How the Wealth
Primary Is
Undermining
Voting Rights
by ARI BERMAN
CANDID
ATE
June 8, 2015
The Nation.
13
I
ALLIE WHITEHEAD
n november 1963, evelyn butts, a seamstress and mother of three from norfolk, virginia,
filed the first lawsuit in federal court challenging her state’s $1.50 poll tax. Annie Harper, a
retired domestic worker from Fairfax County, filed a companion suit five months later. In March
1966, the Supreme Court overruled two previous decisions and overturned Virginia’s poll tax,
stating that economic status could not be an obstacle to casting a ballot.
“Fee payments or wealth, like race, creed, or color, are unrelated to the citizen’s ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process,” wrote Justice William Douglas in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections.
“We conclude that a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever
it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee
an electoral standard.”
Six years later, in Bullock v. Carter, the Supreme Court
held that economic status could not be the primary impediment for those seeking elected office, striking down
a system of filing fees in Texas that charged prospective
candidates up to $8,900 to place their name on the ballot. “We would ignore reality,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, “were we not to recognize that this system
falls with unequal weight on voters, as well as candidates,
according to their economic status.”
But in the decades after the Harper and Bullock decisions, the skyrocketing cost of political campaigns
emerged as a new type of poll tax, with the wealthy so
dominating the political process as to erode the value of
everyone else’s vote. “The wealth primary impermissibly
uses access to wealth as both an obstacle to meaningful
political candidacy for nonaffluent citizens and as a proxy
for political seriousness,” Jamie Raskin and John Bonifaz
wrote in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 1993. “In so doing, it systematically degrades the influence of poor and
working people in the political process.”
The “wealth primary” that Raskin and Bonifaz described in the 1992 election—the last time a Clinton
ran against a Bush—will be exponentially worse in 2016,
when it’s possible that a Clinton and a Bush will again
square off. The 1992 presidential election cost $331 million; the 2012 race cost $2.6 billion. The most expensive
Senate race in 1992 cost $18 million, compared with $120
million in 2014.
Every election since 1998 has been more expensive
than the previous comparable one, but the Supreme
Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the floodgates by allowing unlimited contributions from corporations, individuals, and unions to so-called Super
PACs. In theory, Super PACs are legally prohibited
from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in
practice they’re now performing all the functions of a
traditional campaign without any of the corresponding
accountability. The cost of federal elections increased
by nearly $2 billion from 2008 to 2012 as a result of
Citizens United.
In April 2014, the Court further deregulated the campaign-finance system in McCutcheon v. FEC by striking
down limits on individual contributions to federal candi-
Never before
has so much
money
flowed into
the political
system from
the deep
pockets of
an elite few.
Ari Berman is a
Nation contributing writer. His
new book, Give
Us the Ballot:
The Modern
Struggle for
Voting Rights
in America,
will be published
in August.
dates, parties, and political-action committees. “There’s
always been a wealth primary,” says David Donnelly,
president of Every Voice, which supports public financing of campaigns. “Now it’s a billionaire primary.”
Never before has so much money flowed into the
American political system from the deep pockets of an
elite few. In 2012, the top 32 Super-PAC donors gave
as much money—$313 million—as Barack Obama and
Mitt Romney raised from their 3.7 million small donors combined, according to Demos and U.S. PIRG.
Twenty-eight percent of total campaign funds came from
the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and not a single member
of Congress was elected without donations from that exclusive club.
One couple, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, gave over
$92 million in 2012, more than the contributions from
every resident of 12 separate states. Charles and David Koch have already pledged to spend 10 times that
amount in 2016. “Citizens United has paved the way for
the United States to become an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires are going to control
our political process,” says Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
When the wealthiest Americans dominate every facet
of political life—from who runs, to who wins, to which
issues are addressed, to how our leaders govern—what
happens to the voting rights of everyone else?
U
ntil recently, most presidential
candidates have pretended that they
aren’t beholden to the donors who
finance their campaigns. For the 2016
race, however, the GOP’s candidates
aren’t even hiding the fact that they want to be sold to
the highest bidder. Their primary really is dominated by
a handful of billionaires, with the candidates hoping to
win all-important “auditions” with big-money funders
like the Kochs and the Adelsons, who will collectively
spend over $1 billion on the campaign.
