining the Institute in 2008, Pete spent two years at Project VoteSmart where he tracked the progress of congressional and state legislation, summarized key bills in plain language, and compiled voting records. Pete earned a Bachelor of Political Science from South Dakota State University. So thank you so much for being here, Pete. We're very happy to have you. Is there anything you'd like to say before I hand it over to you? I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, I'm really excited. I think, like I've mentioned to you before, we have had really good response from folks on this. I think this campaign finance is a hot topic right now. People are really interested in understanding how money is influencing policies, government, the candidates who get elected, all of that kind of stuff. So we're really excited to hear what you have to say, and I'll let you take it from here. Great. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here and start off the few slides, and then we're going to go to some live website action to take a look at some data. So as Caitlin mentioned, I came from the National Institute on Money and Politics, and we merged with the Center for Responsive Politics to form Open Secrets. Both organizations and the new organization have always, for decades now, collected campaign finance and lobbying data and made that freely available on their websites. And the idea here is that we can collect this data from various government agencies where it is available in different kinds of formats, sometimes in handwritten pieces of paper, even which we get shipped to us in the mail and actually get into our database. So we're aggregating all this stuff together for folks and putting it into one usable database from lots of different places. So we've got reports that we publish. We have a journalism arm that is constantly writing pieces that are disseminated. You can sign up for those newsletters. We do long-term analysis every election cycle, and we try to put the data into usable tools as well, and I'll be going over some of those on this too. What I'm going to talk about today are the ways, the common ways in which campaign finance can be regulated. And so we'll touch on the three main approaches to that, what the goals are and how they work. And then we'll also talk about trends in campaign finance and elections around the country and get into what those are looking like and how those regulations might impact some of those trends. And then the last thing we'll do is take a look at a couple of the tools that we use to try to allow people to see what's actually happening, particularly in their states when they're trying to advocate for change on any variety of issues. We try to make the data come to life in terms of good governance. So there are three main avenues of spending in politics that I'm going to talk about here today. One of them is contributions to candidates and committees. And this is what most folks typically think about. You see a candidate that you like. You give them a contribution for their campaign. That goes into an account that they can use to run for election. And so they have to log everything that comes in and what comes out and use that money for their own election purposes. Independent spending is another one. This one has really grown in the last 10 years after the Citizens United VFEC decision in 2010. This refers to spending that a person or a group will do to support or oppose a candidate without actually giving that candidate any money for their race. Oftentimes these kinds of expenditures are used to disparage a candidate to oppose that candidate for election. These are typically not run by individuals directly, but by organizations. And we'll get into more of that in a little bit. And then lobbying. So this is the spending directly on government policy. And oftentimes it's spent to try to keep a status quo rather than to make a change to government policy. The three main approaches that we're going to talk about today on regulating this are disclosure, limiting the money, and providing public financing. Every state, and I come from a world of mostly state elections and campaign finance, I'll be focusing primarily on that. But this is also true at the federal level. All jurisdictions have various approaches to these kinds of limitations or regulations on on politicking. Disclosure is the approach that has the most ubiquitous use. So this is the idea that when a candidate runs for office, they most report publicly where they get their money and what they're spending it on. Similarly, if you are engaging in independent expenditure activity, those ads that support or oppose a candidate without actually coordinating with that candidate, giving that candidate money directly, but just doing it on your own. And this is why it's called independent spending. Those are subject to disclosure requirements as well, the various levels. And then lobbying in some states is disclosed pretty well. The federal level is disclosed relatively well compared to many of the states. Disclosure isn't really a big challenge in terms of a First Amendment free speech restriction. Limits are used pretty widely on contributions to campaigns, but not everywhere. So for example, if you are running for a state government office in Texas, like state legislature or governor, there is no limit on how much somebody can give you to run for office. And so we routinely see contributions of seven figures to gubernatorial candidates in Texas, for example. Only about 11 states don't have limits on contributions right now. Most states do, and they vary quite a bit. Here in Montana, if you're running for the state house, the limit is, I think, $170 this year. But in California, maybe thousands of dollars. And then public funding, this is the option to sign up for a program. And this is always going to be an opt-in program as a candidate. This is where you're talking about typically what you'll do is get some seed money to indicate that you're a real candidate and then receive money from the campaign finance agency to run for office. And there are different ways that this is implemented, and we'll talk about that in more detail momentarily. These, by the way, the contributions, the independent spending, and the lobbying data are specifically the kinds of data sets that we collected Open Secrets. And so that's why I'm focusing on them here. There are some other pieces of information that are good to have that we would like to get and are pioneering in some cases. And they include things such as personal financial disclosures, how much money people have tied up in different industries who are in elected office. So the disclosure. As I talked about with candidates running for office, every candidate has to report where they get their money and what they spend it on if they're running for a federal office, U.S. House, U.S. Senator present, or if they're running for a state office. And that is true in all states, as of, I think, 2015. North Dakota was the last state to require state candidates to actually disclose what they spend their money on to get elected. Independent spending, as I talked about, if you make an expenditure on an ad to support or oppose a candidate, that is almost always required to be reported if it is expressly advocating for or against that candidate's election. This has some loopholes in it. About half of the states don't require you to report what you're spending your money on if the ad does not expressly advocate for against a candidate for election. And so what we think about here are those ads that have a black and white picture of the candidate, a bunch of lightning in the background, and some language about the candidate being terrible on some issue and that runs right before an election, which is obviously electioneering, but is only required to be reported in about half of the states. It is also required to be reported at the federal level. This is also where dark money really comes in. So independent spending is what we're talking about, typically with dark money. And what happened with the Citizens United decision in 2010 was that a nonprofit corporation called Citizens United ran an ad to oppose Hillary Clinton for president. And it was actually kind of a long form video kind of a thing. But what's important here is that the federal campaign finance restrictions prohibited corporations, including nonprofit