 Good morning. Welcome to the New America Foundation for the folks who are here, the folks who are watching in our live stream and the folks on C-SPAN 2. Welcome to the first event of the political reform program at New America. I'm Mark Schmidt. I recently returned to New America to to get this program launched. It's not the first event or discussion we've had about political reform issues here, but it is the first in this in this series, and there'll be many more which I hope you will come to. Today, we're bringing people together to discuss a fabulous new book called Subsidizing Democracy by Michael G. Miller who's a professor at the University of Illinois, Springfield and what we're trying to do, the value of this book is that it's really the first book to look at what's really happening in some of the states, particularly Arizona that have had a robust public financing systems for some years now. At the national level, the conversation about money and politics has mostly been a conversation of despair. The numbers are huge. Outside money overwhelms the candidates and parties. The courts are unfriendly. Nothing seems to be happening in Congress, even on things like disclosure that we once thought there was a lot of consensus around. But in fact, over the last 15 years or so, we've had a significant amount of experimentation, mostly in the states, some localities, with systems of public financing that vary in significant ways. And given that experimentation, we're able to really begin to look at what works and what doesn't. Most of these systems, and this includes Arizona, Connecticut system of public financing, Maine, New York City's small donor matching system, Minnesota's tax credit system, which was turned off for a while and then turned on, which creates an interesting little experiment in what happens. Most of these systems have been generally upheld by the courts with one significant exception in Arizona and part of the Arizona law. They've been generally politically resilient, that is, they've withstood efforts to repeal them, and they've been generally popular with candidates. When I first got involved in some of these issues around the time that the Arizona law was beginning to bubble up, I was working on the Hill, and we tended to look at public financing as almost like a, you know, just like a black-and-white thing, and more public money would be good, less private money would be bad, you'd automatically have less corruption, fairer elections, things like that. Over time, you realize like a lot of things will happen in a system like that, and there's a lot that happens between the financing and the election and the legislation. What Michael's book does is begin to look at what goes on in the middle. What do different kind of candidates participate? Does voter participation increase or change in any significant way? Is the ideology of people who participate or don't participate any different? Or an interesting significant question that this book digs into is, have we created opportunities for people to gain the system or manipulate it in ways to their advantage? So I'm enthusiastic about Michael, launching some of that discussion, and then after he presents some important findings from the book, which really involved an in-depth study of candidates in Arizona, as well as all the other systems. We'll have comments on it from three people who actually have surprisingly different perspectives on this, although they share a basic sympathy to the idea. Michael Malbin, actually Spencer Overton is a professor of law at George Washington University School of Law here. From 2008 to 2010, he'll say the dates, I think 2009 to 2011, he was a principal deputy attorney general working on voting rights in the office of legal policy. He's the author of an article called The Participation Interest, which is one of the articles that's really most influenced my view of money and politics. Michael Malbin is the director of the Campaign Finance Institute and a professor at SUNY Albany, State University of New York at Albany, and a long time observer of all these reform traditions. He's the author, co-author of a wonderful paper called Reform in the Age of Network Campaigns, which, like The Participation Interest, kind of helped us think about some of these ideas in a new way. And finally, Matt Hines on the right, Dr. Matt Hines is a medical doctor. He is a former, more importantly, for our purposes. He is a two-term Arizona State Representative, was a minority whip in the Arizona Legislature. And we'll talk about really the experience of being a participant in the system and also running in an election where he didn't have the public financing as a candidate for, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in 2012. He's currently a director of provider outreach at the Department of Health and Human Services, and of course he is not speaking on behalf of the administration, but really from his own personal experiences. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Michael Miller. Thanks, Mark. And I just want to say thanks to the New America Foundation and the other panelists for joining us today. Mark's introduction was so good. I cut my presentation, I think, in half, but my orientation, the reason why I came to really be interested in this as policy and want to write the book from the perspective that I did is, in a former life, I was a consultant and strategist working on congressional campaigns and doing strategy and management. And we didn't always win, and when we would lose, the candidates would always say the same thing. Imagine what we could have done if only we'd had the money, right? And that stayed with me. When I went to graduate school and progressed through that part of my life, and you come to need to take on the big question, and that's a pretty big question, what would candidates do if they had more money? But to me, the jumping off point is really the understanding that these programs, more than just from the big questions that we tend to think of them at, the winning and the losing, the differential between incumbents and challengers, there's a real capacity here to change candidate behavior, change the way that they interact with the voters, and then by extension change the way that people in these systems, even if they don't know that publicly funded elections are a thing where they live, the orientation and participation of voters, I think, there's a great potential for it to be affected by the presence of public funding. So the goal of the book really is to expand the analysis. The political science had really looked at these kind of easy to measure questions. Are elections closer? Are incumbents winning? Do challengers have more money when they run? But I wanted to get a little bit more in-depth in the analysis and to focus on the candidates. So the book really looks at public funding through their eyes, and the way that I did that is I went to Arizona shortly following the 2006 legislative elections in January 2007, and I did on-ground interviews with candidates of all types, sitting legislators, primary losers across the state, and then fielded a survey during the 2008 legislative elections to candidates in 18 states. So importantly, this is not just Arizona. There are public funding systems of some stripe in place in almost half the states today if you take a very broad definition of public funding. So importantly, for the audience, I'm going to focus not on the matching funds programs. I know the panelists have done a lot of work there. I'm not going to talk about those, but I hope they will. I'm going to speak only about the subsidy programs that take a dollar from some account of the government and move it directly to a candidate's pocket. So importantly, there are to me two types of that program, what I'm calling in the book partial and full, and they're pretty self-explanatory. In the fully funded systems that in 2008 when I did the study, those were in place in Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine. And the programs effectively give candidates all of the money that they need to run a race. So for example, in Arizona, when Dr. Heinz ran, I believe the subsidy was just over $30,000 for the primary and general election. And when a candidate runs in that circumstance, you agree you're not going to raise any additional money beyond that. You're not going to spend beyond that spending cap and you're not going to put any of your own money additionally in. So you're locking out all private donors. And the viability threshold for a candidate for the Arizona House is $210, $5 donation. So once they can get 210 people to give them exactly $5, that's how they qualify for the subsidy. The partial programs in 2008 were in play in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Hawaii. Wisconsin has since suspended its program, but those programs only give you a percentage of the money that you need to run the race. So there might be