Out-of-State Contributions Provide Non-Incumbent House Candidates with a Competitive Edge

• Author: Anne E. Baker
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221112634
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(5) 668–681

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221112634

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Out-of-State Contributions Provide

Non-Incumbent House Candidates with a

Competitive Edge

Anne E. Baker

1

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Abstract

Out-of-state donors’contributions represent a growing share of fundraising receipts for House candidates. This raises the

question of whether out-of-state contributions simply represent more money f‌lowing to the campaigns’coffers or whether

these monies could be worth more than their outright cash value. Using campaign f‌inance data from the U.S. Federal Election

Commission 2010-2018, I examine both the fundraising and electoral impacts of non-incumbent House candidates’receipt of

these funds using structural equation modeling, a matching analysis, and a regression analysis. I uncover evidence that out-of-

state contributions are an indication of the candidate’s integration into the extended party network (EPN ) f‌inding they are

closely tied to interest group support. Out-of-state contributions are also found to have a positive impact on non-incumbent

House candidates’competitiveness, which likely stems from the broader support of the EPN.

Keywords

congressional elections, campaign f‌inance, campaign donors

House races have increasingly become national affairs in-

volving larger sets of outside groups and out-of-state donors

seeking to inf‌luence the course of national politics. Although

House incumbents receive the bulk of out-of-state monies

(Baker, 2016b;Stevens & McCammond, 2018), non-

incumbents are increasingly successful in raising funds

from a national set of donors, as media and watchdog group

accounts attest (Open Secrets, 2018;Schoen, 2018). This

success is partly driven by changes in campaign f‌inance laws

allowing donors greater freedom to contribute to an unlimited

number of campaigns in amounts adjusted for inf‌lation in

each election cycle (Magleby et al., 2018). National donors

are poised to have more inf‌luence than ever before, which

raises the question of whether their support simply amounts to

more money in the campaign’s coffers or whether these

monies are worth more than their cash value.

There is good reason to believe that the money stemming

from national donors comes with fringe benef‌its. Arguably

national donors constitute the nuts and bolts of what recent

scholarship conceptualizes as the extended party network

(EPN)—“dynamic dispersed systems of interconnected in-

terest groups, centered on traditional formal party organi-

zations”(Desmarais et al., 2015, p. 194; Koger et al., 2009).

Without money from a set of national donors f‌inancing most

of the EPN organizations’activities, the EPN would not have

much inf‌luence. Moreover, previous studies suggest a core set

of national donors are enmeshed in the network through

membership in multiple organizations and also have expe-

rience volunteering or working for campaigns (Francia et al.,

2003)—in some sense, they tie the larger network together

(Koger et al., 2009;Rhodes et al., 2018). Thus, support from

national donors may be an indication that the candidate has

the support of the larger network. If this is the case, then these

monies should have positive impact on non-incumbent

candidates’competitiveness because the money operates as

a signal to others in the network that the candidate is worth

supporting and the money is associated with other types of

monetary assistance, such as independent expenditures, and

non-monetary support, such as endorsements.

In this paper, I investigate whether out-of-state donor

contributions are related to non-incumbent House campaigns’

fundraising success with interest groups, parties, and in-state

donors and whether they are related to outside spending by

EPN members. Using structural equation modeling, I ex-

amine whether success in one of these fundraising areas

relates to success in another fundraising area for House

campaigns—of particular interest is whether PAC money and

1

Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Anne E. Baker, Political Science, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real,

Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA.

Email: aebaker@scu.edu