A few weeks after Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced
his candidacy, his Super PAC took in $31 million, thanks
to the support of Long Island hedge-fund billionaire
Robert Mercer. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has won a
$10 million pledge to his Super PAC from the billionaire
Miami auto dealer Norman Braman. Former Florida
Governor Jeb Bush has been asking donors to give $1
million a pop to his Super PAC, which expects to bring
in $100 million by end of May, the most ever for an unannounced candidate this early in the process. The Bush
campaign is planning to outsource many important campaign activities to his Super PAC, from advertising to
polling to policy development—despite a prohibition on
direct coordination between these groups and the official
campaigns. Jeb’s onetime chief rival for the nomination,
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has been struggling in part because, “unlike many of his rivals, he appears to lack a prominent wealthy donor prepared, at this
point, to sustain a campaign with a multimillion-dollar
contribution,” The New York Times noted.
T
he presumptive democratic nominee,
Hillary Clinton, has positioned herself
as a populist critic of the Citizens United
decision. “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all, even if that takes
a constitutional amendment,” she declared at her first
campaign event in Monticello, Iowa. During a speech at
the New America Foundation last year, she decried “the
share of income and wealth going to those at the very
top,” which she called “a throwback to the Gilded Age
of the robber barons.”
But some of the leading beneficiaries of this new
Gilded Age have also been stalwart Clinton supporters
throughout her political career, signaling that her 2016
campaign will likely represent a continuation of the 25year alliance between the Clintons and big business. Five
of the top 10 donors to her 2008 campaign were employees of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers. She raised $11 million
from the securities and investment sector during her career as a senator, with the largest amount of money coming from employees of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
The wealth primary among Democratic candidates
for president is not as blatant as it is for Republicans,
The Nation.
June 8, 2015
but it’s just as important. This has posed a particular
conundrum for Democrats, who claim to represent the
common man. The rise of the Democratic Leadership
Council in the 1980s—under the stewardship of Bill
Clinton—pushed the Democratic Party away from its
traditional working-class and labor base and closer to
corporate America. “They were trying to rhetorically be
the working man’s party while raising money from Wall
Street and corporate America,” says progressive Democratic strategist Steve Cobble.
The Clintons, always the poster children for the DLC’s
strategy, have raked in more than $1 billion in campaign
The
contributions, speaking fees, and donations to their philSupreme anthropic causes since Bill ran for president in 1992, The
Wall Street Journal has documented. And that includes
Court put the $208 million from the financial-services sector alone.
Much of the corporate money has gone to the Clinton
government
Foundation in recent years, funding worthwhile charitaup for
ble work but also raising questions about what the donors
expect in return. The likes of Goldman Sachs, Exxonsale.
Mobil, Duke Energy, and Citi Foundation have donated
— Howard Dean
anywhere from $1 million to $5 million to the foundation. Sixty companies that lobbied the State Department
during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state donated
$26 million to the Clinton Foundation. It’s difficult to
separate the Clintons’ political lives from their personal
and charitable endeavors; Hillary’s new finance director,
Dennis Cheng, was recently chief development officer
for the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary will become the first Democratic presidential
candidate to personally raise money for the party’s top
Super PAC, Priorities USA, with a goal of $200 million
to $300 million—as much as, if not more than, she raised
during her 2008 campaign. “I don’t question her integrity;
I don’t question her views,” says Harvard Law professor
Lloyd Blankfein,
Lawrence Lessig. “But I do think it’s practically impossible
chairman and CEO
of Goldman Sachs,
to imagine the public looking at the history of the Clintons
greets Hillary
for the past 25 years and believing that they are not deeply
Clinton at a Clinton
connected to the influence of big money.”
Global Initiative
Where Clinton gets the money for her campaign will
panel discussion,
tell us a lot—as much as her policy pronouncements—
September 2014.
about what she would do as president. Her overwhelming
financial advantage and connections to wealthy donors
help explain why so few heavyweights in the Democratic
Party have decided to run against her this time around.
“Why is she the frontrunner? First of all, she’s Hillary
Clinton, and she has the best résumé in America for being
president,” says former Vermont governor Howard Dean,
who has already endorsed Clinton. “And second, there’s
nobody in the Democratic Party that can raise as much
money as she can. Not only can they not raise as much
money as her; they can’t get close. It narrows the field dramatically, and that’s not particularly good for the country.”
In June 2003, Dean shocked the political establishment by raising $828,000 over the Internet in one day
for his presidential candidacy, with an average donation
of $112. Dean raised 38 percent of his total funds from
donations of $200 or less, planting the seeds for what
many predicted would be a small-donor revolution in
American politics. Four years later, Barack Obama raised
a third of his record-breaking $745 million campaign
“
”
MARK LENNIHAN / AP
14
LYNNE SLADKY / AP
June 8, 2015
haul from small donors, while Ron
Paul raised 39 percent from small
dollars on the Republican side.