a $30,000 spending limit, but we'll give you $10,000 to get you started and you have to raise the rest. Well, thinking about candidate behavior to me, that's a really important distinction. Because the fully funded programs effectively eliminate the necessity of raising money. And having worked in campaign offices and seen the effort that candidates have to expend to raise the amounts of money that they need, I thought the real element here that's important is not money, it's time. So the question is if you remove that fundraising item from the menu of activities that candidates have to do on a week-to-week basis, what will they do with that time that they regain? And so that's a really important question for understanding the way that politics will be waged. So I did a survey where I asked candidates what they did, and I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And I'm going to go through the findings of how accepting full and partial funding affected their time. So on a week-to-week basis, when we control for all the other things that could also affect this relationship, candidates in fully funded states but not partially funded states demonstrated significantly less time spent fundraising, about five hours per week. And it effectively goes from five hours to zero hours because they don't have to raise any money. The partially funded candidates, because they only got some of the money that they needed, still behave exactly like traditionally funded candidates. They're spending five to seven hours per week fundraising. So from that, if you have one group of candidates, the fully funded candidates, not raising money, what do they do with the time? They invest it 100% and then some back into what I call public interaction. Now that's broadly defined, and it's an effort to get a vote. We in political science have conceived, and Paul Herndon's work has conceived of politics as kind of existing in two spheres. You have the campaign for money and the campaign for votes. So I'm looking at public interaction at anything a candidate does to chase a vote, be it electronic campaigning, field canvassing, posting signs, meeting with interest groups, doing press interviews, etc. So if you take various definitions of public interaction, I get the same result, and that is about 12 percentage points of weekly time is fed back into interacting on a personal level with voters. When you translate that into weekly hours, it's five to six hours a week that fully funded candidates are spending talking with voters that they wouldn't have otherwise. And over the course that sounds like kind of a small number to a lot of people, but when you think about the typical legislative campaign in America existing from March to November and then five hours per week over that period of time, what we're talking about here is hundreds, certainly, and probably thousands of interactions between candidates and voters that would not have occurred otherwise. So the second question, if candidates are talking to voters, theoretically you think a couple of things might happen. If I have a candidate on my doorstep, I'm receiving as a voter information about that race. Maybe I had no idea who was running for the state house. I'm also raising salience about the race. Maybe I didn't know what the county auditor or the state legislative candidate, the state house does. So there's learning happening. And while I can't suss out the mechanism there, you would think theoretically that if there's more interaction between a candidate and a voter, there's probably going to be changes in voting behavior. So when we look at voting, we find some interesting effects as well. But what you have to do, I think, when you study public funding, particularly in state legislative elections, is throw out the tendency to look at turnout. Because I don't think theoretically that these things in state races are powerful enough to compel someone to get off their couch and drive to the polling place. Because if you think about all of you as voters, when was the last time you went in a presidential election, especially when was the last time you went charged up to vote for the state legislative candidate? We don't see that. So I think the correct dependent variable is roll off. So the question here is, what's the percentage of people who show up, vote for the president, and then stop voting? So they cast a vote up here on the ballot, but then don't cast a ballot for the races down below. And we see that in really high visibility presidential years, like 2008, when you had a lot of turnout coming in, people are knowledgeable about the presidential race, but not the races down below. Well, when they have a candidate on their doorstep, I find 2008 in Connecticut and 2000 in Maine, excuse me, when there's a publicly funded candidate running in their district, a roll off goes down by 20 to 30 percent. So another way to interpret that is of the people who went to vote in the presidential election years, about 30 percent more of them are voting when a publicly funded candidate runs. So summing up, the fully funded candidates are spending much more time directly interacting with the voting public. And in districts where at least one of those candidates is running, more people are registering a preference in voting in those races. Again, not turnout. The people who have already gone to vote are voting on more of their ballot. We're losing fewer of them. So there's more of this kind of interaction happening that many Americans, I think, see as a cornerstone of representative democracy and more people are voting. So those are fairly good in a normative sense things, I think, for most people. I also looked at what we call candidate quality, which is exactly what it sounds like. How good are these candidates? For most of America, when you have privately funded races, raising money is a really hard and awful thing to do. And if you're not a good candidate, if you don't have those attributes, maybe you haven't served in a lower, you've never been elected to an office before, you don't have the connections. What we see is the familiar story that Mark kind of alluded to in the introduction, challenging candidates become buried by incumbents who have all the advantages and resources. What I find in public funding is that these programs are effectively a factory for quality candidates. Because if you think about the social studies teacher who always wanted to run for the state house, but has never gone to party meetings, has never really made those funding connections, the marketplace in most of America might judge her as, you know, not a great candidate. Why should I invest in a candidate who doesn't have any experience? I can take my campaign, my donation, and give it to somebody who I think is going to win. What we find here with the publicly funded, with the full funding especially, is we diminish anxiety among candidates. We increase the feelings that they're feeling in control. They're less surprised about the rigors of raising money. And they emerge to take on safe incumbents. So you're seeing challengers coming out of the woodwork and saying things like, yeah, I knew I was going to lose this race, but this program gave me all the resources I needed to run a strong campaign and I wanted to give my neighbors the conversation. That's what this is all about. So it's completely altered strategic framework and that's kind of interesting to me. So the quality factory really changes the capacity of citizens to transition to candidates and in a strong way. So I'm happy to talk about that a little bit more in questions. So those are all, I think, fairly normatively good things, but it's not all good news from the states. I have a chapter in the book in which I talk about what I call partisan costs of participating. And the Republican candidates or conservative candidates, I'll use the terms interchangeably, but even if they're not always exactly the same thing, they report more political costs of participation, higher anxiety, more strategic concerns because sometimes if you run as a publicly funded Republican in a primary, your opponent will use that against you and say you're taking taxpayer money to run for campaigns. So what you see because of that cost dynamic is a much higher participation rate among Democrats. And if you look at how that plays out for incumbents of the legislature in the publicly funded states, Democrats are less likely to be met with a publicly funded challenge and therefore with a candidate who's got sufficient resources to mount a good challenge. So there is some concern in my mind that one of the practical results of these programs is to lead to Republican incumbents being a little more threatened than Democratic incumbents. Another finding that would not be as positive on public funding is I find a pervasive gaming of the matching funds systems as originally constructed. Now those have since been struck down by the United States Supreme