EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
MICHAEL J. MALBIN
TRUSTEES
F. CHRISTOPHER ARTERTON
JEFFREY BELL
J. KENNETH BLACKWELL
WILLIAM E. BROCK
BECKY CAIN
New Interest Group Strategies --
ROD CHANDLER
DAVID COHEN
ANTHONY CORRADO
VIC FAZIO
A Preview of Post McCain-Feingold Politics?
GEORGE GOULD
C. BOYDEN GRAY
KENNETH A. GROSS
RUTH JONES
PHIL NOBLE
TREVOR POTTER
Theoretical Structure and
A Preliminary Report On 2000
From the CFI Interest Group Project
ACADEMIC ADVISORS
JANET BOX-STEFFENSMEIER
JAMES CAMPBELL
ANTHONY CORRADO
DIANA DWYRE
JOHN C. GREEN
GARY C. JACOBSON
ROBIN KOLODNY
RAY LA RAJA
THOMAS E. MANN
Michael J. Malbin
The Campaign Finance Institute and
University at Albany, SUNY
[email protected]
MARK J. ROZELL
CLYDE WILCOX
Clyde Wilcox
Georgetown University
[email protected]
Mark J. Rozell
The Catholic University of America
[email protected]
Richard Skinner
The Campaign Finance Institute
[email protected]
www.CFInst.org
1990 M. Street NW
SUITE 380
WASHINGTON, DC 20036
202-969-8890
202-969-5612 FAX
www.CFInst.org
[email protected]
AFFILIATED WITH THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Contents
Introduction
1
Theoretical Frameworks
Historical Overview: When Laws Change, So Do Groups’
Strategies
Organizational Adaptation to Environmental Change
Incentives: The Polarized Political-Legislative Environment
Organizational Learning
Diffusion of Innovation
3
4
8
9
10
12
Interest Group Tactics in 2000
Back to the Basics – Mobilizing Voters
Labor
NAACP
NARAL
BIPAC
US Chamber of Commerce
Citizens for a Sound Economy
National Rifle Association
Taking It to the Airwaves
League of Conservation Voters
Planned Parenthood
Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence
(Handgun Control)
Business Issue Ads by Newly Created Groups -- Citizens for
Better Medicare and Americans for Job Security
Internet Campaigns
14
15
16
18
19
20
21
21
22
23
23
23
24
What Have We Found?
Innovation and Diffusion of Learning in 2000
Partisanship and Strategy – Future Research Questions
Conclusions and Implications
28
28
29
30
Bibliography
Index of Organizations
34
39
25
26
INTRODUCTION
One of the fundamental premises of any system of legal regulation is
that laws alter behavior -- either by direct prohibition or by altering the
incentives for voluntary action.
The assumption behind any campaign
finance reform proposal is that changing the law will make a predictable
difference.
But the assumption is not self-evident.
One common
counterargument sees no predictable connection between campaign finance
laws and their consequences. The so-called “hydraulic theory” says that laws
will divert rather than restrain behavior because money, like water, will
always find a way.
The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) is a good test
case for these two sets of assumptions. This new statute is the most
significant change to federal campaign finance law since 1974.
Its
prohibition of “soft money” contributions to national parties, and its
constraints on broadcast “electioneering,” will
surely send interest groups scrambling to
The so-called “hydraulic
figure out what they should do. Within days of theory” says that laws will
its passage, speculation was rampant about divert rather than restrain
which groups the new rules would favor. Some behavior because money,
thought it would favor groups that could collect like water, will always find
a way.
and “bundle” “hard money” contributions.
Others thought the law would push groups into
direct mail, phones banks, voter mobilization, and other activities that would
continue to be unregulated and undisclosed. Within two years, we surely will
be reading about how the law led many powerful organizations to discover
and exploit new “loopholes” of one kind or another. At least some of those
stories are bound to be right.
Yet, if our information in two years is based only on after-the-fact
observations, our conclusions are just as likely as not to be wrong. There are
likely to be huge changes in interest group strategies over the next two
election cycles. We may assume these will follow paths that are legal under
the new law. However, many of the changes might well have taken place
even without the new law; indeed, some have already started. If we want to
understand the law’s effect more precisely, we need to sort out its effects
from those caused by changes in the political and technological realm that
would have taken place anyway. And we need to do this knowing is likely
that different groups, with different resources and internal constraints, will
react differently to the same sets of opportunities and political incentives.
To prepare us for looking at the effects of the new law in two years,
the Campaign Finance Institute has started a baseline study to help us sort
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out the motivations and mechanisms for change in the years just gone by.
The roles played by interest groups and political parties in U.S. elections
have been sharply transformed over the past decade. The growth before the
BCRA in soft money contributions to political parties opened the door to
financial participation by donors to whatever extent their checkbooks might
allow. Candidate-specific issue advertising – over the airwaves, on the
telephone, through the mails, over the Internet and face to face – have
further opened the door to unlimited participation by those interest groups
whose organizational characteristics let them do more than just give. For
many groups, these changes have involved more than just an increased
activity level, as they have undergone major shifts in their strategy and
tactics, including a willingness to take greater risks to achieve higher-stake
goals.
For scholars of interest groups, these well-documented developments
raise at least four sets of questions.
•
First, at the individual group level, how can we understand why
individual decision makers have decided to change their group’s
strategies or tactics?
•
Second, among the reasons for change, how important have been the
incentives, disincentives, constraints and opportunities created by new
laws, regulations or legal interpretations?
•
Third, are some groups better able than others to react to specific
incentives and disincentives and, if so, how does this alter the mix and
influence of different types of organizations in the political arena?
•
Finally, what are the system-wide implications of a new mix of
activities and organizations, if a new mix indeed is found to exist?
This paper grapples primarily with the first of these questions. The larger
project of which this paper is part will look at all four, with an eye toward
tracing the effects of any new changes that appear as the new law takes
effect.
Much of the information for this baseline study was derived from two
private roundtable dinners held at the Campaign Finance Institute in
Washington, DC in 2001 – one with business and conservative groups, and
another with labor and liberal organizations – followed by interviews with
interest group strategists. The round table participants and interview
subjects were chosen largely because of a general impression that these
groups were among the more innovative in the 2000 elections. What follows,
therefore, does not purport to be representative of all interest group activity.
We were trying in this initial phase to probe the reasoning that led people to
change. We plan to follow this up with repeated interviews with these and
other groups over the next two to three years to trace the evolution in their
thinking as conditions change, and as the new law takes effect.
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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
Political scientists, sociologists, and economists who study interest
group activity in elections generally have assumed that groups make
standing decisions about whether to be involved, the level of their
involvement, their general strategic position, and
the specific tactics to employ. Electoral activity has It is obvious that a
been viewed as an extension of lobbying efforts; the number of groups have
decision to be active in elections and the extent of changed their election
that activity was seen as a rational calculation activities, in some
cases dramatically.
based on the policy agenda of the group and the The changes are not
political environment (Hansen, 1991; Gais, 1996). merely random.
Groups were thought to adopt a general strategic
stance – whether to ally themselves with one party
or to support candidates of both, for example, or whether to support
incumbents or to attempt to change the composition of government. They
were also thought to maintain that stance over time, making relatively
marginal adjustments to marginal changes in the political environment. Even
the specific tactics of the groups were thought to be relatively stable.
It is obvious, however, that a number of groups have changed their
election activities over the past few cycles, in some cases dramatically. The
changes are not merely random, with the decisions of single groups canceling
each other out. The overall contour of group involvement has also changed,
with direct contributions constituting a diminishing portion of total activity,
while issue advocacy, voter mobilization efforts, and other tactics have
become more prominent. These changes suggest a need to rethink our
assumptions about individual groups, and to consider the importance of the
aggregate changes in strategy and tactics to the political system.
The magnitude of the changes by some groups in the 2000 campaign
was remarkable.
•
Planned Parenthood had in 1998 resurrected its PAC and contacted its
members by phone and mail on behalf of congressional candidates. In
2000, the organization spent more than $12 million on politically
relevant activity through its PAC, 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation and
“527” political committee, including $7 million in issue advertising on
the presidential race.
•
The AFL-CIO, which in 1996 had spent about two-thirds of a special
$35 million assessment on issue advertising in targeted congressional
districts, focused in 2000 on mobilizing its members through personto-person contact.
•
The National Rifle Association spent more money campaigning for
Republicans in 2000 than it had in 1996 and 1998 combined,
quadrupled its contributions to parties (including significant soft money
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contributions), and mounted an ambitious voter mobilization effort
that is credited with helping George Bush carry West Virginia.