corporations, from engaging in independent expenditures in this way from funding them through their treasuries. What you would have to do if you were a corporation or any other kind of an organization is form a political action committee and then have that political action committee be funded exclusively by individuals, giving money from their own personal accounts to that political action committee and that political action committee could run those ads or individuals could do it directly. And that's been true everywhere in the country at the federal level and the state level for forever. The Citizens United ruling specifically allowed corporations and unions to fund those kinds of expenditures with their treasuries. At the time that it passed, about half of the states had regulations prohibiting corporations and unions from spending their money directly on these independent expenditure ads for state campaigns, and about half did not. So it only affected about half of the states. Montana was the only real holdout. Otherwise, all of the states immediately stopped enforcing their laws after the Citizens United decision and Montana did about a year later. The issue with dark money piece here is that it has now become routine for nonprofit corporations to get engaged in this kind of activity and they don't have to disclose who their donors are. I want to clarify when many people think of nonprofit corporations, they think specifically a 501c3 nonprofit corporations, which are charities, they're the kinds of corporations that you can give a donation to and it's a tax write off kind of a thing. Those organizations are not engaging in this way. Open Secrets is one of them and what we're talking about here are other kinds of nonprofit corporations. Most commonly 501c4 corporations and this just refers to the paragraph in the tax code. These are social welfare groups that advocate for various issues. On lobbying, oh go ahead. I was just going to mention someone in the chat did ask what is required to be reported in those disclosures. I'm not sure if you're going to mention that before you're at the end of this slide, but that's a good question. It is. So if you're reporting contributions as a candidate then you're reporting the name of the donor and typically also the street address of the donor in the city and state and in most jurisdictions some kind of employment information, what their occupation is and very commonly who their employer is if they're an individual. For independent spending, what kind of disclosures we're talking about are how much money you spent as a group or a company or whatever on the ad, who you paid. So who that media firm is or the USPS or whoever it was and of course the date and usually the candidate that you're supporting or opposing and whether or not you're supporting or opposing that candidate. And this allows us then to look at how much money is actually being spent on a race. The disclosure piece around lobbying has to do with corporations or unions or other organizations that are trying to directly impact the political outcome in the legislative session and they will pay firms or lobbyists to represent them and this is compensation or salaries and then those firms or lobbyists will also pay for things like luncheons or other events and that sort of thing. Almost all of the money spent on lobbying is paid in that salary component paying the firm or paying the lobbyist to represent you and the more successful or powerful a firm or a lobbyist is or is perceived to be the more money they can charge to represent clients and in practice the money that is spent in that compensation component is between 70 and 90 percent of the money that an organization will spend on lobbying. About half of the states don't require that compensation to be reported and this slide show will be shared with attendees of this webinar after the webinar and there are some links that you'll see at the bottom here and that will take you to nice breakdowns of some of these disclosure requirements. As far as limits what we're talking here primarily are contribution limits and so limits on how much you can give directly to a candidate or a political committee in many cases. There are a couple of pieces about free speech regulations and jurisprudence around all this politicking that we're talking about. There is very strict scrutiny applied to the idea that you can't give as much of a message as you'd like to through limits so limits don't typically apply to things that are expenditures from a campaign. A campaign can spend as much money on television ads as it would like to for example that would be a direct limit on its speech but the limit on how much you can give to that campaign because part of the political speech that you're doing in that action is associating yourself with that candidate or that committee and that can be done with a limit on there. It doesn't stand up to as strong of a scrutiny and so limits are permissible to campaign contributions although again not applied everywhere. Independent expenditures because their expenditures are not subject to any kind of a limitation so these corporations and unions and any other organizations that would like to get involved in that activity can do so at their leisure and as much as they'd like and similarly the amount of money spent on lobbying is not ever subject to any kind of a limitation. Contributions to candidates are limited in most jurisdictions because of the aspect of corruption or the appearance of corruption. Independent expenditures as part of the Citizens United ruling were described by the Supreme Court as not causing corruption or the appearance of corruption because ostensibly those expenditures are not coordinated with the candidate or the candidates campaign. Contribution limits have specific impacts. They don't necessarily reduce the amount of money in elections although there is some data that suggests that they might in certain situations but it's not a really clear effect of it. What it does definitely do is change the contributor pool and sometimes it makes it so that candidates can raise money more effectively in comparison with their opponents. Specifically what I'm talking about here are the idea that when you get rid of contribution limits and we actually have a great example of this. Missouri got rid of contribution limits for their state campaigns in the mid-2000s and then re-implemented them in 2018. When they got rid of their contribution limits in the mid-2000s we saw the cost of state legislative races go up about 40% and what I mean by the cost is how much money legislative candidates were receiving. Contributors came in in a big way and in fact about 45% of the money raised by legislative candidates came from 50 individuals and this is just legislative candidates as a group. So about 50 people were basically running the legislative elections. That all went back to normal including the dollar amounts that the candidates are raising just in general as soon as the contribution limits were re-implemented. In addition in states without contribution limits or with high contribution limits we do find that candidates particularly if they're incumbents tend to have very strong financial advantages over their opponents. If you have low contribution limits that advantage largely goes away. I'm going to take a moment to click on this link. This is a great resource to be aware of. This is from the organization the Campaign Finance Institute which became a part of the National Institute on Money and Politics and is now a part of Open Secrets and this has a breakdown of what contribution limits are in each state and again this slide show will be shared after the presentation so you'll get this link as well. But you can get a look at states with small contribution limits for example versus those with larger ones or none. There's quite a few states on there with no limits at all. I'm kind of surprised by that. And they come and go so we had 12 for a while and Missouri didn't and this is actually a really interesting tool in that you can see the historic and so this goes back about 20 years. 