Court in the free enterprise case. But candidates in the matching funds system, the way it was originally worked was if I ran as a publicly funded candidate against a traditionally funded one, every dollar my opponent spent above the threshold, I would get a check. We are locked in financial parity up till $100,000 or so. So what the traditionally funded candidates did in that circumstance is they would not spend money above the threshold and wait until the weekend before the election. So they'd make a bunch of contracts and wait until the Friday before the election and then all of a sudden they're up on TV with ads and mailers and walkers and so it was like a pop-up campaign. And so the publicly funded candidates in that situation would get the checks on Tuesday or Wednesday after the election. And so we found that it was really delaying the spending and pushing back political activity as well. So that's kind of the quick tour of the book and I'll be happy to take questions later and I'll wait comments. But I would just say in closing that the lesson here from a policy perspective is that we tend to approach these things with these conclusions or assumptions about American politics and democracy and I really think as we move forward and consider particularly the proposed public funding bill for Congress we ought to really think about how the incentives are going to change and how the activities and behavior and strategy and emotions of congressional candidates or any candidates would change and in turn how that altered behavior would affect voters as well. So I would turn it back over. Thank you very much Michael. I think we're going to go Michael Malben and Michael Sensor. So I want to add my thanks to Mark and to the New America Foundation for putting on this event. And I want to begin with my most important comment and that's this. This is a good book. It's a very good book. So anyone who's here who bothered to come out this morning to hear this event you should buy it. It's available outside afterwards and he'll sign it. So that's my big point. I wanted to say this up front because most of my comments today are going to sound critical and that's because I'm going to take what I've learned from the book and try to apply it to different situations. I'm doing this because I think public financing is important as an issue and also because no jurisdiction in the future is likely to pass a program that's exactly like the ones in Arizona, Maine and Connecticut. It's important to remember. Yes, the Supreme Court did overturn Arizona's trigger funds and by implication also Maine's and Connecticut's. That's the money that Michael described that gave extra money to candidates who were facing high spending opponents or independent expenditures. But at the same time the Supreme Court firmly and clearly upheld the constitutionality of voluntary public financing. Now the key word there is voluntary. No legislature, candidates who sign up for public funding to do it voluntarily and no legislature in the future is likely to adopt a program with rigid spending limits that leaves the candidate helpless against millionaire opponents and independent spending. So as a result advocates now are typically recommending different policies. In New York State and in all of the federal bills under serious consideration the sponsors have moved away from full public funding with spending limits and instead they use public financing as a floor and then they use matching funds to give candidates an incentive to raise money from small donors. So when I read the book I'm not looking just for a static analysis of one system. I'm looking at the reasoning underneath. I'm looking at lessons for the future. For example for the reasoning underneath I was extremely impressed by the way Michael decided to work his way through the way laws structure incentives for candidates. That's not the way most political scientists have written about the subject in the past. I think it's the right way to go about it. But to explain what I've learned I'm going to spend most of my time on only one of the book's chapters. I'll be happy to in Q&A to talk about any of the others including this excellent chapter on voter engagement and participation that Michael summarized. But for now I want to focus on this issue of how candidates spend their time as a way to get at the question that concerns me. That chapter begins by saying that most candidates have too much to do and they don't have enough time to do it and that's clearly correct. So the question of the book is so what happens if you can free them up from fundraising which is an activity most candidates do not enjoy. To answer this as Michael said he asked the candidates in a number of states to fill out a time log in early October and from those logs he found that candidates who accept full public funding spend no time raising money and therefore spend a greater percentage of their time making direct contact with voters than did the traditionally funded candidates in the same states. Now that's not a surprise but it's important because most of us would prefer that candidates take time to communicate with constituents. Then the book went on to compare states with each other and it found that candidates in full public funding states as Michael said spend a higher percentage of their time in direct voter contact than candidates in states with no public funding or in partial public funding. And importantly for future policy he found almost no difference between states with partial public funding and no public funding. And that's where I want to focus my attention because I have serious reservations about the conclusion and about the method. So to explain the reservation I'm afraid I have to get into some weeds. To make sure he had enough cases to test statistical significance what Michael did, what he decided to do and I understand why is he decided he lumped together all of the full public funding states and the partial states and what he calls the traditional funded states and he analyzed them as groups. He pulled the data, he joined them up and that was the basis for the findings about full versus partial versus not. Now to get a little more deeply into the weeds if you look at the data before they were pulled and if you already have the book it's figure 3.1 on page 55 Michael gives us a bar chart which shows the results of each state individually. When you look at the bars carefully you see that the results are not quite so neat as the conclusion just presented. For example, publicly funded candidates in Arizona spend less time on field activities than the ones in Maine's or Connecticut the two other full public funding states that's not a problem by itself but it becomes a problem when you compare Arizona to the states that do not have clean elections. First let's compare Arizona to the three states with partial funding. All three of those states in the sample with partial funding, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Hawaii candidates spend a higher not a lower percentage of their direct voter contact than the fully funded candidates in Arizona. Now yes, if you quite count everything as campaign activity that if you don't do fundraising then you spend 100% of their time on the other stuff but Michael did emphasize direct voter contact. Even more surprisingly that fact was also true in six of the nine states with no public money. In six of the nine the candidates spent more time on direct voter contact percentage of time than in Arizona. Only three states out of a dozen came in lower than Arizona. So my conclusion from all this is that something more is because I don't dispute what happens when you group the three together that on average the three public funding states look the way they did. My conclusion is that something more is going on than the difference between full public funding partial and traditional. Publicly funded candidates in Maine had the highest percentage of voter contact time but traditionally funded candidates in Maine were second. The variation among states is far too wide for the book's explanation to be enough or satisfactory. The use of multiple regression analysis really doesn't help us to solve the problem because the data were pulled before the regression. So I took the time to go through these weeds because it's not just a technical issue. It has important policy implications. We have to figure out exactly what's driving these differences if you want to know the real impact of public financing or contribution limits or campaign finance or any other kind of campaign finance regulation. And this is going to be especially important for the future because future public funding will be partial. It turns out that the differences among the state's programs are far more nuanced than the big labels suggest. For example, if we look at the states with partial public funding Minnesota is quite different from Hawaii or Wisconsin. In both Hawaii and Wisconsin very little public money goes to candidates, the spending limits are unrealistically low and few candidates choose to participate. In Minnesota a much higher percentage of the money is public. Small contributions are supported by tax credits and these in turn can be seen as publicly supported money and a majority of Republican and Democratic candidates do participate. Partly as a result of these policies, Minnesota's candidates receive a higher percentage of their money from small donors than any other state in the country. 