•
The NAACP formed the National Voter Fund, and spent $11 million on
efforts to boost the registration and turnout of African Americans.
•
Americans for Job Security, an organization that formed in 1997 with
the assistance of the American Insurance Association but that does not
disclose the sources of its funding, spent millions on issue advertising
in several key Senate races.
•
Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC), an established if
once sedate lead PAC for the business community, developed a
program that encouraged employers to make direct contacts with their
employees, providing information that often differed from that
provided by unions.
In each case, these organizations increased the magnitude of their
efforts. In most cases, they also dramatically changed tactics. Unions
decreased their spending over the airwaves in favor of personal contact. In
contrast, Planned Parenthood significantly increased its issue advertising.
How can we begin to understand these rapid changes in interest group
activities? In this paper:
•
We first examine the conventional understanding of group resources
as well as the regulatory context that structures the way those
resources are used in campaigns.
•
Next, we consider reasons to expect that group involvement in
elections is more dynamic than previously believed -- because groups
must adapt to a changed political environment and because there are
networks of groups that disseminate innovations quickly, sometimes
using carefully designed programs that allow groups to learn from
their behavior.
•
Finally, in the longest section of the paper, we describe the patterns of
change in group activity in 2000.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW:
WHEN LAWS CHANGE, SO DO GROUPS’ STRATEGIES
The political science literature on interest group involvement in
elections is vast. Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to
explaining groups’ strategic choices. In general, scholars have assumed
these decisions to be based on the resources available to the group, the
regulations that restrict and channel group activity, and the political
environment (Baumgartner and Leech, 1998; Rozell and Wilcox, 1998). It
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was assumed that resources were relatively fixed, while regulations and the
political environment were seen as more variable.
Groups have many resources with which to influence elections. Among
these:
•
Financial resources have received the most attention, because
American elections are expensive and candidates and parties regularly
solicit groups for contributions. Financial resources come from groups
treasuries, from wealthy donors, and from regular contributions of
group members.
•
Group membership is another resource. Most groups have regular
channels to communicate with their members and some groups have
activist members who can help out on campaigns.
•
Sometimes, a group’s favorable reputation can be a resource,
allowing its endorsements to bestow legitimacy on candidates, at least
among some voters.
The comprehensive 1974 amendments to the Federal Election
Campaign Act sought to channel interest group activity through political
action committees (PACs). Groups with sizable
treasuries could use those funds to help sponsor Because the maximum
a PAC but could not give that money directly to PAC contribution to a
candidate was $5,000,
candidates. PACs raised their money from their there was a limit to any
members in contributions of limited size, thereby one group’s ability to
preventing groups with a few wealthy patrons focus its attention on a
from efficiently directing those funds into few key elections.
elections. PAC members could also contribute
directly to candidates in coordination with the
PAC, thereby expanding the scope of a PAC’s efforts. But because the
maximum PAC contribution to a candidate was $5,000 per candidate per
election, there was a limit to any one group’s ability to focus its attention on
a few key elections, unless the PAC was willing to engage independent
expenditures.
PACs became the focus of a great deal of research by political
scientists, economists, and sociologists – in part because relatively clean
data on interest group allocations were available for the first time. Although
groups continued to use other tactics in elections – including contacting
members, endorsing candidates, issuing voter guides, or urging their
members to volunteer to aid campaigns – PAC money was treated as the
major form of group activity.
The PAC system seemed at this time to be ideally suited to
corporations and trade associations, who could more easily mobilize
individual contributions from executives, who understood the collective
benefits of contributing and who might face additional, personal incentives to
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contribute. By the mid 1980s, there were more than 1800 corporate PACs on
the FEC books. Unions were key players in the PAC system also, primarily
because of their large membership totals. Citizens’ groups were able to
mobilize money, using the resources of the parent organization to pay for the
PAC’s overhead. The rapid development of direct mail techniques allowed
some ideological groups to form as PACs, although the high overhead costs
of running a PAC coupled with the inefficiencies of direct-mail fundraising
meant that little of the money raised by these groups actually made it to
candidate coffers (Brownstein, 1985).
The studies of PACs often distinguished between pragmatic PACs that
gave to incumbents of both parties in order to gain particularized benefits in
legislation, and ideological or issue groups that sought to influence the party
balance in government. Most corporate and trade association PACs followed
pragmatic strategies, giving to key committee members and party leaders of
both parties.
These pragmatic PACs had little incentive to alter their
behavior so long as their contributions helped gain access to policymakers
(Handler and Mulkern, 1982).
In contrast, some groups sought policies that could best be provided
by one of the political parties. Among these were ideological groups, labor
unions, issue groups and a few business organizations. These groups sought
to influence the composition of Congress by recruiting candidates to run for
office, providing help to candidates in intra-party primaries, and targeting
their assistance to those party candidates who had the most to gain.
Eismeier and Pollock (1988) showed that some of these PACs operated as
“strategic actors,” backing vulnerable incumbents from their preferred party
when the election fortunes favored their opponents, and backing challengers
and open seat candidates in elections that favored their party. Labor PACs
and certain non-connected, ideological committees also shifted their giving
between incumbents and non-incumbents of their preferred party, to help the
party maximize its seats (Wilcox, 1989).
Millions of Dollars
In the late 1970s, changes in regulations allowed groups to contribute
treasury funds directly to parties in the form of “soft money” contributions.
The amount of soft money exploded in the mid-1990s, as parties began using
soft money to pay for television advertising. This growth advantaged groups
with large treasuries
Growth in Party Soft Money
and fewer members,
such
as
large
300
corporations, but was
250
also useful for labor
200
unions, which could
150
100
convert union dues
50
into political funds.
0
Although there have
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
been fewer studies of
group
decisions
to
Dem
Rep
c
Source: Federal Election Commission
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give soft money, it has generally been assumed that much of the corporate
soft money was a pragmatic effort to gain access to incumbents; indeed,
many corporations gave soft money to both parties. For corporations and
trade associations, soft money was a simple extension of PAC contributions,
allowing them to use a larger resource pool. Unions also gave significant soft
money, although it often comprised a smaller share of their overall activity
and was given only after state party committees had presented viable
electoral plans (Wilcox, 1994). Democratic party committees receive more
corporate and trade association soft money than from unions (Biersack and
Holt, forthcoming). Issue groups were not major players in party soft
money. Although they shared with the parties an interest in partisan control
of Congress, their key resources lay more in their members than in their
treasury funds. Moreover, pro-choice, pro-life, environmental, gun control
and gun rights groups sought greater control over campaign messages than
soft money permitted.
A shift in the legal landscape in the late 1990s made possible new
avenues of campaign support. Court decisions allowed groups to spend
unlimited amounts of treasury funds to advocate issues through
communications that do not explicitly call for the election or defeat of specific
federal candidates. This “issue advocacy” could mention candidates by
name, feature their pictures, and send strong signals of support or
opposition, creating messages which voters found indistinguishable from
campaign ads (Magleby, 2001).
Although independent expenditures had been allowed for PACs since
the Buckley decision in 1976 and NCPAC in 1985 (Federal Election
Commission v. National Conservative Political Action Committee, 470 U.S.
480), issue advocacy could be funded from the organization’s treasury, while
independent expenditures could not. Issue ads thus permitted corporate
profits, union dues, and other group revenues to be marshaled for political
action. Moreover, independent expenditures conducted through PACs were
limited by the PACs’ ability to raise money under the FECA’s contribution
limits. Issue ads were not governed by those limits. A number of new
groups were organized in the late 1990s to mount issue advocacy
campaigns, often with names that did little to alert observers to the groups’
financial bases.
Issue advocacy appealed to ideological and single-issue groups for
several reasons. First, groups could direct significant sums toward a handful
of close races, thereby maximizing the electoral effect of their involvement.
Second, because the funding for issue ads need not come from individuals
subject to FECA limits, citizen groups can minimize the collective action
problem by relying on contributions from a smaller group of wealthy donors.
Finally, issue advocacy gave groups a chance to define the debate in close
races and to elevate their issues in the public’s eye.
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Issue advocacy was also an attractive avenue for unions, which sought
to raise public awareness of workers’ issues and to hold candidates
responsible for anti-labor votes. In 1996 the AFL-CIO spent approximately
$35 million on a set of targeted races (Francia, 2000). About two-thirds of
this was said by labor union representatives to have been spent on issue ads.
Issue advocacy is less attractive for individual corporations; few
companies want their names associated with the vigorous negative content
that is common in these campaigns. Research has shown that viewers
dislike negative advertising, and their negative feelings toward political
advertising has a “spillover” effect on commercial advertising (Iyengar and
Prior, 2001).
