The topic of this episode is “How do legislators raise money to run for Congress?”
My guest is Weston Wamp, who is the Founder at Millennial Debt Foundation and a Senior Political Strategist at Issue One. He hails from Tennessee, and ran for Congress in 2014. If his last name is familiar to you, that is because he is the son of former member of the House Zach Wamp, a Republican who represented Tennessee’s 3rd congressional district from 1995 to 2011. Weston, like his father, knows a thing or two about how fundraising has come to be a major part of getting to Congress and staying there. And I should add that he is the host of the program, “Swamp Stories,” which has examined the effects of fundraising on Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
Weston, welcome to the program.
Weston Wamp:
Thanks Kevin. I’m a big fan of yours and a big fan of AEI’s.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for saying so. Let’s start at the very beginning. Let’s start with, someone wants to run for Congress. It’s a subject you know well, you’ve been there, you’ve done that. It’s expensive, isn’t it? So how does somebody who wants to run for Congress, raise money to pay for all the things that you have to pay for?
Weston Wamp:
It is expensive, for sure. It’s also changing more rapidly than it has in decades. So if we go back enough decades ago, it wasn’t expensive to run for Congress. Then for several decades it was, and it still is. In fact, it’s probably more expensive than it’s ever been, but you’ve got more ways of financing a campaign. I’ll explain what I mean, now maybe than ever. And the 2020 cycle showed us several more of these examples, but speaking generally or speaking from experience, because I suppose that my experience was the most general way and the most traditional way to run a serious congressional campaign. I ran in a primary against my incumbent, ran twice, but a head to head race in 2014. And to give you some idea that was in a mid-size metropolitan area in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Tennessee’s third district. I raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $650,000, which in our part of the country was enough to run a serious race.
Weston Wamp:
For most people running. It is a race to major donors who are usually thought to be capable of giving a thousand dollars or more, but truth be told if you’re a challenger and you’ve got to get a lot of money fast in order to be taken seriously. You’re really looking for the federal maximum, which is $2,800 per election. So of $2,800 for the primary, $2,800 for the general and a husband and wife could double up, they each could give. So you’re a lot of times in a primary, which is that first race you’re running in. You’re really trying to identify to build up a base of fundraising, your low-hanging fruit, so to speak, how many people do you know who can afford to give you $5,600? That’s $2,800, theoretically from a husband and a wife. And then can you compel them enough, not only can they give, but can you compel them to your vision enough to raise money that way?
Weston Wamp:
What has changed pretty dramatically, and I think act blue on the left, and when on the right are the best ways of explaining this, is that you have now seen a small dollar donor revolution of sorts where a lot of candidates raise a ton of money, 10 20, 30, 100 dollars at a time that didn’t really exist prior to about a decade ago. And it is changed the landscape dramatically, but you’ve got to have some type of viral media or personal fame or notoriety in order to go that route. So you can be a normal person who creates a crackerjack campaign video to get started and millions of people view it and you raise money that way, but the most traditional way as a candidate for Congress to get started, particularly if you’re running against a challenger is going to have to be, you’re going to go find high net worth individuals, business owners, usually, who are willing to give thousands of dollars to your campaign.
Weston Wamp:
And then if you’re in an open seat environment, PACs can give at a larger denomination, political action committees, corporate ones, trade unions, et cetera. And that’s certainly a component of a congressional race in an open seat. But when there’s an incumbent, odds are that the vast majority of PAC money is going to go to support that incumbent’s reelection.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. Now, for the person who reads about running for Congress and the newspaper, scrolls through a stuff online, there’s an impression out there that there are these mega donor characters, the late Sheldon Adelson, for example, when you read stories about it, he gave millions of dollars towards campaigns and elections. And you noted that there are federal limits on how much somebody individually, or with their spouse, can give directly to the candidate. Can you cast some light on how somebody could spend millions of dollars like we read the paper?