But Citizens United has made
it significantly harder for insurgent candidates like Dean or Paul
to catch fire without the support of a billionaire backer. “Do
I think it’s possible to come from
nowhere and end up leading the
pack?” Dean says. “Yes—with the
right message, and at a time when
people really want to make a statement. Do I think it’s possible to
raise enough money from a grassroots campaign to win the presidency? I think that might be really problematic. That’s
where the problem is, and where people get disillusioned;
the Supreme Court put the government up for sale.”
Another Vermonter, Bernie Sanders, is the Dean
of this cycle: In the first 24 hours after announcing his
candidacy, he raised $1.5 million from 35,000 donors,
who gave an average of $43.54. The contrast between
the donors to Sanders and Clinton couldn’t be starker.
Seven of Clinton’s top 10 donors over her political career are employees of banks or corporate law firms: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, DLA Piper, JPMorgan, Morgan
Stanley, Skadden Arps, and Lehman Brothers. Nineteen
of Sanders’s top 20 donors over his political career are
unions; his top donor is the International Association of
Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Sanders’s top 20 donors combined gave him less money than employees of
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs gave Clinton.
Despite his impressive early small-donor haul, Sanders will not be able to compete with the large donors
who will bankroll Clinton’s campaign and can write unlimited multimillion-dollar checks to her Super PAC.
“It’s a huge issue,” says Sanders, “and not just for me. We
are reaching the point where it may be impossible for a
candidate who is trying to represent working families,
who is not wealthy, who is not courting billionaires, to
be able to win an election.”
This money tsunami not only buys access and influence; it also shapes the terms of the debate. Because of
the wealth primary, it’s difficult to imagine a Democratic
frontrunner for president supporting the breakup of the
largest banks, or a Republican frontrunner acknowledging that global warming is real or criticizing illegal
settlements in Israel.
There is also a striking disconnect between what the
wealthy and the rest of the country believe, particularly
on core economic issues. Sixty-eight percent of the public
believe “the government in Washington ought to see to it
that everyone who wants to work can find a job,” but only
19 percent of the wealthy agree. Fifty-four percent of the
public want to raise taxes on the rich to combat income
inequality, but only 17 percent of the wealthy concur.
Despite commanding a majority on these issues, everyday Americans have much less ability to see their political views become law. Research by the political scientists
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that “economic
The Nation.
15
Norman Braman,
a billionaire Miami
auto dealer who
pledged $10 million
to Marco Rubio’s
Super PAC, greets
the senator (left)
after an address in
February 2014.
elites and organized groups representing business interests have
substantial independent impacts
on U.S. government policy, while
average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” In the United
States, they concluded, “the majority does not rule—at least in the
causal sense of actually determining
policy outcomes.”
This doesn’t mean that voting is
hopeless or that every candidate is
the same. Few can now argue that Al
Gore was no different from George
W. Bush or that Barack Obama
would have nominated the same Supreme Court justices
as Mitt Romney. A Democratic Congress will have very
different priorities from a Republican one. And money
doesn’t always determine electoral races—in his stunning
upset in last year’s Republican primary for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, David Brat spent less money
on his campaign than Eric Cantor did at steakhouses.
Yet two converging trends have made it far easier for
the wealthy to translate their economic power into political power. “The campaign-finance system has shifted
radically under the Roberts Court,” says Rick Hasen, a
professor at the University of California, Irvine, School
of Law. “There are more avenues for the wealthy to have
greater influence. And the wealthy are wealthier: There’s
profound economic inequality, and that creates this greater disparity in the ability of people to influence politics.”
The megarich have so much power these days that
even the bottom half of the 1 percent is bemoaning its
diminished influence. “When you look at super-PAC
money and the large donations that we’re seeing, the
regular bundlers feel a little disenfranchised,” Bobbie
Kilberg, a Republican fundraiser who raised $4 million
for Mitt Romney, told The Washington Post.
We are all proletarians now.
“
It may be
impossible
for a
candidate
who is trying
to represent
working
families
to win an
election.
I
n november 1964, after lyndon johnson’s
re-election, the leadership of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee held a
retreat in Waveland, Mississippi, to plot the
civil-rights group’s next steps. Four months
later, the SNCC’s chair, John Lewis, would march for
voting rights in Selma, helping to win passage of the
Voting Rights Act.