57% in 2010, which is the most recent year for which we have data. You also see striking results with New York City's 6 to 1 small donor matching fund system. In the recent 2013 elections participating city council candidates got more than 60% of their money from small donors or from the matching funds that small donors generate. In contrast the median state in 2010 received only 14% of their money from small donors. No other state was close to Minnesota or New York City. So why did this happen? Maybe it's because the rules in both Minnesota and New York drive the candidates to steer their fundraising toward low-dollar donors within the candidates' district. As a result campaigning and fundraising in those places, not in most places, but in those places they're of a piece. They're interwoven rather than being separate activities. When a candidate can make a pitch to potential donors about a rebate or matching funds, those pitches are taking place in a local living room or in a meeting hall, not in corporate board rooms and not in downtown law firms. In this respect small donor matching fund programs are different from others. In traditional fundraising, fundraising is separate from campaigning. In clean election states there is no fundraising. In Minnesota and New York City the two become intertwined. This is not like other public funding whether partial or full. It has a different dynamic. It has to be understood as such. So my big takeaway in these comments is this. We have to understand that the impact of programs vary quite a bit with the details. The details are not only about public funding but also about contribution limits and disclosure. Michael's book has added to what we know. It is a definite contribution. It has shown, for example, that publicly funded candidates in Arizona, Connecticut and Maine spend more of their time on direct voter contact than traditionally funded candidates in the same state. But it doesn't tell us as much as we need to know to differentiate among other states. With respect to public funds, Minnesota's and New York's models have been very successful and they're being looked at by other jurisdictions as models. Because of this we need to look at them more carefully. So in the spirit of a typical researcher, my bottom line is I like Michael's book, but there is much more to do. And comparative state research is what is most deeply needed because it's only by comparing states that you can get at what makes for effective and ineffective programs. Thank you very much, Michael. I'm just going to make one quick comment on what you just said reminded me of something that's stuck in my head since I heard Jenna Napolitano several years ago when she was still governor of Arizona speaking about the state system. They put a lot of value in those qualifying contributions and I remember her saying, the great thing for me is I used to go, when she ran for attorney general, she said I used to go to law firm boardrooms to raise money and then I would go out to the reservations and other places to look for a vote and now I can go to the same people I'm looking for for votes for money. That's a good standard to look at. Spencer. Thanks. So I would like to thank Mark Schmidt. Thanks so much for the opportunity to come out today. Professor Miller has written a very important book. I agree with Michael about that. I'm a law professor, not a political scientist and lawyers including US Supreme Court justices. We often make unfounded assumptions about how politics works, right? But the facts, the facts are important and that's something that's important about this book. We would assume that public financing requires that candidates spend less time fundraising. We might assume that Republican candidates might be more averse to accepting public money. But this book shows facts there. Many of us have faced the question of whether or not public financing increases turnout. Professor Miller makes the more penetrating observation that with public financing, voters are more likely to vote in down-ballot races. Important contributions. I also like the fact that Professor Miller focuses on state reform too often, especially those of us who are in the Washington, D.C. area. This focus too much on federal reform and their cutting edge organizations like public campaign, like Demos, like Common Cause, that focus on state reforms in addition to federal reforms and that state action is quite important. So now, as a good objective political scientist, Professor Miller focuses deeply on data. As I've said, he acknowledges that the goals of different public financing programs vary. Now, because I'm a lawyer, I can't really speak about data or facts, right? So I want to talk about my opinions. I'm going to dress them up and call them values, right? But I'm going to focus on these values here. Public financing should no longer aim to purge all money from politics. That's kind of my value proposition statement. Instead, it should encourage as many private citizens from varied economic backgrounds to participate in the financing of politics. Conventional reformers suggest that, ah, there's too much money in politics, but they're wrong. The real problem is that money comes from too few people. While 64% of eligible Americans voted in the November 2008 election, only 10% typically give to political campaigns. And less than one half of 1% is responsible for the bulk of money that we see in campaigns. So just like we encourage all citizens to vote, a key goal of public financing should be to encourage all citizens to participate, to make a financial contribution to a political candidate of his or her choice. Unfortunately, conventional campaign reform, public financing, sometimes suppresses political participation. Had Barack Obama, for example, participated in general public financing, as campaign would not have been able to collect for the general election even a single $5 contribution from a contributor, right? He would not have attracted an unprecedented number, millions of small donors, and perhaps more important, President Obama would have likely sacrificed thousands of volunteer organizers who engaged in voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, and phone banking. That's because, as Michael Malbin has shown in his work, that, you know, donating even small amounts creates a bond to a movement, and that leads to other forms of grassroots engagement in terms of volunteering, voting, et cetera. One of the most promising tools for expanding participation is using public funds to match political contributions. That was mentioned a little bit before, but the idea in a nutshell is that public financing programs should no longer attempt to equalize money between candidates by giving each candidate the same amount for a flat grant. Instead, public financing should facilitate participation by donors by giving a six-to-one match on the first $200 of a contribution. So, for example, that makes a $200 contribution by an individual worth $1,400 to a candidate. Now, multiple matching funds, it reflects a philosophical shift about the role of money in politics. As David Donnelly has written, reformers need to spend less energy on getting big money out of campaigns and more on getting the people back into those very same campaigns. Multiple matching funds address the core challenge to political participation. That's lack of income. Income is a barrier to participation. For example, in 2004, individuals with family incomes over $100,000, you know, they represented only 11% of the population. They made up a slightly higher percentage, 15% of those who voted, right? And in terms of the amount of money that they gave, they gave well over 70% of the money that was used for campaigns. So, average folks are not participating, and we want average folks to participate in campaigns. Multiple matching funds make candidates more willing to engage more Americans and expand participation. For example, another study from Michael Melvin. I'm a law professor, if I didn't mention it. I'm not a political scientist like Michael, so I've got to use his numbers. In New York state, candidates collect only 7% of their money from contributors who give $250 or less. So that's for state candidates, right? New York state. There's no match in New York state in the state, but on the city level, New York city, where there is a match, these candidates, as Michael has talked about, collect