2018 is the most recent update we've done to this. We just haven't gotten around to the 2021 yet but you can see for example Missouri dropping their limits in the mid-2000s there and then re-implementing it for 2018. Public funding is a really exciting area in Campaign Finance regulation right now. There are four kinds of public funding programs here. A couple of years ago I would have said there are three. The oldest models are the full grant and the partial grant. These are both cases where you just get money given to you by a state campaign finance agency in a set dollar amount. Excuse me. Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine have full public funding grants. What happens is as a candidate you raise some sort of set of donations that indicates that you're a legitimate candidate and that's defined in each state's law. Typically it's contributions from individuals in the amount of $5 or $10 from a certain number of individuals either in the state or in your district and then you turn that into the state campaign finance agency. The agency actually usually gets to keep that money and put it into the public funding pot but then they give you a grant to run for office. The arguments here are that it allows people who do not have very extensive social circles to raise money from to run for office because they can get funding to do that by raising the seed money and also that you take out the contributions from private sources. The reason that this is called a full grant is because once you sign up to do this and all of these are opt-in programs for each candidate you don't have to do it. But once you do sign up through that and you get that public grant you can no longer raise private money. You run your campaign exclusively on that public grant. Partial grant Minnesota is the only state that has one of these for legislative races. This is a very similar model but the grant is smaller and you are permitted to continue raising money from private sources with restrictions that are lower contribution limits and overall spending amounts for your campaign. The small donor match and voucher programs have seen a lot of action recently. The small donor match was done in New York City in the late 90s and has been evolving over the years and is also being adopted in many other places including New York State now and their upcoming election will be their first election of small donor matching funds but it's also been adopted in a couple of counties in Maryland and elsewhere in the country. What you have here are you can raise money from you opt-in again. Oftentimes you are subjected to overall spending limits for your campaign. The idea here is that you incentivize candidates to go through individual donors usually in their district in their city council district or something and raise money from small dollar donors. People that are giving $5 or $10 or $50 and then that donation gets matched if it meets the correct criteria. In New York City I think that match is currently nine to one and so you can raise $100. I think $100 still qualifies New York City and as a small donation and then the city will give you another $900 on top of that and what happens is the candidates then will campaign differently and this like other kinds of election reforms this kind of a campaign finance reform is meant to try to get candidates to be more representative of their constituencies. The voucher program is new in Seattle, new as of a few years ago. That is the first jurisdiction that I am aware of to adopt this kind of a program. The campaign finance agency sends out vouchers of $25 each and to register voters in the city and each voter gets four of those $25 vouchers and then they can give them to whatever candidate they like and then the candidate turns those vouchers in or four different candidates or however the voter wants to split that up and get the money from those vouchers. Those are the main regulations around campaign finance efforts to sort of cap outside donations to make candidates more representative of their constituencies and to make sure that we can see what's happening in the elections. What seems like on the public funding side there really aren't a lot of jurisdictions who are doing any sort of public funding based on this list you provided here. Yeah at the state level that's definitely true so we've got five basically right now those three with the full grants Minnesota with the partial grant and then New York state with their upcoming small donor match program although we haven't seen what that looks like yet in action because this will be the first election next year with that in place. Yeah I wonder if there you know more states or cities who are considering adding these types of features or even switching completely to publicly funded elections. Jurisdictions are not permitted to switch entirely to publicly funded elections but they do have to give the option for a candidate to campaign in the traditional way. However many local jurisdictions are considering moving to small donor matching funds or voucher programs. I don't have a comprehensive list because we don't collect local data comprehensively although we're doing a few places but that is absolutely where the movement is taking place primarily right now in public funding reform specifically and largely in campaign finance reforms this is where the momentum is is trying to get small donor representation. Right. So I want to talk a little bit about how different kinds of people and groups engage in campaigns and what the trends are and this can inform kind of what sorts of campaign finance reforms might be most appropriate in a given area. Individuals and organizational donors to campaigns behave very differently. Individuals will give money to candidates that they support just based on liking that candidate based on their policy. Maybe they have a personal relationship that sort of thing. Increasingly individuals are giving to candidates that do not represent them geographically and so we're seeing the nationalization of federal and state politics particularly through platforms like WinRed and ActBlue which are pass-through organizations that allow you to make contributions to candidates elsewhere in the country very easily online and so we're seeing that happening in increasing amounts. In 2020 we were seeing some record out-of-state contribution totals even from smaller donors in many states such as Iowa and just other places where there were high profile races happening at the state level. Yeah I have to say I know that you know on my own Facebook news feed and that sort of thing I probably got more ads from popular candidates outside of my state asking for donations than I did from candidates near where I lived and I think that's yeah just becoming more and more prevalent. If you click on those links to make that donation that donation usually does go through ActBlue for example if it's a Democratic candidate or increasingly WinRed which is a newer platform for the Republican candidates. Corporations specifically give a little bit differently. They don't tend to care unlike individuals who care quite a bit about making contributions to people that are of that individual's political party. Corporations tend not to care about the political party of a candidate. AT&T is the biggest contributor in our state level campaign finance data directly to campaigns. AT&T gives almost exactly 50 percent to Republican and Democratic candidates. They give about 95 percent of their money to incumbents and this is the typical model for a profit corporation or its political action committees. In some states by the way a group like AT&T or a corporation or a union can make contributions directly to candidates without forming a political action committee so it just comes from their treasury at the federal level and in about half of the states the corporations and unions although they can spend on those independent expenditures we talked about are prohibited from making contributions directly to candidates from their treasuries. They form a political action committee which is then funded by individuals associated with that company. Usually executives, board members, that sort of thing that are each giving a lot of money to the PAC and the PAC contributes in the interests of that corporation or union. Those interests almost ubiquitously just give across the aisle and give to incumbents. Incomendants are making policy, incumbents win about 95 percent of the time or so if they're running for reelection and so they will continue to make policy and the motivations for contributions from these interests are to be at the table when decisions are being made. Unions have a similar