Moreover, many voters are likely to be suspicious of
advertising on issues that seems to be clearly in the economic interest of a
company. Clearly, any issue advertising campaigns mounted by corporations
must find a way to surmount the problem of attribution.
Clearly, therefore, past changes in regulations—or in the
interpretations of existing regulations or a growing awareness of the
possibilities inherent in existing rules – have permitted groups to mobilize
new resources and to use this money in new ways. Moreover different rules,
and interpretations of rules, have favored different groups. Most of the
literature on groups in elections paints these groups as adopting standing
decisions on strategy and tactics that do not change over time. Yet there are
other reasons to think that group involvement may be more dynamic than
the literature implies.
ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Despite the prevalence of assumptions about stable behavior, scholars
have long known that organizations adapt to changes in their environments
(Simon, 1976; Woods and Waterman, 1994). For example, interest groups
adapted to the FECA regulatory regime fairly rapidly, with corporations,
membership organizations, and ideological groups quickly forming PACs.
(Sabato, 1984; Cantor, 1986.) In 1974 there were 89 corporate PACs and
318 associated with membership organizations; by 1978 there were 784
corporate PACs and 451 membership organization PACs. Although some
corporations appear to have created PACs without careful thought (Sabato,
1984; Biersack, Herrnson, and Wilcox, 1994), the growth of these
committees was concentrated in particular sectors of the corporate world
(Gais, 1996), suggesting a likely connection between an organization’s goals,
policy environments and standing strategic decisions.
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Number of Registered Political Action Committees, 1974-2000
Committee Type
Corporate
Labor
Trade/membership/health
Nonconnected
Cooperative
Corporation without stock
1974
89
201
318
-
Total
608
1978
784
217
451
165
12
24
1,653
1988
1,816
354
786
1,115
59
138
2000
1,545
317
860
1,026
41
118
4,268
3,907
Note: The data are as of December 31 for every year.
Source: Federal Election Commission
Moreover, evidence from case studies has shown that even PACs with
well-defined allocation rules can alter those rules in responses to changes in
the policy agenda (Bedlington, 1999; Mutch, 1999). Finally, in the 1980s,
some interest groups (especially unions and some companies) adapted to
changes in the regulatory regime that permitted contributions of treasury
funds to party committees in the form of “soft money.” Clearly, therefore, we
know that interest groups can rapidly adapt their behavior to changes in their
political environment or in the regulatory regime. Our questions are why,
and to what effects.
In our project, we focus on three factors that
contribute to change:
(1)
changes in the external environment that produce an
incentive for organizations to change;
(2)
a willingness and ability for organizations to learn; and
(3)
teaching, or the diffusion of innovation among similar
organizations facing similar problems and trying out
different solutions.
Incentives: The Polarized Political-Legislative Environment
Even though the FECA did not change for years, the political
environment did change in important ways during the 1990s, creating
incentives for many groups to change their electoral involvement. First, the
trend toward party polarization accelerated during the decade. The average
ideological position of Republicans and Democrats diverged sharply and party
unity scores increased (Fleisher and Bond, 2000; Jacobson, 2000). As the
parties moved apart, voters seemed to respond to party cues, producing
more congruence between policy preferences and partisanship (Jacobson,
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2000). Party polarization had important consequences for issue groups that
had long sought to support candidates in both parties – especially pro-gun
groups like the NRA, pro-life and pro-choice groups, and environmental
groups (Thomas, 1999; Mundo, 1999; Patterson, 1999; Cantor, 1999). On
abortion, for example, as the two parties diverged it became harder for prochoice groups to find supportive Republicans, and for pro-life groups to find
sympathetic Democrats. Moreover, the constituencies for these groups
became increasingly partisan (Adams, 1997).
Party Unity
100
90
Score
80
House Dem
70
House Rep
60
Senate Dem
50
1970
1980
1990
2000
Senate Rep
Year
Source: Vital Statistics on Congress, 2001-2002. N. Ornstein, T. Mann , M.Malbin. Washington, DC. AEI Press. 2002. P.
173. Note: Data show the percentage of members voting with a majority of their party on party unity votes. Party Unity
votes are those roll calls on which a majority of a party votes on one side of the issue and a majority of the other party
votes on the other side. By definition the minimum average is 50.
The growing party polarization led to difficulties in the conventional
legislative process and an increase in unconventional policymaking (Sinclair,
2000). Legislative activity that could benefit or harm particular groups was
often rolled into continuing resolutions, inserted during conference
negotiations, or inserted during bargaining between party leaders and the
president. Party leaders were conditionally given a larger role in crafting
final legislation (Aldrich and Rohde, 2001).
These changes took on additional import when the Democrats
captured control of the White House in 1992 and then the Republicans took
control of Congress in 1994. In both cases, those interest groups with
agendas best realized by one or the other party came to recognize the
importance of maintaining control of the policy agenda by controlling political
institutions (Gais, 1996). When groups with strong ties to Democrats were
effectively exiled from the new majority’s leadership offices on Capitol Hill
(Gimpel, 1996), many reacted by increasing the level of their electoral
involvement (Biersack, Herrnson, and Wilcox, 1999). In each election cycle
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after 1994, Democrats narrowed the GOP majority in the House. In 2000,
the presidential, Senate and House elections were virtual ties.
Increasing partisanship coupled with narrow party margins created a
very different set of incentives for groups engaged in the electoral process
than had the relative stability of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ideological
and issue groups that once sought to support candidates of both parties had
to rethink their strategy because a single seat could change the majority.
There was a greater incentive for these groups to concentrate their resources
on those few seats that might decide control of Congress, or on the
presidential election.
This same logic did not apply to “pragmatic” groups, such as
corporations and trade associations, which had always provided support to
incumbents of both parties. Although GOP leaders increasingly pressured
these groups to be more active and more partisan, there were clear costs to
such activity should the Democrats win control of the House and maintain
control of the presidency. If anything, the new political climate created even
stronger incentives for pragmatic groups to give to incumbents of both
parties.
Organizational Learning
For incentives to alter behavior, groups may have to learn in ways that
run counter to long-standing decision rules and styles. It is not excessively
anthropomorphic to think about organizations “learning” in this way. Cyert
and March (1963) suggested that organizations learn from experience and
have a sort of memory (see also March and Olson, 1984). More recently,
Suarez (2000) has argued that businesses adopt political strategies based on
past experience, yet the lessons learned from past events may well be
inappropriate for the new political environment. Suarez argues that firms
learn most efficiently when a strategy fails, for firms will experiment in
response to failure and perhaps adopt a new default strategy if the
experiment succeeds.
Most of the literature on organizational learning draws on social
learning theory, which posited passive organisms responding to stimuli, and
acquiring responses that have reinforcing consequences. Yet it is possible to
think of organizational learning in a more active sense.
Cognitive
psychologists have viewed learning as a more active process, in which
individuals seek out information that is useful in building their schemata. In
the electoral arena, information is often readily available; interest groups
often have access to candidate and party polls, and may commission their
own polling to monitor the effectiveness of their activities. Groups are
embedded in networks that include others who are focused on learning what
works, and sharing that information (Martin, 1995). Moreover, some groups
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have implemented quite systematic assessment strategies to determine
which tactics work best, and which are less useful.
Of course, not all organizations will have an equal incentive to learn.
Some will have little reason to innovate or to adopt innovations from other
groups. Pragmatic corporations, for example, may find that PAC and soft
money contributions to incumbents are sufficient to ensure that their
arguments are heard during policy debates. Others may have found a
perfect match between their available resources and their campaign tactics.
But those groups whose agenda is best advanced by a particular party have
reason to adopt the most effective tools to influence the outcome of
elections. They also operate in a setting where learning can readily take
place.
The Diffusion of Innovation
Organizational leaders are not isolated as they think through their
options. Learning can occur rapidly across organizations when the system
contains people and mechanisms that encourage
cross-fertilization. Politics is filled with campaign The political world is
ideally suited
entrepreneurs who work together with interest almost
for innovations to
group representatives in networks that seem diffuse rapidly.
almost ideally suited to spread information. (For a
general discussion of entrepreneurs and diffusion of
innovation, see Mintrom, 2000).
Electoral
campaigns are rich in innovation, for many reasons. First, very large sums
are spent on consultants whose fortunes hinge critically on winning and who
therefore work hard to come up with new techniques to convince voters.