over 60% of their money from people who give $250 or less. And that's because candidates target these higher-income Americans because it's just easier to raise money, right? Candidates says, why should I call 10 people and ask for $100 for each of them when I can make one call and get $1,000? And studies show that people who are asked are more likely to give. So we shouldn't be surprised that since higher-income people are more likely to be asked by candidates, they're more likely to give. Now, let me turn away from the differences in terms of public financing here to critics of public financing, right? Some critics argue, hey, private markets alone should finance politics. I disagree with that. I disagree because providing the basic framework for citizen participation, that's a proper function of government. So for example, the state provides a platform for people to participate through voter registration services, through accessible polling places, through ballots, through other tools. Multiple matching funds are no different. Multiple matching funds, they're not welfare for politicians as some have labeled conventional public financing. Instead, multiple matching funds, they allow more people to use money as a tool to hold public officials accountable. Those who insist that we have to rely on private money alone to finance politics, they elevate their mechanical aversion to government over a commitment to legitimately expand liberty to more people. These multiple matching funds, they make candidates less dependent on a small group of large donors and by doing so, they prevent corruption in the appearance of corruption. They can also avoid significant problems with traditional public financing, including wasting large subsidies on candidates with little public support. So summing it up, reformers, and they're already starting to do this. They should stop trying to purge money from politics and instead should use money as a tool to facilitate widespread participation in politics. Thank you. Neither a law professor nor a political scientist. Again, here on behalf of myself as a former candidate, thank you to the New America Foundation, for the invitation. I am a former candidate and a former legislator from Arizona and so I represent, I guess, a single data point. And I will disclose that I have not yet read the book, though I plan to. So I am just giving you a little bit of an example of what it's like to live through this type of a system and my experience is with that and I'll compare it a little bit to what I was planning for Congress, which was, in terms of fundraising, just awful. As every candidate will tell you. So out of residency, I moved to Tucson, Arizona, to attend my internal medicine residency program, excuse me, there, and throughout my medical career became somewhat frustrated with, in general, how we dealt with patients, the inefficiencies in medicine and various other things that prompted me as I was exiting my residency to try to make a change and not really knowing much at all about politics. We'd had the representative, Jim Colby, who was in what is now Congressional District 2 in Southeast Arizona, retired and that caused quite a cascade, including State Senator then, State Senator Gabrielle Giffords, who stepped down from her Senate post, caused a variety of cascades and freed up a State House seat. So I actually, I literally walked into the Democratic Party headquarters not knowing a thing and announced, hello, I'm Matt Hines and I'm here to run for Congress. And they just looked at me and said, who are you and why are you here? And I was in scrubs, I hadn't shaved even more so than now. That was my first real interaction with this whole system that I didn't understand in any way. Now eventually, I was able to get some guidance from a State Senator who's a dear friend of mine who sat down with me and just discussed how this works and he suggested, if you want to do this, by the way, being a Democrat in the State Legislature in Arizona is not necessarily a very rewarding experience only because of the fact that it's, I don't think it's two to one now because the years I served there it was literally more than two to one majority Republican. So he just explained you tend to lose every vote and we do work real hard but you need to make sure this is going to work with your career, family and you need some money to do this. I recommend you look at the clean election system and of course I had no idea what that was and as you've heard described by Michael it works really, really well. You get five bucks from you want to get about 250 of the contributions to make sure you have enough valid ones and you do it going door to door and that is something that was really for me very personally rewarding and I can tell you that it was basically all that I did was voter contact. I went door to door and as a newly minted doctor going door to door asking for five dollars, a little odd but I got to teach people about what this program was what it did how it empowered them and how it got some of the excess money out of the system and I got 250 contributions going door to door and then continued that. My volunteers, myself I think I went to over 5,000 homes personally. That's hard to do and I did that in about seven months and I literally spoke to over 2,000 people on their doorsteps and that is the kind of and I really that's the most rewarding thing that I think that I was able to do during the campaign and that's how I actually did defeat an incumbent. The way the house elections work the two top vote getters in the primary are the ones that go on to the general in my district which was majority minority, Democrats typically win but an incumbent that had been there for three terms who was very comfortable and did not choose to do much in the way of field work, not much in the way of going door to door who also didn't qualify for his clean elections contributions either was defeated by two clean election candidates, myself included. So it definitely worked and it certainly in this case was able to help a candidate like me with absolutely no connection whatsoever to a network, to politics as a resident you're kind of an indentured servant you are in the hospital and in this case the VA also a couple of other hospitals in Arizona there and you don't really come out to see the light very often so it was something that was able to help me get into the system and I did not win in 2006 actually I kind of skipped over that I tried and I did well but then I ran again also as a clean candidate in 2008 and I did win and that was the election I was talking about where I defeated an incumbent. So really I have to say my experience has been a very positive one with the system. I chose to run in 2010 using more traditional funding at that point for a variety of reasons but that still wasn't a huge focus for me because I was an unchallenged incumbent but then moving to 2012 where I briefly was in a Democratic congressional primary against my friend Ron Barber who wasn't initially going to run by the way that was a very very different experience and one that maybe someday I'll repeat but I kind of doubt it and principally because the entire time I was in a windowless room on the phone trying to beat money out of people and it was the most frustrating I mean I don't know how I didn't burn through more staff because it was very very frustrating and I don't think I knocked on a single door not one so I went from over 5000 personal knocks on doors in 2008 to zero because I was in a room calling and asking for money to run this campaign and that was for me that was really miserable because what I got from going door to door and talking to people face to face was a real idea about what they were facing in their world I could see their house, I could see their kids I could assess all sorts of things a lot of them asked me for medical advice actually which I gave with a caveat so yeah see your doctor but yeah it's definitely a problem so you know that's something I really missed and that's something that I credit the clean election system in Arizona with really allowing me to do and just to give you a bit of an idea how it works on the ground because it's been there for so long every election cycle a very large recycled paper book comes out to all the voters and everybody expects it now it is the clean election candidate book and you're listed in there whether you're a clean elections candidate or not you're listed as traditional or clean you can put in a paragraph about yourself you get a picture you can put your website and some other phone number for your campaign and that book has become kind of a mainstay of campaigning in Arizona and people are expecting that and they get it every I guess every two years so it's really been and also there's a debate series as well the clean election system in Arizona as the clean candidates come together and have to do a forum so that's kind of how the system