interest and they give in a similar way although they do lean more democratic in their contributions but often will make contributions to Republican office holders if it is necessary in the context of Republicans basically controlling the politics in the state. Once you're an incumbent you get to raise a lot of money. So this is a breakdown that we have on our Open Secrets website fundraising by incumbency status. So you can see here the average amount raised by federal incumbents in U.S. Senate races is $28 million plus. If you're challenging the incumbent you can expect to raise about $5 million so a very big difference there. This is true for U.S. House races. It is also true at the state level. This is a query on the Follow the Money website which I'll blow up here of contributions to candidates for state legislative office specifically gubernatorial candidates can really kind of throw patterns off and if particularly if they self-finance to a large degree. So we're looking at legislative candidates normalize the database and you can see again incumbents who are winners raised a lot of the money here $674 million out of $1.3 billion so about half and this is pretty normal. You'll also note that the losers who are trying to challenge them raising about a third of the money raise that money with more contributions. If you divide the dollar amount by the number of records here you're noticing that the average contribution to these incumbents is higher per transaction and that is largely because they're raising more money from institutional donors corporations unions political action committees and that sort of thing. Typically when a candidate runs for office for the first time they will raise money largely from individuals and then once they win the contributions begin coming in from the political action committees and other institutional donors almost right away. That's interesting because you know at CES we talk a lot about our voting methods and the way that only being able to choose one candidate on your ballot limits what we can say and it also really puts a disadvantage on third parties independence just you know new candidates who come in with fresh ideas right and so then we can see how on top of that the the political spending and the way that our our elections are funded just even further disadvantages those those people who are trying to come in with with new ideas and their the status quo right is is what's what's being all the all the money is being brought into. That's absolutely true in particular with contributions to campaigns and oftentimes with the money spent on lobbying much of the money spent on lobbying won't be spent to support a change in policy but to ensure that people who are trying to reform a policy such as perhaps prohibiting fracking or something like that will not be successful. The money will just be there to make sure that the status quo stays. Independent expenditures are a little different. They are typically made by non-profit corporations frankly at this point although it used to be a little bit more of for-profit corporations and unions getting directly involved. It's hard for us to see who is funding the non-profit corporations because again they don't have to disclose their donors publicly although they do to the IRS which has a habit of keeping tax information secret. Most campaign finance agencies don't require a meaningful disclosure of funders of non-profit corporations and those that do try to get those non-profit corporations to disclose their funders often get thwarted by people engaging in the practice of creating a shell game where the non-profit corporation will receive money from another non-profit corporation and then make an expenditure and so when they report a donor it's just another opaque name like Americans for America or something like that. Where we have been able to see where that funding is coming from though it looks like it is largely from wealthy individuals and also from to a lesser extent from trade associations like Chamber of Commerce or retailers or realtors or from unions but largely wealthy individuals are funding this outside spending from what we can tell. That kind of spending has then motivations behind it that individuals have with their campaign contributions as well. These will be used to support a specific candidate oftentimes and we see this a lot with candidate specific super PACs at the federal level where you just have a super PAC that pops up and supports a candidate throughout the campaign and the independent expenditures aren't used in quite the same way as contributions. Contributions are made kind of across the board. Independent expenditures particularly when you get into the state level do not tend to target every candidate that's up for election. They tend to target candidates that have made a very high-profile vote so for example in the Colorado State Senate a few years ago after the Aurora shooting there there was a bill in the Senate to restrict gun access a couple of senators voted for it and the NRI came in with a lot of independent expenditures to recall those senators and was successful in doing that. The other way that independent spending is used is to try to target very specific races that are very competitive particularly if you have a competitive legislative chamber so if you if you can flip a Senate or protect your slim majority in a Senate then independent expenditures will rise very high. One of the questions that we get a lot is whether elections are getting more expensive and the answer a short answer is yes so this is a report that we published as the National Institute of Money and Politics and the Center for Responsive Politics before the merger excuse me before the merger. This was fundraising by federal candidates. These bars represent partisan fundraising in four-year different cycles so candidates in elections in 2020 and elections in 2016 and elections in 2012 for a comparable election cycle and you can see the 2020 fundraising was far and away above prior presidential election years for federal campaigns. For state campaigns it was a little less it's been a little less clear although the dollar amounts are going up. At the time that we wrote this we didn't have all the state data in yet so this was our projection for 2020. The actual amount came in around in here so still an increase but a smaller than this chart looks like. We didn't see the end of the election year push that we often do probably because of a lack of fundraising events because of COVID but we are seeing the dollar amounts continue to go up. Where states have public funding programs we still see the dollar amounts tend to go up and so that doesn't really make that a static dollar amount even adjusted for inflation we still see increases there and part of that is that the states will increase the size of say their grants to try to keep up with what other candidates are raising so that candidates continue to opt into the public funding program. And do you all have theories or thoughts on why it's continuing to increase? Part of it is certainly a large part of it is certainly the engagement of small donors and what we're seeing here is increased polarization in the country which leads to stronger motivations for people to get engaged in the in the process and make contributions to candidates. Some of the candidates that have set record fundraising levels in Congress for example are AOC who has motivated people on the far left quite a bit. Marjorie Taylor Green has shattered some records for first quarter off your fundraising and obviously she's motivating a lot of people on the right and this is part of what's really driving that increase. And so it sounds like it's it's the these increases are coming more from the individual donors and not necessarily an increase in spending from the corporate donors or the PACs. Yeah so specifically with those increases what I'm talking about are the contributions to the candidates and that is true the individual donors seem to be causing that to go up quite a bit. Corporations and other really established interests tend to have kind of a budget that they that they have and then yeah they're going to stick with that. And they're also in jurisdictions with contribution limits they tend to give the limit if it isn't exorbitantly high. So for example at the federal level the limit is around it's adjusted for inflation I think