Weston Wamp:
Well, it’s a great followup. I arguably should have gone there in my first answer, but there’s probably an important distinction to be made as to why I didn’t. So first of all, I’ll take a step back and say that every congressional district is different. They come in different categories. And in my mind, and when I think about the structure of a campaign, the type of funding needed, you need to think of congressional districts not as 435 homogenous, 750,000 person groups, but they’re all different. And running a campaign in them is different. The amount of money required is different based on whether they’re a rural area, an urban area, it could be counterintuitive sometimes that a rural district might actually cost more than an urban one. I could give you some examples of that. And in some cases you’ve seen some of the strongest grassroots efforts.
Weston Wamp:
Dan Crenshaw in Texas is a great example of this. Some of the best grassroots efforts from a relatively unknown candidate, AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a great example of this. In New York city and Houston with Ocasio-Cortez and Crenshaw, you see two examples of candidates who really did extraordinary things at a grassroots level, even in major markets. Now here’s the answer to your question about millions of dollars. So you as a candidate can go and raise money $2,800 at a time, or you can raise money in larger denominations from $5,000 is the limit from a PAC, or there’s now small dollar strategies where you can advertise online with the hoping that you’re maybe spending $3 to raise $10, but Citizens United brought along the Super PAC era. Now, as a candidate, you can’t go raise Super PAC money. That’s actually against the law.
Weston Wamp:
Now it happens more than it should because there is some gray area, but the way that Sheldon Adelson and he is an example on the right, George Soros is one of the popular people who’s been picked on and the left for having contributed massive amounts of money to Super PACs. Now you could, and I think as is the case practically speaking, if you’re considering a run for Congress or for the Senate, you could go in advance and talk to people who might fund Super PACs, but the IRS, but certainly the Supreme court’s intent here was that if a Super PAC intervenes into a campaign, that campaign is not meant to coordinate in any way with that Super PAC, either on fundraising or on messaging, but the Supreme court Citizens United ruling and other rulings right there in that same timeframe in 2010, basically provided for unlimited amounts of money, either from companies or individuals or trade unions, trade associations, basically any organization can give an unlimited amount of money to a Super PAC.
Weston Wamp:
And that’s how you got this era, where in theory, you could run for Congress and raise $50,000. But if you’ve got a super rich friend who wants to run basically a shadow campaign, they can do that. And they can put as much money into a Super PAC as they want. And they can basically run it like a campaign and many Super PACs do. But the letter of the law, I said the IRS earlier, really this is the FECs domain. The FEC would say that you should not be coordinating, even though that’s become kind of a inside joke in the world of politics, because it’s so evident that there is in fact coordination between campaigns and Super PACs.
Kevin Kosar:
All right, so let’s move along to the next step of the Mr. Smith goes to Washington scenario, so he wrangled some folks and he gets enough money raised and he’s fortunate enough to win his primary. Now the general’s loom. What does he do then? Does he go back to the same sources for new money for the general election? Does he have to tap new sources? And do you have to stay within your own state’s jurisdiction to raise money, either in the generals or the primaries?
Weston Wamp:
Yeah, so I’ll answer the last one first. You don’t have to stay within your state’s jurisdiction. You can take money from anybody who’s a US citizen. Anybody in the country can give those maximum contributions that I defined earlier. It’s $2,800 per individual, for both the primary and the general. So what would normally happen, let’s take a generic example in upstate South Carolina. Midsize market, there’s a lot of markets like that. I think it’s a lot of times easiest to understand congressional politics through a single market congressional district. What I mean by the single media market, where you’re only campaigning in one immediate market. And so in upstate South Carolina you’d be doing that. And it would be expensive, but not unreasonably expensive in a mid-sized market to run a congressional campaign, particularly a primary. So let’s say that you did it with a half a million dollars.
Weston Wamp:
You raised a half a million dollars the old fashioned way, and the old fashioned way being really, find as many business people who will give a thousand or more dollars and you win your primary. And now you’re in a general election. And the answer to your question is you would definitely go back to those same donors, because at this point they will have felt like you won the first of two necessary victories to get to Congress. So they would be very likely to double down so to speak, and give you another donation, at least as large as the first one they gave you, unless they’ve already hit the max.