works there and I don't want to take too much more of your time but I do want to again thank all of the panelists and I look forward to I believe there's going to be some time for questions I look forward to answering any specific questions you might have of me thank you Michael do you want to say anything about respond to any of the comments or do you want to just go to the question and usually I have some things that I want to say but I see so many people in the audience that I specifically want to hear what their questions are so we'll just do that one quick comment I want to make I think sometimes we make especially when I hear Matt talk about that role of the going door to door for the $5 contributions we make a lot of the distinctions between these systems but sometimes they look a little more like each other than we sometimes think and that importance of the qualifying contributions in Arizona has always struck me as a really something that people I think didn't necessarily project but is very important let's go to the audience please say who you are if you have an organizational affiliation please say what it is I'm going to go to the one person I see who I know is from Arizona Jonathan Roush I was going to brag about that born and raised no kidding Arizona though Phoenix not Tucson a big rationale for these programs is of course to reduce the power of special interest and change the behavior of the way people actually vote after they're elected do you have any evidence on whether these clean money and matching arrangements change the behavior of politicians in office especially vis-a-vis interest groups yes and no on the question of you know is there a quid pro quo exchange you know for campaign dollars and comparing legislative behavior within Arizona or any other of the fully funded states I don't know that anyone has done that but there are two studies one of which I'm co-authoring with Seth Masket where we find that legislators who are elected using public funding in both Arizona and Maine appear to be more ideologically extreme relative to their party caucuses so I've heard anecdotally candidates in Arizona say well it's much easier now if you eliminate the campaign finance marketplace because it used to be to get elected you would have to be kind of moderate right you would have to go door to door or make the calls and no one would give you money if you were nuts but now again anecdotally what I hear is it's very easy to get elected if you're just picking a side if you're more conservative than the typical Arizona legislator maybe you can go to your church on Sunday and pass the offering played around with your $5 qualifying petition in it and in one day you're qualified there is none of that market vetting going on so that was kind of the theoretical reason for wanting to know that but the evidence suggests that on both sides in both states that we've looked at clean funded legislators are to the right and left of their respective caucuses but that's all I've got as far as meat of the answer and I think it's important to distinguish that system from let's say a multiple match system so in other words that 250 friends who are either in the Sierra Club or the NRA or whatever you can get your contributions together your qualifying contributions together and get a big pot of money in a place like New York City or other places however you can continue to raise you don't just stop at the 250 close ideological friends you reach out to a broad group more money as a result of reaching out to a greater number of people so again I'm not a fact guy right an empirical guy but it is more likely that you'd have a broad spectrum of contributors Michael I know you've done some work I want to respond both to John and to Michael with respect to policy it's very hard to do the research in a quantitative way but we know that the main documentable influence of large contributor networks on office holders comes at the agenda setting stage of the process not on final roll call votes that's why it's hard to do the research we have tons of example evidence of bills being specially kept off not passed it's most especially in a negative power of stopping a bill from moving forward but also in amendments to create special breaks for people I don't think there's much doubt that this happens the question is can you document that it doesn't happen in a clean election state I haven't done that work but I do know that a traditionally funded state especially working through party leaders the agenda setting stage is quite important second on the question of whether clean elections produces more extreme office holders this time I won't get in the weeds we can have a private conversation later I just want to say that I strongly disagree with the paper that is the unpublished article I have a different interpretation of their data and I find words like extremists to be tendentious misleading but it's the data that I think we will have this conversation when you move away from the clean election states there have been statements out there that systems that favor small donors are more polarizing and they'll have a more polarizing effect on politics the campaign finance institute research says that's not true we've looked at whether small donors are more polarized than large donors and the answer is no there's no evidence for it and we've looked at whether the candidates to whom small donors give are more polarized than other candidates and again with one or two clear exceptions the answer is no in terms of both candidates and donors there's really not much difference with the one difference that small donors don't lobby and that is a significant difference so if I may just really quickly this is again anecdotal but I served with I guess 89 legislators and on one specific policy point in 2012 I believe it was 2012 there was a significant reform proposed to the clean election system and with some provisions that would have caused some limitations to change it more I believe it was going to make it more like the New York system to a certain effect and what you saw was some of the folks that I would describe as perhaps ideologically non viable without a public funding system it was very interesting to see the coalition of folks who came together to defend the existing clean election public funding system and it did include many folks on both sides it was largely Democrats but then it was a very interesting sub-section of the majority caucus that relied entirely upon the clean election system to get in there so that's again anecdotal but I do think it speaks to your point in the case of those in the majority that I was observing to be part of that coalition to defend the existing system I would say yes in Arizona again in my experience of course it's helpful to have bipartisan and cross ideological support for a this is a really important question I hope that after the paper with Seth Masquit comes out we could maybe get this out because I think it's really it's a vitally important question Maritah McGhee Hi Maritah McGhee with the campaign legal center one of the issues you guys have not addressed yet is the role of parties and I find this particularly interesting because when you talk to folks particularly on the Republican side many of their solutions to the current system it deals with strengthening the parties so one of the questions I have when you talk about looking at these matching systems whether the Arizona is what you think the appropriate role of the party should be and I would say on one argument that there are moderating influence the other argument my experience in Illinois might be that the parties are a corrupting influence so what role do you see the parties playing in these systems? Well as a fellow resident of Illinois I think you're spot on with your take that's a tough question I'm not a party scholar and I think there is some debate among political scientists on how we should interpret parties but I think the role of the party is when we talk to the party leaders particularly in the assembly they are looking in Arizona at clean elections as a recruitment tool so that you can go and fill out the seats where maybe no one would emerge to run to take on the incumbent who won with 68% last time so in a way they're seeing it not as we're going to win the seat but we're going to put out a full slate of candidates because a rising tide lifts all boats so that in my experience has been how the parties are working with public funding I'm not going to say that it's diminishing their strength I don't think that's true but I would actually be really interested to hear what Spencer and Michael think about the small donor matching programs and the role of parties in those I think it's important that we increase incentives for political actors candidates parties PACs to reach out to average Americans and ask more people and engage more people in a serious way I also think that I am a fan of public financing