this year it's 28 or $2,900 per election so once in the primary and then again in general and these interests will give that to the candidate and then they can't give more but they'll just give it to all the incumbents. Independent expenditures are a different story. Again they aren't subject to any kind of limitation and this is a breakdown of independent expenditures from outside groups so we're excluding party committees engaging this kind of activity at the federal level and you can see that this has been generally going up it is best when looking at a chart like this to visually compare four years apart. So 2012, 2016 and 2020 are comparable elections as our 10, 14 and 18 and so we're seeing a consistent increase here. If this is going to hold for 22 we can expect to see a bar kind of up around here for 2022 and that is absolutely driving up the costs a lot as you can see. Yeah I can't get over that the 2020 just how what an exponential increase that is there compared to the rest. There were two very big motivations for this. One was that we had a presidential contest that A was inspiring a lot of people to get involved because of the nature of the candidates and B we was perceived to be competitive as opposed to some of the presidential races where it hasn't been as competitive. This one was seen to be pretty competitive throughout the course of the election which spawned increasing amounts of spending as the election went on. Another reason that this went up is because the US Senate was perceived to be on the on the line so again a flippable chamber will cause substantial increases here. I do want to show at least one tool here to try to make some of this data meaningful for people who are doing advocacy on the ground and I'm going to step away from campaign finance reforms specifically but go into trying to work on an issue in your state legislature. I'm going to our follow the money.org website. This is the website from the National Institute on Money and Politics. This website will eventually go away and all of our information will be hosted on our Open Secrets website but we're still working on that and it is way off so I'm going to demonstrate this here. If I go to this menu in the upper left corner and then tools we can look at this power mapping tool. I'm just going to take a moment here to pull up California. I have to admit we're behind on some of the updates that we're doing for office holders for 2021 as part of the merger which as you can imagine is taking a lot of time for us so I'm going to go to 2020 to get comprehensive information here. What we're looking at is a power mapping chart that can be used to supplement power maps that groups are making to work on the issues that they work on. Right now we're looking at the x-axis of supporting or opposing a specific issue and the y-axis of how much decision making power the legislator or governor has in that issue. I'll talk a little bit more about that once we get this into a more readable kind of format here. What I'm going to do is instead of having all of the members of the legislature and the governor in this chart I'm going to limit this to a specific legislative committee and in this case I'm going to go with the house assembly the California assembly labor committee. Let me blow this up a little bit. So each one of these dots here now represents a member of this legislative committee and they are all on the zero point part of the x-axis because we haven't suggested that what issue might be supporting or opposing so we don't know yet. They're on the y-axis in different places because of things like chairing the committee or chairing a lot of committees or being on a lot of committees versus somebody who's probably a newer legislator doesn't have as much power in the legislature from what we can tell in our database. On this California assembly labor and employment committee perhaps this committee is considering a piece of legislation that would require union contractors to build certain things related to business construction or something. So we can grab our industries here and let's say that we've got this is our economic classifications of donors and so what we're going to be doing here is looking at how much money these legislators got the members of this committee from these different industries and so we can do things like this is a gradient of oppose or support on a piece of legislation. I'm going to suggest that the general business sector is opposed to this. They don't want to necessarily hire union contractors to build their buildings for them but then the general trade associations are very much in support of this legislation. I'll go down to labor sector and get more specific. We have a multi-tier classification system here so we can get into labor a little bit further and then let's go with general trade unions are very supportive of this piece of legislation and then we can update this and this is going to move these legislators based on where they get the money and so you can take a look at people who may be close to even on the money that they've received from these industries. You can click on the dot and see that money and why this person is where they are on the chart and you can even click into this and get into the data behind the money and see which specific contributors there were but I want to highlight this as a tool that we built specifically for advocates who may be working on an issue that is maybe before legislative committee to see where they might be able to sway somebody over to their side of an issue or shore up support for somebody who may be somebody that they need to talk to where the campaign finance might be able to highlight that for them among other reasons that a legislator may switch a vote on a piece of legislation. I'll send out Caitlin I'll send you links to a couple of other things that are trying to help us make the day to come to life too for people who are actually doing work but this is the kind of thing that we're trying to do with this campaign finance data in terms of getting even outside of elections and campaign finance specifically. Yeah this is fabulous I can see this being incredibly useful for advocates and yeah people trying to advance different issues and it's it's it would be interesting even just as a citizen if you know oh there's you know a specific bill coming up in my legislature I wonder how the folks on X committee might vote on that or where they're getting their money from you know um yeah that that is awesome. We had a fantastic I forget her name this was a few years ago now and we found that online there was a woman who was just a local advocate I believe who went before a committee in West Virginia which is where she lived that was considering an energy issue and it was related to to fracking in West Virginia I believe and she just went into the legislative hearing started reading all the donations from the industry to each of the legislators and was actually forcibly removed from the from the hearing but it was inspirational to see people get in there and get engaged. Yeah that's awesome. But with that I'll open up the Q&A if that works. Yep absolutely I have pulled the very various questions if anybody has additional questions feel free to go ahead and stick them in the chat this will probably be your last your last call I've got quite a few here um and we're already approaching the hour if if we need to go five or so minutes over would that be okay for you Pete? I'm available as long as you need me. Okay great um so T.E. Sumner asked um I think this was during the the disclosure uh part of the presentation they asked are there any restrictions by address or employment I think of the um you know the types of individuals or uh yeah the types of individuals who are donating to campaigns. Yeah so this is a great question it has to do with disclosure of of how the political process is being engaged versus privacy of the individual donors. There are a couple of states where you cannot actually get the addresses and a few states where you can't get the employment information of the donors. Wyoming is a state where all we get is the name of the person in the town. It makes it very difficult for us to tell who's actually finding elections in that state. Texas does require contributor addresses to be reported but they don't make them publicly available which kind of defeats the purpose from our end. And