Second, campaigns attract large numbers of young, educated workers who
are also intensely committed to winning, willing to devote long hours to the
cause, networking with their allies in a common venture. Finally, because
campaigns center on communicating with voters, rapid advances in
telecommunications have made it imperative for campaign professionals to
keep up with what’s new.
As a result, the political world is almost ideally suited for innovations
to diffuse rapidly. Within ideological coalitions, there is significant exchange
of personnel.
Informal networks based on friendship, ideology, and
professional interest also help the spread of new campaign tools (Martin,
1995). Campaign finance disclosure laws, coupled with consultants who
monitor advertising buys and other activity, enable groups to copy
innovations made by other groups that may be outside of their own coalition.
For all of these reasons, any new innovation in interest group tactics is likely
to be quickly copied by other groups.
One example of such diffusion of innovation is the recruiting and
bundling activities of EMILY’s List, a PAC that seeks to recruit and support
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pro-choice, Democratic women candidates. EMILY’s List is best known for its
bundling of small contributions by its members to candidates it has endorsed
(Nelson, 1994). These tactics were learned from such organizations as the
Council for a Livable World, which developed the idea in 1962, long before
the FECA, but spoke about the tactic freely and publicly as a device other
issue groups might want to consider to expand their influence under the
FECA while adhering to contribution limits (Thomas, 1980). The tactic then
diffused -- first among organizations sympathetic to EMILY’s list, such as the
Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and WISH List (Rimmerman, 1994), and later
to groups as diverse as the pro-business Club for Growth and such Christian
Right groups as the Madison Project and Susan B. Anthony Fund.
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INTEREST GROUP TACTICS IN 2000
Percent of Total
The broad contours of group activity in the 2000 elections were quite
different from those of 1996. Most importantly, regular PAC contributions
and independent expenditures made up a significantly smaller portion of
overall group activity in 2000 than four years before.
Direct PAC
contributions to candidates increased from $204 million to $248 million over
this period, and contributions to party committees by PACs also increased,
from $31 million to $59 million. Soft money contributions to parties, most of
which came from interest groups or interest group members, increased from
$261
million
to
PAC Contributions as a Percentage of
almost
$500
million.
And
All Interest Groups' Hard and Soft Money
candidate-specific
Contributions and Broadcast Issue Ads
issue
advocacy
spending
on
50%
television increased
40%
from perhaps $50
30%
million in 1996 to at
20%
least three times as
10%
much in 2000. In
0%
sum, direct PAC
1996
2000
activity
in
1996
constituted
about
Election Cycle
Source: The Campaign Finance Institute
40% of all interest
groups’ spending on
hard and soft money contributions, independent expenditures and broadcast
issue ads. By 2000 the figure was roughly 25%. None of these numbers
includes the vast amount spent on direct mail, telephone, internal
communication and other direct voter mobilization techniques. As we shall
see, the growth in these activities has been highly significant and is poised to
become more so.
For the sake of our analysis, we shall return to the distinction between
pragmatic versus partisan or ideological groups – if only to explain why the
pragmatic groups will not be our focus in the report. Much of the growth in
hard money PAC contributions, and in political party soft money, did come
from donors whose contribution goals were pragmatic. As suggested earlier,
we would not expect the polarized partisan politics, or high stakes, of the
2000 election to have had a great impact on the decision calculations of
these pragmatic groups. Indeed, most pragmatic PACs behaved in 2000
much as they had in 1996. Smaller PACs often gave to the same candidates
and did not generally increase the level of their activity or the distribution of
their resources. Some larger pragmatic groups increased their soft money
giving noticeably, in response to party solicitations, but their soft money
giving generally mirrored the partisan split of their hard money contributions.
For example, AT&T increased its soft money giving from just over $1 million
in 1998 to more than 3.8 million in 2000, but it retained the overall 60%
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GOP share of its PAC’s contributions. Other pragmatic groups actually
increased slightly the percentage of their funds going to Democrats.
Lockheed Martin increased its soft money giving by nearly $1.2 million, and
the 42% of these funds that went to Democratic Party committees lowered
the company’s GOP portion from 67% to 60%. Nearly all large pragmatic
corporate and trade groups increased their soft money contributions or
began to give soft money (e.g., the National Association of Realtors), but the
decision to give more money was not generally accompanied by a broader
rethinking of the pragmatic givers’ approach toward elections – with the
exception of a few companies, such as Microsoft, that went from being nonplayers to players because of their newly discovered, large and particularized
reasons for pragmatic giving.
The situation was different for those groups whose policy agenda is
best achieved if one party controls government. For these groups, the 2000
campaign was the ultimate case of an election in which everything was at
stake. A few seats could switch party control of the House, and the
presidential election was forecast to be very close. Ironically, given the
results, the Senate was seen before the elections as a safer GOP bet, but a
few prescient observers thought it possible that the Democrats might even
win in that chamber. With the parties adopting increasingly divergent policy
agendas, much was at stake for groups on both sides of abortion, for
environmental groups, and for both sides of the health care debate. In an
especially close election, turnout was seen as a critical factor, and a handful
of House and Senate seats were seen as controlling the balance of each
chamber.
With high stakes and a rapidly changing political context, groups with
a high interest in party control will have an incentive to change.
However, it should be emphasized that organizational change
does not necessarily call for inventive, new forms of political
action. It did for some groups, as the explosion of televised
“issue ads” will attest. But for others, organizational change
meant a new emphasis on older techniques. Michael Baroody,
executive
vice
president
of
National
Association
of
Manufacturers (NAM), observed: “Our view is that when things
are moving that fast your recourse … is to go back to basics. Michael Baroody,
Executive Vice
Rather than try to keep following the changes, getting the President, NAM
basics right will help you deal with and adapt to whatever the
change is.”
BACK TO BASICS: MOBILIZING VOTERS
The most common tactical change by interest groups in 2000 was a
shift toward greater voter mobilization efforts. This tactical emphasis was
not unusual. When the NAM’s Baroody talked about “basics,” the example he
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used was an election in Kentucky’s sixth congressional district, in which
freshman Republican Ernie Fletcher defeated former Rep. Scotty Baesler (D),
who was seeking to regain his old seat.
While a number of factors
contributed, one Wall Street Journal article gave a great deal of the credit to
a grassroots voter mobilization effort among business people. (Hamburger,
2000)
Business of course was not alone. A number of groups focused on
expanding their voter lists, and some built networks to permit personal
communication with the people whom they had identified. Political science
research has shown that personal contact has a far greater impact on turnout
than phone calls and mail (Gerber and Green,
2000.
Note, however, that most of the
research so far has focused on non-partisan
messages.) Many activists share the perception
that personal contact is important, and have
adopted a “return to the grassroots” strategy.
Many of them see broadcast issue advocacy as
sometimes being counterproductive, activating
a group’s opponents as well as its supporters.
Service Employees’ International
(Magleby, 2001).
However, the return to the Union members mobilizing voters for
grassroots, and skepticism about broadcast, the 2000 election.
should not be confused with a Luddite view of
technology. Many of the organizations in our study used highly sophisticated
techniques, sometimes including the Internet, to target their audiences and
to get their messages across.
Labor
Several groups concentrated the bulk of their efforts on reaching their
own members and sympathizers, spending relatively less on advertising to
the general public than they had in the past. The AFL-CIO emphasized voter
mobilization in 2000, a major shift in emphasis away from the issue advocacy
of 1996. There is some evidence that Labor’s issue advocacy in 1996 did
reduce the victory margins of first term House Republicans (Jacobson, 2000),
but few of the targeted members lost and many analysts concluded that the
tactic was unsuccessful. In 1998, Labor reduced its emphasis on issue
advocacy and instead focused on expanding new mobilization techniques that
it had also first tried in 1996. Labor’s internal research shows these 1998
efforts to have been responsible for an increase in turnout among union
households over the previous midterm election (1994), that outdistanced the
shifts among other large voting blocs.
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In 2000, the AFL-CIO (www.aflcio.org) again focused
heavily on mobilizing union voters. The AFL-CIO did give
soft money to parties, and mounted a significant issue
advertising campaign as well, but a majority of its
resources went toward voter mobilization. Less than 25%
of labor’s $40 million in 2000 was spent for television
advertising (Biersack and Holt, forthcoming).
The
mobilization effort was impressive in the sheer number of
paid staff and volunteers who were involved. The AFL-CIO
deployed more than 1000 paid staff and many more volunteers to register
voters and built networks of personal contacts.