I think it's an appropriately entirely productive use of government funds but I also think strategically we need some insurance policy so that when politicians in the future balance budgets and cut public financing money we have other incentives to ensure actors well political actors will reach out not just to large contributors but to average Americans I think that one idea that was brought to my attention by Michael was the concept of allowing parties to spend more money on coordinated expenditures with candidates when that money comes from small donors or you could do the first $200 of any contribution that's one thing another idea that happens in Colorado is a small donor PAC where a small donor PAC collects a smaller amount from individuals average folks but then it can give a larger amount to candidates than a conventional PAC can so giving these political actors incentives to ask and engage and bring more people into the process I think are key now that doesn't deal with this underlying issue and I'll let Michael deal with that of matching programs and parties thanks for answering that ball I was going to start by saying I agree with Spencer that we want to encourage activity and not discourage activity one problem with the way the issue was sometimes debated and Meredith's phrasing of the question was a fair reflection of the way it's debated but you stated it with skepticism and that is we often hear political party used as if it means the same thing in all places clearly it does not a party in a strong speaker state with strong caucuses where the party carries the votes of the followers in his or her hip pocket that's very different from a state where power is more dispersed and the role of the party in raising money and so forth is different it's a very large question in general I think we don't one doesn't want to see the rules making it difficult or impossible for parties to work under supreme court rulings parties have the right to make unlimited independent expenditures something that has the label of party can become a vehicle for making unlimited contributions that are intended to benefit the candidate and if you are in one of the 38 states they have contribution limits or the federal level where there are contribution limits on candidates contribution limits on parties seems to be a necessary corollary if you want the contribution limits the candidates to mean anything some people in some states don't want them to mean anything and they behave that way so you can't answer Meredith's question in a short time but it's a really important question and it's a center of a lot of debates and I think the issue is too often romanticized briefly again anecdotally here I've seen actually the recruitment concept definitely in the democratic party within Arizona encouraging candidates to run which in some cases when you have such even though we have independent redistricting in the state of Arizona which has been there since 1992 I believe we still have quite a lot of lopsided majority districts either on Republican or Democratic side so we are able to the party is able to get candidates to challenge incumbents even though they may not have a very high chance of necessarily winning to at least engage that the people of that district in a discussion in discourse so that's a good thing I've also heard it also does have a lot of money if you're a challenged incumbent you're going to start working the district a little bit more you're going to pay more attention to people in the district as well but then from my own particular situation I became really by virtue of the public financing system of interest to the Democratic party so that is how I would kind of twist that a little bit the party didn't find me the Democratic party headquarters and presented myself awkwardly they were still very kind of they weren't quite sure about me they didn't know what that was about and they didn't really seem very interested in exploring that so I would say that it can definitely help them with recruitment though not necessarily in my case hi I'm going to ask a question that is in some ways an extension of the excellent question that Jonathan asked which is what happens in the actual course of governing right this conversation was a lot about campaigning almost nothing about governing a lot about politics nothing about policy I heard Spencer mention the word accountable one time so the hypothesis and actually I mean I think actually the evidence tends to support this about public funding is one you get better and more diverse candidates who are more representative of the population as a whole and two you get candidates who are spending more time listening and talking to actual voters as opposed to people who fund campaigns therefore you think that the people who are in office or more in touch with the general concerns of the populace at large so what happens you have these matching funds or some system in which you bring more people into the system and then when you have the two years of the legislative session that goes away so you have people who are new to legislating and maybe voters who have gotten involved and then there's nothing to support their participation through that two years so one hypothesis my contention is that what happens that all goes away and then you're left with this permanent class of lobbyists and special interests to help part time legislators do what the lobbyists and special interests want them to do so I guess my question is are there insights from public funding that we can take to actual lawmaking and should we be thinking more about the two years of governing as a complement to the public funding there are only three states with full public funding and some of the experts are in the room but one one has an impression but there have been no political science studies that look at this comprehensively that the lobbyists simply do not set the agenda as much in Hartford as they used to I can't speak about Arizona and Maine is just a different place New York City is different you're not going far away you're a subway ride from the legislative hall and you live in your neighborhood so this varies by place but one of the mechanisms that lobbyists use to help control the agenda is not there now you have an hypothesis I have an hypothesis we both have the tools to do the testing but we'll acknowledge that nobody's really done it in a systematic way and let me just talk about values and norms I think there is this traditional reformer notion of a trustee civic republican notion of government where we want to free legislators from kind of private interests they're going to operate using their best judgment as trustees I have a healthy skepticism of that vision of democracy I would agree that over the course of a legislative cycle we want legislators to be accountable to citizens not just lobbyists or a small group but a broad and diverse group of people and so just as a normative matter for me that's one of the reasons that a multiple match is more attractive than a direct grant and I understand there's some connection to citizens in the sense that you have to you know get 200 or 250 qualifying contributions but the movement of public financing toward a more kind of accountable diverse group that's over a legislative cycle or over a significant period of time I think that's a good thing from a democratic value standpoint sorry go ahead I had a professor in grad school who also was a professor that Michael had in grad school we used to say that government is born of the cold smoke of elections and so thinking about these two kinds of systems that we've been talking about if you believe that Dr. Hines as he said I could assess the condition of the people that lived in my district I think that bodes well for representation if more of that is happening if you believe that more of that is happening in the fully funded systems I think you're going at least in a place where you can say there's evidence preliminary evidence to think that that might be the case but again we don't know all we have is a hypothesis I do agree though that the small donor match programs appear to be very effective Michael's got a very nice paper that suggests that the donor pool looks a lot more like the voting pool in these systems and I think they're very promising in that regard and so by merging the campaigning and the fundraising elements into one you're also getting that out of these systems as well so I think both points are correct going slightly tangential, forgive me but as having been in a legislature where we have four term limits in place that to me more than anything else is what empowers lobbyists and empowers appointed hired members of the staff and I could observe this because every two years between 30 actually between 40 and sometimes 50 percent of the Arizona legislature is new every two years and so the people that have the power the people that literally write the bills and bring