then there are other states that just don't have occupation employer information that is required to be reported although other states do require addresses to be reported and make them available publicly. The use for this information is that for example with us we will let me do a quick share again here we will use address information to be able to tell you who somebody gave to. So Steve this is our Montana governor I'm actually going to look at him in the context of being a contributor because he's made some campaign contributions but this is a page for him we have an ID number for him just as we do for any other person or group who is engaged in the political process it allows us to tie together all these different activities that he's involved in. So we can see the offices that he's run for which offices he's held which independent spending has targeted him contributions that he's made and he's made quite a few and we are able to tie this together because we know that Steve Bullock at this address or the series of addresses is Steve Bullock and so that's how we use the address information we actually don't share publicly ourselves to be honest with you but that is how we use the address information and then the employment information is helpful for us in terms of looking at industries of contributors and also for people who are engaged in campaign finance enforcement actions to make sure that say you're an employer isn't requiring employees to make political contributions you see changes in patterns when that happens got it so fascinating all of the things you can do with this data yeah um sass asked i i like this question how strong is the correlation between the winner of an election and the candidate who raised the most money in that race do you have data on that yeah um there is a um a strong correlation there uh the strongest correlation itself comes from uh i'm trying to pull up a chart if i can find it quickly here the strongest correlation comes from incumbency uh incumbency also um has a very strong correlation with raising the most money the this is me now being able to type and talk at the same time in the same way that's okay we will not judge you um certainly if you don't uh if you are not the um if you are not the incumbent and do not raise the most money your chances of winning an election are about five percent wow if uh if you're in an open race if you're challenging an incumbent it's even less the um it's just uh it's you can't win that way you have to have one of those advantages typically to win the election and typically uh if you don't have the incumbency advantage if you're in an open race and you're the top fundraiser uh you win i think it was around 72 of the time you will win with that monetary advantage in case there is no incumbent if there's an incumbent the incumbent wins about 95 percent of the time there's also a difference in where you get your money from um if you're running for the first time and you're getting in your money from a variety of sources particularly a variety of individuals or or if you actually get some institutional donors that helps you a lot of people will run for election the first time and finance their own campaigns people that sell finance tend not to do very well although there are some very notable exceptions yeah i mean i i can see why that would be the case because part of raising money means that you have to be talking to people right so you're you're getting the word out as you're asking folks to donate um the little known a little reported fact was that donald trump's 2016 election actually set the record for the most small donors to a presidential campaign the the media coverage is very much about how he was self financing which was true at the start but it was mostly in the form of loans to his campaign and then after the or late in the primary convention season small donors really started pouring in and he actually broke the 2008 obama record at the time and i believe biden broke his 16 record oh sure um all right then we've got a question from howard what is the difference between packs and super packs yeah so a super pack is a kind of a pack so when we're talking about a political action committee here we're talking about a political committee that is set up to receive contributions and then make contributions or expenditures to political recipients candidates and that sort of thing um a super pack is a colloquial term it doesn't actually have a legal definition but what it is at the fec for federal elections there is a regulatory label for it that is called an independent expenditure only committee that doesn't rule off the tongue that well so super packs is what's usually used these are packs that will not make contributions directly to candidates and a traditional political action committee will raise money and make contributions to candidates may also engage in some independent expenditure activity but how much money that pack can raise from any particular donor is limited because of contribution limits to candidates and when a political action committee makes contributions to candidates it itself is subject to contribution limits so that you don't have somebody giving huge amounts of money to candidates through a second committee like this super packs because they do not make contributions to candidates and are only engaged in making independent expenditures can raise as much money from any donor as they'd like and this was the result of a supreme court case i think it was a supreme court case may have been an appellate court case after citizens united as kind of a follow-up to that decision so in general i think you may have mentioned this earlier when you were talking about the different types of donors and different types of contributions but when you're talking about those independent expenditures we can think about the the various campaign ads that we see during election time that aren't actually from the candidates campaign they're from americans for america like you said earlier or something that's right so they can spend tons and tons of money advertising for a candidate without actually donating to that candidate's campaign yeah and there's a lot of money to be made right now if you're a campaign finance lawyer in what's coordination with the candidate is so definitely if you're writing a check to a candidate that's a contribution right if you're running the ad and not talking with the candidate at all ever about it or that or anybody associated with the campaign that's pretty independent of the campaign and not subject to any kind of a limit there's a lot of gray area though in how much communication you may or may not have with a candidate and at some point coordination becomes an in-kind contribution contribution something of value other than money and maybe subject to contribution limits but that line is difficult to really pin down and lawyers have a lot of fun with it yes sounds like a very blurry area for sure next we've got a question from frank who asks what would the disclose act do if it's enacted they say this is title four of the four other people act do you know about the disclose act um only very generally uh i i don't feel comfortable going into the details of the disclose act unfortunately that's okay it's it's always much better to to state when you're not sure of something than to get incorrect information so it has been reintroduced a few times too so or different kinds of versions of it so i get a little mixed up all right well frank you might have to do a little bit of digging on your own on google for that i'm not able to follow up with somebody else at our open secrets organization that has traditionally focused more on the federal campaign finance as well so katelyn i can follow up with you on on that too and and good answer sure that would be awesome actually um then bobby asked do you have any data to show how much money foreign individuals uh or corporations contribute to us election campaigns yeah so um the only so foreign individuals uh if you are foreign individuals and four corporations are ostensibly prohibited from making contributions to partisan political campaigns but defining a foreign corporation can be difficult um corporations maybe incorporated in different places or have different parts of them incorporated in different places individuals who are us citizens and living abroad are permitted to make contributions