The magnitude of the other resources in the “ground war” was also
impressive. Organized labor reportedly made more than 8 million phone
calls in the 2000 campaigns, and sent out more than 14 million pieces by
mail, not including materials distributed in person by volunteers and paid
staff (Biersack and Holt, forthcoming). Unions also used e-mail to send getout-the-vote messages to 60,000 households, and provided fliers on-line for
activists to download and print at home. The AFL-CIO claims that more than
2 ½ million forms were downloaded and distributed in this manner.
However, Labor has always been able to put up impressive numbers
for these kinds of activities. According to labor union political directors, the
more significant shifts involved personal, face to face contact. According to
Steven Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, organized labor found -after field tests and follow-up surveys – that their communications have been
most effective when one union member talks directly to another, much as
the old-style political party precinct captains would do in the past. He
considers this approach to have been responsible for a significant increase in
participation among Labor households at a time when turnout in general
stayed flat. This increased the union household share of the electorate from
23 to 26 percent. But the program still needs improvement, Rosenthal said:
too much of the political organization disappears after Election Day when
local coordinators return to their normal jobs.
Labor unions also trained hundreds of members to run
for public office in 2000, the first time that Labor had sought in
a significant way to recruit candidates from within its ranks.
Skip Roberts, legislative director of the Service Employees’
International Union, (www.seiu.org) singled out this strategy -not only because it might elect people to office with strong labor sympathies,
but also because the campaigns have energized local members to participate
in elections. He cited examples of several state legislative campaigns in
which his union’s members were Democratic Party nominees and “we just
had, literally, hundreds of members as volunteers, because they weren’t
voting for some politician. It was someone they knew.” He called this
technique his “most exciting” effort for “getting membership involved.” The
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AFL-CIO’s president, John Sweeney, announced in December 2001 that Labor
intends to expand this program in 2002.
For some groups, personal contacting is the most
obvious approach given the nature of their daily work
activities. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC)
(www.nalc.org) is one such group. According to George Gould,
Assistant to the President for Legislative and Political Affairs,
about 96% of the letter carriers are members of the union and
these individuals tend to be highly interested in political activity. Their major
asset is a detailed knowledge of the communities in which they work. As
Gould noted, “the letter carriers know their territory, so they’re very valuable
in the campaign. And for a get out the vote operation, a letter carrier can
walk in and say, ‘That map is ten years old, that building isn’t there any
more’… [That will] save the campaign a great deal of effort and time….
They’re also very good on campaign phone banks. They’re comfortable with
people.”
NAACP
Most groups, unlike Labor, focused their mobilization
efforts outside their own membership, developing lists of
potential voters who were likely to be sympathetic to their
issues. The NAACP (www.naacp.org), for example, became
involved in electoral mobilization for the first time in 2000,
establishing a 501 c(4) organization – the NAACP Voter Fund.
The NAACP recruited Heather Booth, a longtime group
organizer and former director of the Women’s Campaign Fund to run the
Voter Fund. The goal of the Voter Fund was to mobilize African American
turnout in the 2000 elections.
The Fund concentrated its efforts on
infrequent voters – those who had voted two times or fewer in the past four
elections. It hired a consulting firm to identify 3.8 million infrequent black
voters in forty congressional districts that were either predominantly AfricanAmerican or had substantial clusters of black voting-age
citizens. The fund’s leaders believed that infrequent voters,
who are not often targeted, could still be reached with
communications of a type that have been losing effectiveness
when used on over-saturated frequent voters.
Although
frequent voters may be annoyed by receiving too much junk
Kweisi Mfume,
mail, and too many marketing calls, infrequent voters were President,
receptive to calls from an organization they were likely to NAACP
trust. The fund made an effort to contact each of these
potential voters as many as nineteen times – seven mailings, seven phone
calls, and five door-to-door contacts. The phone calls included some by
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volunteers and some pre-recorded calls by celebrities including Bill Clinton.
More than 40,000 volunteers were involved in the door-to-door canvassing.
The group also initiated a re-enfranchisement campaign to register potential
voters who were either serving time in jail or who had lost their franchise
because of a previous conviction. Overall, this voter mobilization campaign
cost more than $11 million, with a single, anonymous donor reportedly
providing a significant amount of the funding.
The Voter Fund put organizers in the field in more than a dozen states
where either the presidential election or a Senate election was expected to
be close. It also aired commercials in coordination with other groups
including the Sierra Club. The group ran more than 750 spots in the top 50
media markets, mostly attacking GOP Senate candidates. One controversial
spot attacked George W. Bush for opposing an expanded definition of hate
crimes, graphically suggesting that Bush’s position amounted to indifference
over the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr.
NARAL
The National Abortion Rights Action League
(NARAL) (www.naral.org) also stepped up the level
of its grass roots activity in 2000, devoting a large
portion of its budget -- as much as 80%, according
to its now former political director Gloria Totten -to field operations and mobilization.
A much
smaller amount was spent in 2000 on media – perhaps only 20%. The
group’s major focus was to build the National Pro-Choice voter files through a
Pro-Choice identification project.
(NARAL conducted this project in
cooperation with Planned Parenthood and through a grant from the Turner
Foundation). Totten said the effort added about one million people to the
voter file, bringing it to 2.9 million people. She said that the organization
spent a great deal of money and time to turn the file into a “workable tool . .
. that our affiliates could access quickly. It was utilized in the educational
and advocacy work, so by the time we got to the elections, it was really
ready to go”.
According to one person on NARAL’s political staff, election 2000 was
the first time the organization increased its communication toward a targeted
audience specifically to move voters. After developing its voter file early, the
organization later could target its efforts to competitive elections or regions
in which the issue of abortion was projected potentially to affect the decisions
of at least three percent of the voters. The group made independent
expenditures in thirty-nine targeted congressional districts to help Democrats
in tight races or open seats. NARAL also endorsed a presidential candidate in
a primary battle for the first time, choosing Al Gore in his campaign against
Bill Bradley.
Perhaps most interestingly, NARAL targeted messages to
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supporters of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader to try to
convince them that their support of his candidacy would ultimately help
George Bush get elected.
BIPAC
One of the most remarkable tactical shifts came in the
activities of the Business-Industry Political Action
Committee (BIPAC) (www.bipac.org). BIPAC had long
been a cue-giver to business PACs, but in recent years
had seemed somewhat staid – particularly when compared with the more
aggressive tactics of the small business community (Nelson, 1994; Biersack
and Nelson, 1998). In 2000, BIPAC commissioned a national poll to find out
where voters received political information. It found that 17% of the
respondents had heard something from a labor union regarding the elections,
but only 7% had heard anything from their employer. Yet the poll also
showed that 24% of workers thought their employers were their most
credible source of political information, compared with only 17% who chose
unions. This led BIPAC officials to believe that corporations could persuade
employees, if only they would communicate with them in a meaningful way.
BIPAC’s assessment was based on a significant rethinking of how to
act most effectively in a changing political environment. BIPAC’s President,
Greg Casey, said that hard and soft money contributions typically were used
to pay for mass communications that had lost much of their impact with
modern voters. Specifically referring to organized labor’s recent adaptations,
Casey said that he wanted to persuade individual business leaders to engage
in “conversations” with their employees, and to provide them with tools that
would make it easy for them to do so. This would be more effective than
relying solely on large associations to carry business’s message. The aim
was to use a messenger who had credibility with the workers, much as a
union might do by using a shop steward.
BIPAC encouraged print
communications and peer-to-peer efforts, but its most effective device
probably was the Internet program it developed for
Project 2000.
Under this program, BIPAC developed a database
on political issue information, including members’ roll call
votes on a wide variety of issues. BIPAC would then work
with a local business leader to help the leader pick issues
that were important for his/her own company or
community. These would form the basis for a tailored
scorecard or information packet.
They also would
persuade the local business leader to “buy in” to the
concept BIPAC was offering. With the local business
leader’s direct involvement, the information would be
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Greg Casey,
President, BIPAC
2002 The Campaign Finance Institute
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mounted on the corporation’s own website, with that corporation’s “look” and
“feel”. According to Casey, “the people who work at Randy’s Repair Shop
don’t care about me or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What they care
about is Randy.” The user would perceive what he or she was viewing as
coming from the local business, but the local business could not have
mounted the effort without BIPAC’s infrastructure.