them to us and well not me as a member of the Democratic Party so much but sometimes but mostly to the majority to the speaker to the president's office because those are the lobbyists that have been there for 30, 20, 30 years and I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing but what I'm saying is in my direct experience that is what limited more than anything else the ability of legislators to I think most faithfully represent their constituencies because they didn't know what they were doing we're trying to figure out where the bathrooms are and there's always 40 percent of the legislature that doesn't know where the bathroom on the third floor is because they're new and so what you have is in this craziness everything's new and different you have lobbyists and you have when you're not quite sure if you should be trusting that lobbyist or not then we'll ask the chief of staff who's been there for 22 years so and I that's probably a good thing too but the chief of staff is not elected and neither are your legislative council lawyers right so those people don't have to go door to door and ask the voters for anything at all and so that is what really I know it's not directly the topic of this panel but term limits is what seems to have much more impact as far as I can tell I'm going to step out of the role of moderator for a second because nobody else has to actually kind of endorse the point you were making because I think it's it really reminds me of an article I just read recently by Heather Gurkin from Yale Law School which I think the title of it is Lobbying as the new campaign finance reform he's basically arguing that because the people who have the capacity to lobby are so limited we could think about some lessons that come from public financing for how to build that information capacity for lawmakers in a broader way and that could come from things modeled on a small donor financing system that actually help smaller, help ordinary citizens get their voices heard in a legislature or just lead more analogous to a full public financing system which would be to create more centralized information resources and I think it's a really smart direction that she's laid out and I recommend that article which is probably on your mind Shannon Brownlee It's a non-profit based in Boston that's working on healthcare reform and let me give you a little bit of background for my question we're interested in promoting public deliberation around healthcare reform and health promotion so I'm wondering whether or not this small donor model increases civic engagement not just at the voting booth but also in people having conversations in their communities about what they want and how to get it and does it actually increase people's ability to affect legislation both so is it the conversation in the community and the legislation? Getting engaged in a campaign in a low cost way increases your civic knowledge which makes it easier to participate the next time around so you increase social capital political capital and that's a plus in the direction you're talking about Public deliberation requires enabling structure it doesn't happen by itself so it's a step to create a tool it's useful but not sufficient and whether a candidate does town halls whether a candidate encourages this whether the candidate uses this for deliberation as opposed to using it as a selling vehicle that's those are all possibilities but you don't move directly from one to another what you do get out of this small donor model is you've broken through the one really important hurdle which is to get the person engaged and to get the person who was potentially empowered to ask the person to be engaged again door to door that's where all those voter contacts occurred and I know from one year to the next I had a variety of legislative candidates running around the same district talking to the same people and those relationships really mean something but in these situations in which if a voter had given $5 to me then they would refuse to give it they get very protective of you because you have that bond so you definitely are stimulating that sort of civic engagement and then that can I believe go on to do other things and at the very least you're teaching them about all the different levels of government what your legislators are supposed to do getting folks that maybe would only typically vote in a presidential year or for the president or US senator or governor you're getting them and I'm like oh no that doctor guy came to my house he's down here somewhere and what's this oh wow judges maybe no one votes for judges we all know that but I'm kidding but I do think that I have no way to measure it but I do think that in my own experience I could see that I want to piggyback on this even though I've already spoken much about one of the important differences between the clean election model and the matching fund model most people are most willing to be engaged that is they know the most when you get close to election day and what the clean election model does is it gets you to give $5 before most people have even heard of the candidate it's strictly door to door and then it shuts off and the candidate does have to engage directly but doesn't have this lever, this vehicle so that's why most of the people who supported full clean election funding in summer in this room are now looking at hybrid models where you can continue the small donor fundraising up through election day as a way of getting people into the system David Donnelly, I see you back there and you were mentioned by name do you want to comment on that question? I did see I had I saw somebody, yes Hi, Kurt Walters with Public Campaign Action Fund I was really interested Professor Miller by your emphasis on roll off as opposed to turnout overall so just wanted to know if such a system could be in place at say the federal level so House and Senate elections do you think we might see a similar increase maybe since they're at the top of the ballot in overall turnout rates? I think so for me it was a well, yes, possibly so now I'm already walking that back I think my distinction in the book is merely theoretical because as I said in the presentation it's really hard for me to get to a place where I believe that's the race you care about that's the reason why you're going to go and vote is state legislature no offense Dr. Heim but I think people are really focused on the federal races as voters that's the reason that they're going there now if a publicly funded candidate is running for congress does that make you more likely to vote I'm not sure I'm not sure that my findings are going to translate to federal races and the reason for that is because most congressional races and certainly the presidential race and senate races are already pretty visible right so where are you going to affect voter education and salience it's going to be very marginal I think and so I'm not sure and others may have different thoughts but I'm not sure the more I think about it that we should expect higher turnout from public funding because particularly since the proposed programs you know are going to be the 6-1 match and we're still going to have fundraising and there's no reason necessarily to believe that congressional candidates would totally do it in the face-to-face way I'm not sure that we would see those effects and I think I really do think though that we should give up turnout as the thing that we all want to see effects in I would just note that I think that corruption and the appearance of corruption are important values and could be affected in especially congressional elections many of us have an idea that the presidency is what we think of when we think of politics and I think that that's just not the case because there's so many other political actors and there's not as much transparency because there's not as much media coverage and then also in terms of the presidency you're raising money from so many more people that a large contribution that's $35,000 even isn't as significant whereas if you're running for congress or you're running for state house or city council a big contribution is important and there's not the leverage to attract those large contributions because you don't have the celebrity that's not at play so I think that these other candidates are more susceptible, have to do more to raise money and are more vulnerable and I think that I personally believe that there are values other than preventing corruption that are important I think that preventing corruption is key especially with the supreme court and a multiple matching system can help prevent corruption especially at these lower level offices including US House I know we have to wrap up at 11 because there's another event coming up in this room Michael do you want to I meant this like I just want to thank everybody for coming out it was a lot of fun I really want to thank all our panelists great work