to the US political campaigns we don't have data on foreign individuals making contributions to campaigns again that is ostensibly prohibited although you could potentially do that through a dark money group and so getting involved in those independent expenditures because we can't see who the donors are could potentially include some foreign money we wouldn't be able to tell though um there are the open secrets website does have a foreign lobbying registration so this is a fair for an agent registration um database and so you can actually see who's involved in lobbying um and there'll be some some information there about those foreign groups that are trying to influence the policies good to know um all right we've got i've got four more questions here um from tyler to the extent that you can see based on anecdotes press ethics complaints or investigations how common is illegal campaign coordination between candidate campaigns and PACs controlled by unions or corporations so that that's kind of related to uh what we were just talking about with that fine line right um from the super PACs it is very rare that we see an actual settlement or successful litigation around the coordination issue and so the only answer that I can really give is that it um isn't common in the form of being found to be illegal so um it's difficult though to document conversations sometimes and the level of coordination can vary even from jurisdiction to jurisdiction was permitted so for example there are states where you might as a candidate choose to shoot some b-roll footage and put it out there for independent campaigns to use uh for independent expenditures and that sort of thing um or uh one of the things that can happen is that independent expenditure activities will take place and then the group will talk to the candidate about it uh like there's more where that came from or something uh and and or or it could even be a threat there was a great uh report out of the Moritz College of Law at the University of Ohio um a few years ago where they interviewed um former congresspeople uh this was uh they weren't identifying who they were so um there's that to note um but um some of the conversation there was that groups would come into the office and say we this is our independent expenditure budget but we're not you know we're not coordinating with you um about about that so it's it's a fine line and really blurry yeah yeah sounds like there are so many ways for there to be kind of loopholes and back room deals with with all of this right it's just it's hard to track um and the um that yeah the existence especially of the the so-called super PACs makes it especially difficult the um the name of that report if anybody's interested you can google it and actually get a copy of it is called the new soft money the new soft money i'm going to make a note of that real quick so that i can remember to include it um in the follow-up email the folks want to check it out okay um all right then we've got another question from sass who asks does opensecrets slash follow the money have any apis for accessing its data yeah absolutely um i'll shoot a quick screen share here um the actually i have a posted note here to learn more about our api through the open secrets website so i'm not that familiar with it yet um but uh on the follow the money website if i go to our data and apis uh this website has basically the ability to write sequel queries in it with through the interface rather than knowing sequel so you can ask the database essentially anything you might want to ask it and get an answer and the answer is something that you can export you can download data a table for example or you can stream data through an api and for those of you who may not know what an api is we're talking about an application program interface um this allows you to stream raw data from one one website to another it doesn't have to be a table although it can be uh i'm going to click on examples here uh and show a couple of my favorites uh w r a l is a public radio station north carolina that publishes a lot of online articles uh they are streaming our data through the follow the money api this is an article from 2015 when they announced that they started doing this uh and if they mention a sitting legislator such as at the time i'll speak or tim more you can mouse over that person's naming get their top five donors uh and so this is just streaming from the website it's awesome yeah it's really cool uh and there are others um i'll show just one more here from the Atlanta journal constitution um where they have put together an amazing tool in georgia about um legislative members with lots of information about who those members are you get to look at a bunch of uh this is almost creepy how many faces we see but just click on click on uh tyler paul smith here uh so this is information this is a bad example um oh i wonder if this one is broken here we go um steven tarvin uh so we got lots of information about his district and that sort of thing that they've put together over at the at the journal constitution and then here's their top however many donors you want to look at um awesome and sass says this is perfect thank you so knowing sass um they are probably going to get right on that and and start using one of your apis for something yeah absolutely reach out we've we work with people to kind of get them started uh the building the actual the api is kind of on the user um but we're happy to talk about like how how the data works how best to get what you need uh the most recent one i was working with i think was um the saint louis post gazette um they have a new api that streams our data that allows you to look for contributions to sitting office holders in in in missouri got it that's great um okay i've just got two more questions uh shane asked is there a consensus on the best public funding model um so open secrets i need to note only advocates for enhanced transparency so we advocate for more disclosure but we don't advocate for any other particular kinds of reforms including contribution those are public funding and what i mean here with this presentation is to talk about just kind of where the action is and what the effects are um that said there are experiments happening public funding is where experimentation is happening a lot right now with the small donor matching programs including variations on what constitutes a small donor do they have to be in your district versus outside what the match rate is one to one six to one nine to one and how that impacts how candidates actually go out and try to raise money and it isn't that the donor is going to write or not write a five dollar check to a candidate because they're going to get matched so much as the candidate is going to campaign differently and try to get the money from different places um the voucher program i think is being considered in other localities as well that one's from Seattle it will be interesting to see how these play out and there is academic research going on looking at demographic information about donors and how representative the donor pool is of the electorate for a candidate and with these different adoptions of programs we'll get to see how the specifics of each program sort of impacts what the outcome is yeah there's uh like you said there's lots of experimentation going on a lot of these reforms are still relatively new so we we have a lot more to learn um and the more states and jurisdictions that sign on to this the the better the data will be of course more data points yeah yeah um okay and i said i had two more questions someone just put another one that i think is interesting in in the chat so now we still have two more questions Andrea said i recently learned about a major city that implemented robust campaign finance reform as an unintended consequence it successfully removed economic barriers to run but increased vote splitting due to the larger candidate polls has open secret studied or reported on this unintended consequence i'm sorry and so does could you repeat that for me sure it's a long question so essentially she's asking um about campaign finance reform removing barriers for candidates to run but then because those barriers are removed um the larger you have a larger candidate pool that results in more vote splitting um so for anybody for you p or for anybody who is in the audience and doesn't know what