Hyperpartisan Campaign Finance

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Publication year: 2021
• Citation: Vol. 70 No. 5

Hyperpartisan Campaign Finance

Michael S. Kang

HYPERPARTISAN CAMPAIGN FINANCE

Michael S. Kang^*

Abstract

Hyperpartisanship dominates modern American politics and government, but today's politics are strikingly different from the preceding period of American history, a Cold War Era when bipartisanship and ideological moderation predominated. Hyperpartisanship was not the salient dynamic in American politics when campaign finance law began, and as a result, campaign finance law developed under strikingly different assumptions about American politics than the current prevailing circumstances. Today's campaign finance law, inherited from this preceding era, is thus mismatched to the campaign finance of today. Campaign finance law focuses on individual candidates as the central actors in fundraising and misses the role of parties in organizing the campaign finance landscape. It therefore both systematically underestimates the risk that parties pose in collectivizing the potential for campaign finance corruption and overestimates the First Amendment values promoted by modern campaign finance when the parties today focus so heavily on mobilizing their base and preaching to the choir.

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Introduction...........................................................................................1173

I. The Cold War Origin of Campaign Finance Law...................1176

A. A History of American Partisanship Through the Cold War .. 1176
B. The Birth of Campaign Finance Law ..................................... 1181

II. The Rise of Hyperpartisanship After the Cold War............1184
III. The Mismatch Between Campaign Finance Law and Modern Hyperpartisanship.......................................................1193

A. What Has Changed in Campaign Finance? ........................... 1193
B. The First Amendment Consequences of Hyperpartisanship ... 1197

Conclusion...............................................................................................1207

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Introduction

Hyperpartisanship dominates modern American politics and government.¹ American politicians and voters are more sharply divided along party lines in how they identify, vote, and think about politics than they have in more than a century. Today's politics, though, are strikingly different from the preceding period of American history, a Cold War Era when bipartisanship and ideological moderation dominated the scene. And today's campaign finance law, inherited from this preceding era, is poorly suited for today's new world of hyperpartisan campaign finance.

During the Cold War Era, American politics were not nearly so partisan, let alone hyperpartisan. The contemporary notion of "hyperpartisanship," which I adopt here, assumes something like the cold War baseline of bipartisanship as the norm, in line with the way that Americans born and raised during that era still understand its milder partisanship as historically regular.² Compared to today, the major parties were more centrist and not nearly so ideologically well-defined. Voters were less clearly divided along party lines and ideology. Voters who identified with one party voted nonetheless for candidates of the other party, routinely splitting their ballots on election day.³

Elite bipartisanship mirrored bipartisanship among voters. When Baker v. Carr⁴ was decided during the heart of the Cold War, the two major parties overlapped ideologically in the U.S. Senate to a shocking degree by today's standards. Republican and Democratic politicians regularly coalesced into bipartisan coalitions opposing bipartisan coalitions, particularly on civil rights and foreign policy.⁵ Almost a quarter of Republicans were more liberal than the most conservative Democrat, and almost a quarter of Democrats were more

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conservative than the most liberal Republican.⁶ The pressing questions of election law surrounded race and regional discrimination, not overweening partisanship and manipulation of election rules for party advantage. This Cold War bipartisanship was virtually unprecedented in American politics and strikingly different than today's conditions of hyperpartisanship.

Modern campaign finance law began, like all the rest of election law, during this Cold War period. Until the 1960s, federal courts abstained almost completely from "political" cases under versions of the political question doctrine. It was not until the one-person, one-vote cases, beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962, when federal courts began engaging with election law. The 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act further required courts to decide questions of state and local election law, and along with the one-person, one-vote cases, opened the door to broader judicial engagement with the right to vote under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Following the Watergate scandals, Congress enacted comprehensive campaign finance regulation that quickly required courts to develop the constitutional law of campaign finance under the First Amendment.⁷ All this election law development happened to occur when American politics featured the lowest levels of partisanship in American history.

Election law, including campaign finance law, therefore began and developed within a Cold War political context where the parties managed to cooperate, overlapped ideologically to a significant degree, and won elections by competing for undecided centrist voters in a way that has been nearly forgotten today. As a consequence, election law created during this Cold War window of bipartisanship never confronted or contemplated the intensity of partisanship that has reemerged today, nor the party politics and campaign finance that today's partisanship has spawned.

To overgeneralize only a bit, today's parties reflexively oppose each other, do not overlap ideologically at all, and focus on mobilizing their base (or demobilizing the other party's base) rather than winning over undecided centrists. Following the Cold War, the parties neatly sorted into ideologically cohesive teams of voters and politicians that remain doggedly loyal to their party, election after election, up and down the ballot. party affiliation has increased among voters since the Cold War, while partisanship increasingly dictates how people vote.⁸ The party switching and split-ticket voting that were

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relatively common during the Cold War largely disappeared, as voters stick with their party throughout their ballot and from year to year.⁹ Partisan animus also rose sharply, with roughly half of partisans today feeling "fearful" of the opposing party, and roughly a third feeling that the other side is "so misguided that [it] threaten[s] the nation's well-being."¹⁰ Voter partisanship again mirrors hyperpartisanship among politicians. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, for instance, are more polarized than they have been in more than a century.¹¹ The ideological overlap that characterized Congress at the time of Baker v. Carr is completely gone today.¹²

Campaign finance law is thus mismatched to the party politics of today, and therefore, the party campaign finance of today. Today's politics, and campaign finance, are far more party-centered than they were when the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)¹³ was enacted, comprehensively amended, and subsequently interpreted by courts. In addition, today's campaign finance spending tends toward base mobilization—preaching to and motivating the choir, rather than converting the undecided—far more than it did during the Cold War Era.¹⁴ Rather than tacking to the center and engaging each other for undecided voters, the parties today turn inward during campaign season and further polarize toward the ideological extremes far more than they once did. However, today's campaign finance law, borne of a less partisan, less party-centered era, still targets quid pro quo corruption between individual donor and particular candidate, while largely looking past the potential for collective corruption mediated through political parties that are now at the heart of national politics.¹⁵ I explore these developments here.

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In Part I, I briefly survey the history of American partisanship from the intensity of the nineteenth century through its Cold War recession, before its resurgence since the 1990s into today. I survey this history only briefly because I have written about this history in great detail elsewhere.¹⁶ In Part II, I explain how the coincidence of the Cold War lull in partisanship and the beginning of election law helped shape campaign finance law in certain directions. Hyperpartisanship was not a salient dynamic in American politics when campaign finance law began, and as a result, campaign finance law developed under strikingly different assumptions about American politics than the current prevailing circumstances. Under modern hyperpartisanship, our newly centralized and ideologically cohesive parties grew into the central hub for modern campaign finance.

In Part III, I describe the consequences of the mismatch between campaign finance law from the Cold War and modern campaign finance of today. Campaign finance law still focuses on individual candidates as the central actors in fundraising and misses the role of parties in organizing the campaign finance landscape. It therefore both systematically underestimates the risk that parties pose in collectivizing the potential for campaign finance corruption and overestimates the First Amendment values promoted by modern campaign finance when the parties today focus so heavily on mobilizing their base and preaching to the choir.

I. The Cold War Origin of Campaign Finance Law

The Cold War was a nearly singular era in American politics, characterized by an unprecedented period of bipartisanship and ideological moderation between the major parties. This Part describes Cold War party politics and how the development of campaign finance law during the era was tailored to and...