CCP continues its hard questioning of the public financing system.  In its latest white paper, it challenges the assumption that female candidates for public office, having less access to political money networks, will benefit from public funding alternatives.  It studies Maine and Arizona and concludes that the women did not capture a larger share of state elected offices after public funds became available.  CCP argues, in fact, that women politicians in those states experienced on average a “slight” decline in political market share.

     This does not work as a case against public funding. The argument that the study is set up to refute is not essential to the public funding brief.  Candidates win or lose for a variety of reasons:  the role of money—how much is available, and how it is spent—is one factor, and the operation of this factor is not easy to understand or to relate with precision to outcomes.  It would never do to base the case for public funding—or on any regulatory or legal arrangement, for that matter—on a concrete expectation that certain classes of candidates will win more often.    

    For those women, among other candidates, who may benefit from the public funding alternative, it remains better on balance to have, than not to have, such a choice.  Candidates may look to this “public” source of funds because there is, for them, none better, but they believe they have something to say, an audience to develop, and the qualifications to serve.  Or they may give up a larger sum, privately raised, because the healthier the quantity, the more the time and energy spent raising it, and some candidates may reasonably believe it to be a superior use of their time and energy, and more in the voters’ interests, to engage in activities other than fundraising and on contacts with those other than donors. 

    As campaigns become more expensive, or just remain as oppressively expensive as they are, the choice offered through public funding programs is simply a good one to have.  No more ambitious claims need be made.  If that is CCP’s point—that there are arguments for public funding that may not wash, at least in the states studied—then the point, while overdrawn (a point for a different day), is worth making.  CCP has not dealt a blow to the main case for public funding because it is not answering that case, and so it is not discrediting it.

Bob Bauer