In most corporations, the web sites were just the informational piece
of a larger program of grassroots mobilization. Casey described the activities
as “innovations” for BIPAC and its allies because the business community had
ignored grass-roots level political activity for fifteen years in favor of simply
making contributions. Today, he said, there is a recognition that elections
can be won with grass-roots activity. The major impetus for this change in
strategy was the recognition by people in the business community of
“changing political paradigms”: close elections in which control of the
Congress hinged on a few competitive races, and the likelihood that this
would not change soon.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
The Chamber of Commerce (www.uschamber.org) also
worked to strengthen its grassroots in 2000, although it
continued to spend money on issue ads and reinvigorated its
PAC. The Chamber’s executive vice president for government
affairs, R. Bruce Josten, noted that the Chamber sought to
“take resources and maximize them in what we considered to
be close races, if there was a defining philosophical difference between two
candidates, and that if it was close enough where one could make a
difference.” The Chamber sent out more than a million express advocacy
mailings to members (of either the national organization or of local chapters)
in twenty-five targeted House races and ten Senate contests.
The
organization also mailed thousands of voter tool kits to state and local
Chambers as well as to businesses that wanted to participate in the effort.
In addition, the Chamber expanded some of its existing programs, such as
the “Meet and Greet” program in which state, local or national Chamber
members meet with incumbent Congress members or aspiring candidates.
Part of the purpose was fundraising and part was to build enthusiasm and
support for members and candidates who were “friends” of the Chamber and
involved in competitive races. The Chamber expanded these meetings from
about 100 in 1998 to more than double that number in 2000.
Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE)
Citizens for a Sound Economy (www.cse.org) was formed in 1986 to support
“free markets and limited government.” In 1996, CSE focused its electoral
activity on television advertising. In 2000 the group had changed to
emphasize grassroots politics. Vice President for Public Affairs Martin Reiser
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said that the reasons for the change were first, to build
an effective and long-term grassroots network, second,
to engage in activities that enabled the institution to
grow. “We would run multi-million dollar campaigns,
whether they be voter education or issue advocacy,
and at the end of the day all that money had gone out the door and we
hadn’t built anything.”
After the 1996 cycle CSE decided to build a
grassroots network of free-market advocates and began to open state
chapters throughout the country. For the 2000 cycle the group focused on
the twelve states where it had state offices. According to Reiser, the group
ultimately sent two million pieces of mail, made one million phone calls, and
numerous precinct walks. In Florida alone the group had about 500
volunteers and did door-to-door visits in about 20,000 neighborhoods.
National Rifle Association
In each of the previous cases, a group changed its tactics to
place more of an emphasis on grassroots communications.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) (www.nra.org) had
always focused on direct voter contacts. In 2000 it increased
the magnitude of its efforts and the targeting of its
communications. This was part of a larger campaign that also
featured significant media buys and efforts to attract free media. In 1999,
the NRA aired a series of infomercials in the Midwest and in battleground
states, urging gun owners to join the organization. In the spring of 2000,
the NRA ran a series of issue ads trying to refocus the gun control debate
and draw momentum away from the Million Mom March.
During the fall campaigns, Charlton Heston did a highly publicized tour
in six key states, stumping for GOP Senate candidates. The NRA aired issue
ads in key states, and increased its contribution to party committees while
giving money to candidates in most House districts. But its major effort was
in contacting voters.
The NRA’s “Vote Freedom First” campaign was
designed not only to mobilize gun enthusiasts, but also to persuade gun
owners to vote gun rights instead of other issues. This was particularly
aimed at members of labor unions who also owned guns.
The NRA worked to build a voter contact list that extended beyond its
already considerable membership. It rented lists of hunting and fishing
magazine subscribers and built a list of licensed hunters, gun club members,
and others who might be sympathetic to the NRA agenda. As the election
approached, the NRA contacted these potential voters through mail and by
phone. The content of the messages varied by state and district. In many
cases, the NRA sought to convince union voters to support Republican
candidates. In several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Missouri and
Illinois, there is little evidence that the NRA’s efforts did much to persuade
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union members, but in West Virginia the specially tailored messages may
well have had an effect. A letter mailed to 30,000 members of the United
Mine Workers of America in that state focused not only on Vice President
Gore’s position on gun control but also on the environmental stances in
Gore’s book Earth in the Balance (1993), which the NRA argued would cost
West Virginia jobs in the coal industry. Many observers credit this campaign
with George W. Bush’s narrow, surprising victory in the state. Gore and
Bush tied among union members there, whereas pro-gun Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Bob Wise swept the union vote in an easy victory.
TAKING TO THE AIRWAVES
League of Conservation Voters
Deb Callahan
President,
League of
Conservation
Voters
Although many groups moved away from advertising and
toward voter contacting in 2000, not all groups made this
change. Some, like the League of Conservation Voters (LCV)
(www.lcv.org), stuck with their approach from the recent
past.
Specifically, LCV continued using independent
expenditures without moving significantly into issue
advertising. In response to the GOP takeover in 1994, the
League had adopted an independent expenditure strategy
targeting the “Dirty Dozen.” It continued this effort in 2000,
spending more than in past election cycles. The group added
a program to identify Environmental Champions of both
parties and to allow the candidates to use that label in their
advertising.
In general, LCV prefers independent
expenditures to issue ads because it takes a large budget to
run enough media issue ads to have an effect on a race.
Nevertheless, LCV has indicated that it may reevaluate its
stance in future elections. Because independent spenders
may not coordinate, or even talk to, the candidates about
strategy, LCV political staff members are beginning to wonder
about the effectiveness of their choice.
Planned Parenthood
LCV’s tactical continuity
was not normal for the
groups in our study. Most
interesting was the significant change in Planned Parenthood
(www.plannedparenthood.org), which had established its PAC
in the 1998 election cycle to go along with its 501(c)(4) taxexempt nonprofit corporation.
That year, the 501(c)(4)
organization is political activity mostly consisted of telephone
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Gloria Feldt
President, Planned
Parenthood
2002 The Campaign Finance Institute
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and direct mail communication with Planned Parenthood members on behalf
of congressional candidates. In 2000, the group added a new focus to its
previous activities, spending an estimated $12 million through its PAC,
501(c)(4) and “527” political committee, including $7 million on advertising
about the presidential campaign in ten states. In late September through
early October 2000, Planned Parenthood’s spending on advertising exceeded
the Democratic National Committee’s, helping those who supported Vice
President Gore to match the level of pro-GOP spending. One advertisement
featured Republican women decrying Gov. Bush’s views on abortion; another
featured a physician talking about the so-called “gag rule”.
Planned Parenthood was also active in “ground war” campaigns to
support pro-choice House and Senate candidates in targeted districts.
Among the key races were the Missouri Senate campaign, in which the
organization sent out 90,000 voter guides. A joint Planned Parenthood /
NARAL phone bank made 15,000 calls in Missouri late in the campaign. In
the California 27th House district race, Planned Parenthood spent $100,000
on direct mail, $20,000 on voter identification, and did four mailings
attacking the incumbent Republican, James Rogan. Nina Miller, Planned
Parenthood’s former political director, said that tracking polls showed that in
targeted districts and states the ad campaigns worked effectively to move
Republican and Independent women toward Gore and toward other
Democratic candidates further down on the ticket. Planned Parenthood
actually was more successful at moving GOP women voters than was NARAL,
which eventually switched to focus its effort on independent rather than
Republican women.
The move toward heavily pro-Democratic behavior in the election was
controversial for Planned Parenthood.
Many in the organization were
reluctant to become so strongly involved in partisan politics. Unlike NARAL,
the group had a “brand name” that for much of the public suggested a nonpartisan, public service type of organization. Some Republicans withdrew
contributions to the organization, although the precise magnitude of this
effect is difficult to estimate.
Brady
Campaign
(Handgun Control)
to
Prevent
Handgun
Violence
Handgun Control (www.bradycampaign.org)
dramatically increased its level of activity in
2000. According to Joseph Dennison,
director of state legislation, PAC spending
increased from $180,000 in 1996 to more
than $2 million in 2000. Previously the group had focused on
direct contributions to candidates. In 2000, Handgun Control
spent most of its money on independent expenditures in
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Sarah Brady,
Chair of the
Brady Campaign
to Prevent Gun
Violence
2002 The Campaign Finance Institute
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several targeted competitive Senate races as well as the presidential
campaign. The other significant change was the decision to become involved
much earlier in the election year in the use of issue advocacy. As Greg
Macias, the associate director for political affairs, pointed out, the decision to
focus on the airwaves reflected the group’s desire to promote its issue to a
target audience of suburban mothers who were not part of its existing
grassroots infrastructure. Interest groups evolve their electoral strategies in
response to what they observe in the political environment. Handgun Control
initially planned to run ads in May to establish the terms of the gun control
debate, and then to back off from this activity as the elections drew close.
