The sky-high cost of campaigns.

• Author: Neal, Tommy
• Position: Includes related articles - Cover Story

It costs a bundle to run for the legislature, and November's campaigns will be the most costly in history. Why are we spending so much?

Records are set to be broken. And when it comes to breaking campaign spending records for state legislative seats, it happens every two or four years. With elections scheduled this year for approximately 6,100 seats in 44 states, spending records set in 1988 and 1990 are likely to be shattered once more, as they were in 1991 in New Jersey--a state that elects legislators in odd-numbered years. There, last November's election set a record for total spending for state legislative campaigns: $15 million, a 34 percent increase in four years.

The most expensive New Jersey campaign, topping the 1987 record of $378,000, was for a Senate seat--$420,456--won by a challenger. Incumbents lost in two other expensive races that cost more than $400,000. Sixteen campaigns had price tags of more than $200,000 each.

Consider what may be expected this year in Washington state, where the numbers are close in the Senate: 25 Republicans, 24 Democrats and 24 seats up for election. In 1990, with the same partisan split and 25 seats up, five campaigns topped the spending record of $237,283 set in 1988 and seven other races cost more than $200,000. The 1990 record was set by Senator Ray Moore, whose successful bid for re-election cost $286,867. The challenger in that race, Andy McLauchlan, spent $237,840. The average cost for Senate races in 1990 for 47 candidates was $111,183, according to Washington's Public Disclosure Commission.

In Michigan, two candidates for the Senate spent more than $250,000 in 1986 races. Eight candidates exceeded that amount in 1990. That same year, five candidates for Michigan House spent more than $100,000. Not a single House candidate spent that much in 1986.

Or consider Oregon, where spending by 14 legislative candidates topped $120,000 in 1990. Gary Moncrief of Boise State University found that the average cost of campaigns for Oregon Senate seats increased 384 percent--adjusted for inflation--from 1980 to 1988 and the average cost of campaigning for a House seat went up 247 percent.

Less populated states are not immune from escalating campaign costs. In Idaho, for example, the average cost of running for a Senate seat tripled in 12 years--from $4,400 per candidate in 1978 to $15,000 in 1990. In Vermont the median cost of a Senate campaign increased 52 percent from 1984 to 1988.

Of course, for costly campaigns no state approaches California, where senators represent 744,000 constituents. Tom Hayden still holds the record of $2 million for an Assembly seat he won in 1982. Hayden and his general election opponent spent more thant $3 million in that race. Coming in second, so far, is Senator Cecil Green, who spent $1.4 million in 1988 successfully defending a seat he won the year before in a multimillion dollar special election. His opponent in 1988 spent $1 million.

In 1990, however, total spending on general election legislative campaigns in California declined to $23.9 million--down from $40.2 million in 1988, $30.4 million in 1986 and $24.2 million in 1984.

What fuels the escalating cost of state legislative campaigns? Inflation alone accounts for some of the increase. A campaign that cost $25,000 in 1978 would have cost $50,000 in 1990 dollars. But numerous studies have shown much larger increases over shorter periods of time. An NCSL survey showed increases of 219 percent and 140 percent in Alaska's Senate primary and general elections between 1982 and 1988. Oregon's Senate primary and general election costs increased 239 percent and 157 percent during the same period; House and Senate general election costs in Connecticut climbed 109 percent and 80 percent from 1982 to 1986; and in Kentucky the Senate primary and general election costs rose 289 percent and 172 percent from 1982 to 1986.

"Professionalization is a major factor in the hight cost of campaigns," says Herbert Alexander, director of the Citizens' Research Foundation of Los Angeles and author of Reform and Reality: The Financing of State and Local Campaigns. "State legislators who a generation ago walked around the district passing out combs and pencils bearing their names are now hiring full-time campaign managers, pollsters, advertising specialists and direct mail experts," Alexander says. "And none of that comes cheap."

Not only are campaigns becoming more professional, so are the legislatures themselves. Alexander comments that "public office at both the statewide and state legislative levels seems to have grown in desirability over the past decade."

In his study of four northwestern state legislatures Biose State's Moncrief says that in both Oregon and Washington, states at the mid-range in terms of professionalism...