The VRA transformed politics by enfranchising mil— Senator Bernie lions of Americans, but 25 years after its passage, leaders
Sanders of the civil-rights movement and the campaign-financereform community returned to Waveland, feeling that
their work was incomplete. “Getting private money out
of elections is the unfinished business of the civil-rights
movement and the Voting Rights Act,” says Gwendolyn
Patton, a youth leader with SNCC in the 1960s. “People
here were murdered trying to get the right to vote, but
what good is it if there’s no one to vote for?”
The 1966 Harper decision held that a state could not
“dilute a citizen’s vote on account of his economic status
”
16
or other such factors,” but that’s exactly what the wealth
primary has done. It discriminates not just on the basis of
class, but also on the basis of race.
Voters of color are at a marked disadvantage in the
wealth primary. They make up 37 percent of the US
population but only 1 percent of campaign contributors
and 10 percent of elected officials. “Because they control
fewer resources, people of color generally have less opportunity than others to participate in politics and elect
representatives of their choice,” George Washington
University law professor Spencer Overton wrote in the
Texas Law Review. “A political process based on private
money gives wealthier white communities disproportionately large influence in determining all candidates.”
John Bonifaz’s organization, Free Speech for People,
has recently been exploring whether the wealth primary
violates Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits a voting
system in which the “totality of circumstances” leads
to minority voters having “less opportunity than other
members of the electorate to participate in the political
process and elect candidates of their choice.”
When Congress reauthorized the VRA in 1982, the
Senate named nine factors that courts should consider
in judging a potentially discriminatory voting system.
Two relate to the wealth primary: “the extent to which
members of the minority group…bear the effects of discrimination in such areas as education, employment and
health, which hinder their ability to participate effectively
in the political process,” and “the exclusion of members
of the minority group from candidate slating processes.”
Federal courts have previously invoked these factors, with
one noting in a 1998 case from Tennessee, for example,
that “the economic and educational isolation of AfricanAmericans…limits their ability to fund and mount political campaigns. In this sense therefore, blacks are not able
to equally participate in the political process.”
This disparity is particularly notable today, when the
flood of big money into the political system coincides
with renewed efforts to make it more difficult for citizens—particularly people of color—to vote, whether by
shutting down registration drives, cutting early voting, requiring strict voter ID, purging the voting rolls, or disenfranchising ex-felons. “We are facing a dual attack on our
democracy—everyday voters are being disenfranchised,
while corporations are being hyper-enfranchised,” said
former NAACP president Ben Jealous in 2013.
At a recent talk in New York, Lawrence Lessig drew
parallels between the fight for voting rights in the 1960s
and the push to get money out of politics today. He
showed footage of civil-rights marchers being beaten on
Bloody Sunday in Selma. “They were fighting for equality, for an equal right to vote,” Lessig said. “Here’s what
we must recognize: We don’t have the vote either. We
don’t have an equal vote—not in the ballot election, but
in the money election. Not in a general election, but in
the green primary.”
Fifty years ago, because of poll taxes and literacy tests,
African-Americans were systematically denied the right
to vote. Now, thanks to the wealth primary, the vast majority of Americans are being denied the rightful value of
their vote.
n
The Nation.
June 8, 2015
TURKISH DE M
T
Maria
Margaronis
writes from
The Nation’s
London bureau.
Istanbul
o reach the istanbul headquarters of the
People’s Democratic Party (HDP), you have to
find a place to cross a chaotic six-lane highway
lined with a jumble of buildings that look as
if they’re waiting to die. On its north side, a
trompe l’oeil construction fence interrupts the narrow pavement to present the future facade of Tarlabasi
360, a pricey business and residential complex being
built by Calik Holdings, whose CEO—the son-in-law
of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—recently
stepped down to run for Parliament. The road, widened
in 1986 with the destruction of many grand Ottoman-era
Greek and Armenian buildings, cuts off the decaying
neighborhood of Tarlabasi from Beyoglu’s thriving cultural and commercial center. A five-minute walk from the
modern stores and cafes of Istiklal Avenue, families live
in a single room in half-ruined houses. Kurdish women
in lace-edged head scarves squat over basins of mussels
to scrape for the tourist trade. A man in a leather jacket
minds a small flock of sheep parked on a concrete corner.
Barefoot children—some of them Syrian refugees—play
under lines of laundry strung across narrow streets, or
click toy pistols, or rush past gleefully with spray bottles