vote splitting is it's essentially when you have lots of candidates multiple candidates who are who are kind of fighting over the same voter base so say you have five candidates who all have relatively similar platforms and so they're fighting over the same voter base and um what happens is that votes get split among all of those candidates and often you end up with a winner who has a fraction of a small fraction of the vote right not an overwhelming majority or even overwhelming plurality um and so she's just asking whether any of these kind of unintended election consequences have been studied at all by open secrets so we haven't studied those directly although we do log vote totals for candidates um at least for the state candidates that are coming from the fall of the money website and to some extent for the federal candidates coming from the center for response politics um and so it is possible to do that kind of a research but i i'm not familiar with it sure um however this is also where the kinds of election reforms that the organization works on or are coming in and impacting things yeah yeah absolutely and so i think you know most most folks are interested in getting campaign finance reform implemented because um they can see how it certain individuals or certain corporations can have an outsize influence on our elections right but at the same time like andrea pointed out it can cause other unintended consequences and so if we can implement something like approval voting on top of campaign finance reform that would be that would be a dream and in my in my world um all right so then jeff asks what happens if you discover that an election winner violated the campaign finance laws do you rerun the election uh so it is unusual but not unheard of for that to happen typically this takes the form of receiving contributions that exceed a contribution limit that actually happens pretty commonly and there are different remedies for it the reason it happens commonly is because a contributor may not be aware of or may not personally care about the contribution limit and make a contribution to a campaign that is above the limit the campaign will typically accept all contributions and then go through and review for those that exceed the limit and the first remedy for this is to return the excess part of the contribution which is common and that's typically what happens actually in our database we'll end up then with the returned transaction on the two so that we have a net total for that contributor and that puts the candidate or the committee into compliance that's usually where it ends we see candidates are watching each other's campaigns a lot and so these kinds of violations come up usually pretty quickly but there are cases where where that is where somebody has broken the law and people do get in trouble for that the president of the new york state senate went to jail for a while for campaign finance violations but it isn't particularly common if we see something in our database that looks suspicious the first thing that we do is verify the data so a did we get it right or did we get it wrong and then b has the candidate made an amendment to the report have they returned the excess contribution and reported that in a strange way that we couldn't find it in that sort of thing so that's our first step we don't we are not an enforcement organization right but we do put the data out there for everybody to see and so people will actually see that kind of stuff and bring it up okay and i do see uh sorry somebody just messaged me saying that they had oh there it is yep sorry latifah i i accidentally skipped over her question um so she asked do you have any stats on us citizens living abroad who donate to political campaigns here um yes i don't have any digested stats here but our database does include and publicly makes available the state of the so the state reported for the address of the contributor on that donation and the city and in the event that it's a foreign contribution or a contribution from a foreign location you will find something in there that isn't a state and so you'll see like Paris and then some indication that it's France or one of the military zones is going to be a common common address there right so it's possible to to look at that great okay i just it's a it's a small percentage but but i don't know exactly what it is yeah i would imagine that that's relatively rare especially compared to yeah the overall number of donations that are coming in um okay well there was one more final question this is this will be the last one and then we'll cut it off we're already about 15 minutes over i really appreciate your patience um but people are very interested in this subject so i'm glad to engage engage you and engage them um if open secrets focuses on disclosure of donors can you identify when a donor is not in the same jurisdiction of the candidate or where a measure is to be on the ballot specifically extra jurisdictional donations yep and so i'm just going to pull up a query here i'm just going to look at contributions to state campaigns in alaska in 2020 everything i'm doing here is actually something that can be done through the interface on the website but for time constraints here i'm just typing in the search here are contributions to candidates in alaska uh within state data so state candidates uh in the 2020 election and then we can look at contributions from in-state or out-of-state and so what this is doing is looking at whether or not the state on the transaction for the contributor address uh is ak and matches the state that the election is happening in and then there are a few transactions here where um we don't have any information about the state and so we don't know if it's in-state or out-of-state but for the most part we get a pretty good idea and this is a pretty typical kind of a breakdown um although there are cases where we will see a higher percentage of contributions coming from out-of-state and actually if we look at contributions to ballot measure campaigns we will even more frequently see uh contributions from out-of-state if the ballot measure is something like putting sugar labels on soft drinks or something like that um where corporate or union contributions are really coming in from like headquarters that makes a lot of sense um so many so many good tools on your website um and this was uh such good information thank you so much for being here pete i really really appreciate your time and your expertise um i know that you uh you sent me the slides so i'm going i'm going to include those uh in a follow-up email to everybody and then pete would you also be able to send me kind of a list of any of the other websites that you showed during during the presentation so i will take a look at those there are also some other organizations that are really helpful when looking at what's happening with campaign finance and elections um i'll give a shout out real quick to the campaign legal center which is a great resource of lawyers that is also a 501c3 charitable organization like we are that is working with the public um and typically with investigative journalists and the like to um around legal questions around campaign finance so i'll send a few of those as well awesome i'd like to note for people here with advocacy organizations that we often do um tutorials we'll walk a group through like how to use the website so um that's another kind of presentation we're available for if you'd like to reach out wonderful um and for all of you as well if you're whether you're new to uh learning about elections uh center for election science and approval voting or if you've been around a while you enjoyed this event um you know we're talking about campaign finance we're talking about donations we need money to fund our work as well so if this is something that you're really passionate about um i would definitely encourage you to check out our website and to potentially donate if if you're feeling passionate about it um and definitely take a look at the open secrets website and either tomorrow or friday i will send out an email with this recording the slides and all of the other resources that p provided um so thank you everyone uh for being here and thank you again pete it was uh fabulous having you thanks for having me and thanks everyone for coming this is this is great awesome thanks everybody have a wonderful day