Yet after observing the extent of activity of other groups and the likely
closeness of the presidential and several Senate races, Handgun Control
decided to run additional ads in early September.
Business’ Issue Ads by Newly Created Groups -Citizens for Better Medicare and Americans for Job Security
The business community did use the airwaves,
although most companies were reluctant to air issue
advertising on their own. Peak associations such as
the Chamber of Commerce aired more than $15 million in issue advertising in
2000, but the most interesting tactic of business appears to have been the
creation and funding of other groups that could air issue advertisements
without directly linking them to individual companies. Two groups attracted
considerable attention for their spending – Citizens for Better Medicare,
(www.bettermedicare.org) which was funded by the pharmaceutical industry
in an effort to shape the debate on prescription medication and cost control,
and Americans for Job Security, founded with the aid of the American
Insurance Association.
The precise identity of the donors to these
organizations have not been revealed, but the Washington Post reported that
major high-tech companies contributed to American For Job Security in 2000
at the strong behest of Trent Lott (Isikoff, 2000). Citizens for Better
Medicare reportedly spent $50 million or more on issue advertising during
1999-2000, but much of that was spent for advertising early in the cycle that
did not mention candidates (See CFI Issue Ad Report, A-8; Miller and Miller.)
A CBM staff person estimated that perhaps $15 million was spent for
candidate-specific advertising, much of it in districts where the message was
meant to counter the AFL-CIO’s.
Americans for Job Security spent
approximately $10 million, all on issue ads, most of which attacked
Democratic candidates and a few of which supported Republicans. The
corporations who funded these groups apparently did not want their names
on the ads’ bylines, but by creating new organizations (often called “shadow
PACs”) businesses have found a way to channel their resources into issue
advertising.
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INTERNET CAMPAIGNS
In 2000, many groups experimented with the use of the Internet and
e-mail as part of their campaign efforts. Some groups established web sites
that allowed visitors to contribute to the organization or its PAC, others
placed voter guides and other persuasive materials on their web site for
activists to download and distribute to friends and neighbors. Some groups
contacted their members through e-mail, and several groups sought to build
e-mail lists. The success of John McCain’s campaign in raising money
through the Internet suggested to many that the medium has potential, and
the low costs of Internet fundraising (especially compared with direct mail
solicitations) are attractive to many citizens’ groups.
The Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org) made an extensive
effort to communicate voter information through its own
website as well as through banner ad spaces on voter.com and
Lycos. The Sierra Club’s website featured its voter guide and
the banner ads brought visitors directly to the website where
they could easily access the guide. The voter education section
on the website featured state-by-state voter charts so that
visitors could “click” on their home states and access
environmental political information relevant to state and local
races. The organization also made available for the first time an e-mail
version of the Presidential Voter Guide that could be sent out on request.
Sierra Club also used the Internet to facilitate some of its other activities.
One of the new activities in 2000 was the use of broadcast voter guides –
taped commercials on particular environmental issues for targeted races.
The ads featured a request for viewers to come to the Sierra Club website to
review in more detail the environmental records of the candidates.
The NEA (www.nea.org) developed an email list of actual and
potential supporters in twenty-seven targeted congressional
districts.
This was mostly an effort to keep sympathetic
incumbents in office. The organization would collect email
addresses of potential supporters (usually through direct mailings and phone
calls) and then use the email lists to send education policy updates,
emphasizing the incumbent member’s activities. This activity started months
before the election. Closer to Election Day, the NEA sent emails with video
clip attachments of the presidential candidates speaking on education issues.
BIPAC used the Internet as part of its outreach to business. As
mentioned earlier, BIPAC created web pages for individual businesses, with
the company’s logo. This let the companies to provide information to
employees from BIPAC’s database of members’ roll call votes, after the each
company decided which roll calls was important to its business or location.
The company would appear as the source of the information sent out to
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employees over the company’s Intranet, but BIPAC established and maintain
the underlying database that made the whole effort possible.
Perhaps the most Internet-intensive organization in the
2000 election cycle was MoveOn.Org, which grew out of
an Internet campaign urging the Congress to abandon its
effort to impeach and remove Bill Clinton from office. The organization
started with contributions from individuals and foundations, but now solicits
money on its web site. Move On regularly contacted its “members” via email, and claims to have raised more than $2 million for Congressional races
in 2000.
The National Rifle Association’s Web site also allowed that organization
to collect contributions, and included streaming videos of Charlton Heston’s
exhortations. Research on Internet giving suggests that the NRA has done
especially well in this medium (Powell, Powell, and Wilcox, 2001).
Internet and e-mail campaigning is still in its infancy, and many
groups are innovating in this area. They are monitoring the efforts of other
groups, tracking their successes and failures. For example, the Chamber of
Commerce’s Internet strategy in 2000 was entirely a research and
development effort, as the organization tried to understand the potential and
limitations of this new tool. Many interest group leaders are skeptical of the
medium, but they are also beginning to test its usefulness systematically.
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WHAT HAVE WE FOUND?
INNOVATION, DIFFUSION AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING IN 2000
The 2000 campaigns showed how quickly changes in tactics diffuse
through the interest group community. The AFL-CIO’s focus on building its
grassroots capabilities in 1998 was diffused, through a great deal of personal
interaction, to other unions in 2000. NARAL’s focus on voter mobilization
was also inspired in part by the Labor model. On the business side, BIPAC’s
Greg Casey said that, “We came to the conclusion that organized labor had
recognized before anyone else the changing nature of politics in this country
and reacted correctly and put together a grass roots effort. If business was
going to be successful, we had to do the same thing. Project 2000 was
born”.
The way that supportive networks operate is clearest in the case of the
NAACP. As the NAACP built its new political arm, it relied on advice and
assistance from sympathetic organizations. Heather Booth, director of the
NAACP’s National Voter Fund, noted that “Handgun Control was in the same
building and we’d go upstairs and say, ‘Okay, is this how you did it’? ” The
organization also consulted with the Letter Carriers to make maps to guide
their contacting efforts, and partnered with the Sierra Club on some issue
advocacy.
Many of the organizations we studied also made an effort to learn from
their own experience, through formal
evaluations.
For example, the NAACP
commissioned Donald Green and Alan
Gerber – two Yale University political
scientists who have published important
experimental studies of the impact of
various voter mobilization efforts – to
determine which methods of contacting
Donald Green and Alan Gerber at CFI
seminar.
voters
worked
best,
and
in
what
combination. It also commissioned polls,
conducted focus groups, and received a precinct turnout analysis from the
National Committee for an Effective Congress.
A number of groups do polling to determine the effects of their
campaign efforts. The AFL-CIO, Club for Growth, Americans for Job Security,
NEA, NARAL, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, National Association of Letter
Carriers, and others, conducted some type of polling – in some cases
tracking polls to determine the impact of issue ads, exit polls to determine
which issues moved votes, and polls of their members. Focus groups were
also common, along with interviews of members, executives, and others.
The magnitude of these efforts varied from a few focus groups and a
small survey to a series of surveys in various regions and at various points
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during the campaign. Groups that run issue ads test them and gauge their
results in the same way as do party committees and candidates. More recent
efforts at grassroots mobilization are sometimes studied by focusing on
turnout in particular races or districts, and these studies vary in their level of
sophistication. Yet it is clear that actual research informs the decisions of
many groups, and that these organizations have formal mechanisms in place
that enable them to learn from past successes and failures.
PARTISANSHIP AND STRATEGY – FUTURE RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Everything we have discussed so far has been about the decisions
groups make to increase the level of their activities and shift the modalities.
Our initial impression was that the new
activities were associated with a An alternative possibility is that
heightened degree of partisanship individual groups have not become
within the active groups, stimulated by more partisan, but the system has,
by increasing the importance of
the stakes involved in the close battle groups and activities that used to
for majority control of the Senate and be less significant than they are
House. At this stage of our research, now.
we want to look further at whether the
individual groups in fact have become
more partisan. An alternative possibility is that individual groups have not
become more partisan, but the system has, by increasing the importance of
groups and activities that used to be less significant than they are now.
We plan to examine this issue in subsequent stages of this research.
For now, we share some preliminary ideas. Many groups that seek policies
most commonly associated with one political party have historically made an
effort to give to candidates of both parties. Pro-choice and pro-life groups,
groups that sought to protect the environment, to promote gun control or
gun rights – all have sought out candidates of the “other” party to support, in
some cases practicing “affirmative action” to find those candidates (Rozell
and Wilcox, 1996). In an election with close partisan divisions, with parties
increasingly polarized on many issues and perhaps group membership less
bipartisan than in the past, it seems likely that many groups would decrease
their bipartisanship. No matter how given members might vote on abortion
or clean air or gun control, they vote their partisanship to organize the
chamber, and that organizing vote has important consequences for each of
the groups’ focal issues.
The overall allocation of PAC contributions and soft money by these
groups does not show increased partisanship. NARAL directed 92% of its
money in 1992 toward Democrats, and 94% in 2000. The National Right to
Life Committee channeled 86% of its funds to Republicans in 1992,
compared with 83% in 2000. Sierra Club gave Democrats 97% of its money
in both election cycles, and League of Conservation Voters went from 93% to
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Democrats in 1992 to 87% in 2000. The NRA is the exception to this
generalization, increasing from 64% to Republicans in 1992 to 92% in 2000.
Yet these PAC totals understate the
change in two ways. First, many of these
PACs
occasionally
supported
vulnerable
candidates from the other party in 1992 but in
2000 gave nearly all of their cross-party
money to safe incumbents. More importantly,
in many cases the only effort on behalf of
candidates of the other party was a cash
contribution from the PAC, whereas voter contacting, issue Paul Jacob,
Fellow,
advocacy, and other efforts were heavily partisan. It does Senior
U.S. Term Limts
not appear that the close margins and party polarization led
these groups to abandon their token bipartisanship in 2000,
but it does appear that the more partisan side of their activity was conducted
at a far more intense level in 2000 than in years past. Of course, some single
issue and ideological groups will tend to pursue a single-party strategy no
matter how competitive the electoral environment. In some cases, such as
U.S. Term Limits, groups will focus much of their effort on party primary
nomination battles to try to help the more ideologically compatible
candidates. Paul Jacob of U.S. Term Limits noted that the organization
moved heavily in 2000 in spending on primaries (about 70% of all group
spending) and plans to increase its primary nominations activity again in
2002.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
In the 2000 campaign, a number of organizations dramatically
changed the nature and level of their activity. A great deal was at stake, and
many groups perceived that a small increase in turnout, or a shift in
preferences among undecided voters, could decide party control of the
House, Senate, and the presidency. Many groups, perhaps inspired by
organized labor’s tactics in 1998, shifted from a focus on advertising to one
of grassroots mobilization and networking.
Others favored large issue
advertising campaigns. Some also experimented with the Internet and other
new technologies, although the future of these tools remains unclear.
The move toward grassroots networking and voter contact appears to
have been due to several factors. Many activists believed that advertising
was costly and that the payoff for their scarce resources would be better at
the grassroots. The elections of 1994, 1996, and 1998 showed that turnout
was critical to party fortunes. Voter mobilization was therefore especially
attractive in an election that was forecast to be close. Yet other groups
increased their issue advocacy, in part because this tool helps to mold the
public debate, and persuade undecided voters.
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Little in the political science literature can help us understand why
similar groups might choose different tactics. In general, organizations that
emphasized grassroots operations had strong membership bases, while some
that focused on issue advertising had “members” who essentially were
contributors. But there is more to the story. The contrast between NARAL
(which did some independent spending but focused on voter contacting) and
Planned Parenthood (which moved from voter contacting to issue advocacy)
is interesting. The explanation for these different strategic decisions is not
immediately obvious. It may be that this reflects only the preferences, skills,
or idiosyncratic characteristics of group strategists. But it is also possible
that these decisions reflect the difference between NARAL’s and Planned
Parenthood’s resource bases.
NARAL has a long history of political
involvement. It therefore perhaps has less of a non-partisan “brand name”
and therefore may be less effective in mass advertising to convince
Republican pro-choice voters to defect. Planned Parenthood may well have
spent some of its reputation resource in the 2000 campaigns, and may be
perceived as more partisan in future elections.
A more important lesson from these cases is that campaign finance
rules and interpretations alter the types of resources that can be brought to
bear in electoral campaigns. The PAC system advantaged corporations,
which could more readily surmount the collective action dilemma than issue
groups, but it also limited the ability of companies and unions to use treasury
funds in politics. Soft money allows wealthy organizations to give to the
parties, either to gain access to policymakers or to bolster party fortunes, but
it does not allow ideological groups to define the debate. Issue advocacy
allows ideological groups to gather money from foundations or wealthy
donors, and to channel that money into messages that shape the policy
debate. This helps citizen groups avoid the “free rider” problem, because a
few important members can make a difference in the policy outcome and
thus have an incentive to participate (Olson, 1965).
Now, the legal framework has changed once again. The election of
2004 will be conducted under new rules for political party contributions and
issue advocacy.
This Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was the biggest
change to federal campaign finance law in more than twenty-eight years.
The law is bound to have a powerful effect on interest group campaign
strategies and tactics. The Campaign Finance Institute intends to study the
way groups react to the new law, as well as how they react to other
important changes as they occur.
Our guess is that the effect of the law will vary with different types of
groups.
•
Pragmatic groups will probably put less money into federal races
than they have in the past. Executives will face some pressure
to increase their hard money contributions. However, to the
extent that corporate treasury money was being given in
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response to requests, to preserve access, at least some of that
money will stay on the sidelines. Contrary to the “hydraulic
theory,” this is a place where the law is likely to make a
difference.
•
In contrast, we expect groups with partisan or intense policy
agendas to stay involved. The BCRA appears on first reading to
be pushing those groups away from broadcast electioneering,
but many of the larger groups in our study were moving in that
direction anyway. The big question is about groups that were
using broadcast advertising to a significant degree. The affects
will vary, depending on a group’s characteristics.
o
Groups that have small membership bases cannot readily
convert to voter mobilization activities. If they rely on
corporate or labor union money, they will have to shift
from radio and television to direct mail or telephone.
Alternatively, they could use ads to try to define an
election early, before the 60 day window, or else run
advertisements later that do not use a candidate’s name
or likeness.
o
Labor and business organizations funded from treasury
money will face the same media restrictions and
opportunities, but they can do electioneering through
PACs and are also well positioned to continue working on
voter mobilization.
o
Larger issue groups will have a range of choices. One
option, not stressed but well known to the law’s sponsors
and to election attorneys, is that a group might spin off
an unincorporated association. As long as this association
can raise money (in any amount, without limit) from
individuals who are willing to accept disclosure, and avoid
any indirect corporate or labor support, it will be able to
buy exactly the same messages (naming candidates
within 60 days of an election) as it could under the old
law. That is because all of the electioneering prohibitions
in the BCRA build on the basic corporate and labor
restrictions in current law.
Predicting the tactical choice specific groups will make is difficult,
particularly if the groups have a large membership bases, such as NARAL or
the NRA. They could continue electioneering by setting up unincorporated
entities, funded entirely by individual contributors, to buy TV ads. The same
organizations could, however, decide they wanted to emphasize targeted
communications, as the NRA does. (Corporate and labor contributions are
permitted for these, as they are for broadcast ads that do not meet the law’s
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definition of “electioneering.”) We predict that any specific group’s choices
will be based on its assessment of the political environment and its
resources, including its ability to shift individual contributions into a new
association. The law will not be a major impediment for these kinds of
organizations.
Of course, predictions may go wrong. We cannot be sure what will
happen, or why, until it does. That is why we are engaged in this project.
The current paper may therefore be seen as a baseline study. It is meant to
document some groups’ decisions to change during one of the last two
elections before the new law takes effect. The full project will take at least
two more elections to finish – one final election under the old system and the
first election under a new one. CFI will report regularly on the results from
this ongoing study, as they become available.
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Index of Organizations Mentioned
American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO): 3,8,16-18, 25,28
Americans for Job Security: 4,25,28
American Insurance Association: 4,25
AT&T: 14
Business-Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC): 4,20,21,26,27
Citizens for Better Medicare: 25
Citizens for a Sound Economy: 21-22
Club for Growth: 13,28
Council for a Livable World: 13
Emily’s List: 13
Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund: 13
Handgun Control: 24-25,28
League of Conservation Voters (LCV): 23,29
Lockheed Martin: 15
Madison Project: 13
Microsoft: 15
MoveOn.Org: 27
National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL): 19,24,28-29,31-32,35
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP):
4,18,28
National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC): 18, 28
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM): 15
National Association of Realtors (NAR): 15
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National Education Association (NEA): 26,28
National Rifle Association (NRA): 3,10,22-23,26-28,30,32
Planned Parenthood: 3-4,19,23-24,28,31
Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU): 17
Sierra Club: 18,26,28-29,31
Susan B. Anthony Fund: 13
U.S. Chamber of Commerce: 21,25,27
U.S. Term Limits: 30
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