Weston Wamp:
And then another phenomenon begins, and this would be different. This might be the limitation of my example in Greenville. It might’ve been better actually, if we used a low country like Charleston, South Carolina, where a district might more likely be competitive across party lines, because at the point at which you’re the nominee, but usually not prior to becoming the party’s nominee, you’re going to have the congressional committee, either the NRCC on the Republican side or the DCCC on the democratic side, is going to step in and provide all sorts of resources.
Weston Wamp:
They’re going to bring competency to your campaign and fundraising. They may even dispatch somebody to come and train your staff. You’re going to have funding provided to you, there are a whole lot of different ways, old school and new school tactics that are used to bring as much funding to bear in a relatively short period of time between the primary election and the general election.
Weston Wamp:
But you get a huge tailwind. And Kevin at that point, the PACS, particularly the ones that have a leaning one way or the other, in terms of either conservative or liberal bent, they’re much more likely to intervene in a general election scenario. So the game definitely changes. You’re going to go back to your first donors. Let’s say you raised a half, a million dollars in the primary, pretty safe to assume you could raise that half a million dollars again, but then the big money sets in, and particularly in a race that’s going to be contested across party lines. And that’s where a half a million dollar primary campaign can quickly become a two, two and a half, $3 million general election campaign because there’s funding coming in from so many sources, not to mention the possibility that a club for growth or some type of an outside group that commonly will come and pick a favorite, pick a side in a congressional race, will do that and air their own television radio, online ads and support of a candidate.
Kevin Kosar:
Briefly, I’m going to comment before I move on to my next question, I think that’s one thing that our listeners may be surprised about. The specter of somebody in some state far away who happens to have very deep pockets and decides I’m going to try to influence an election in somebody else’s home state or home district by dumping a lot of money into a fundraising vehicle, Super PAC or something like that, and possibly tip the balance. That’s really something. So our candidate gets through the general election and heads to Washington. There, he doesn’t get any respite from fundraising, does he? Is it time to thank those nice people at the congressional campaign committees who helped him out?
Weston Wamp:
It is. I would qualify that by saying, this is where every district is again different. And if you get elected, let’s say that you got elected in 2020 as a Republican. 2020 was a good cycle for Republicans in Congress. And so you may very well unseated a Democrat. You go into 2022 with nothing certain, that’s very different than a Republican who may have gotten elected in an open seat in a very Republican district. The only reason I point out the difference there is because there is a completely consuming need to fundraise for those members of Congress who are in these most competitive districts. And if you’re a less competitive district, across party lines, the real challenge would only come from a primary. And it’s so unlikely in congressional politics that an incumbent loses a primary that I would say that those who on the right and the left, who represent relatively safe red or blue districts do sleep better at night than those who are in contested races, because it’s basically constant fundraising.
Weston Wamp:
Now, you were leading me towards one of the most insane and arcane practices in Washington. And that is the expectation that members of Congress basically work as roto-dialers on behalf of their political party. And I mentioned the DCCC or the NRCC, but the way that this works is really from your freshman year on, and the amount of money you’re expected to raise only increases with seniority, but based on the committee you’re placed on, you have an expectation, a bounty on your head and amount of money that you’re supposed to raise, not for your own reelection, but for the national campaign committee of your party. And it creates first of all, a lot of resentment with members. I mean, the great irony here, Kevin is the members hate this. They didn’t sign up to be professional fundraisers when they first ran for Congress, but they quickly realized that this is how the game is played.
Weston Wamp:
And very few try to even weasel their way out of it. Most of them just accept it. This, this is called party dues. There’s dialing for dollars is what a lot of people refer to the process as being, it’s actually against the law to fundraise on government property. So as crazy as this is, but the DCCC and the NRCC actually have right there on Capitol Hill, on private property, they have little cubicles set up with phones for members of Congress to go in there and call donors back home, or potentially even donors in other parts of the country. A lot of times, these are donors who may have an interest in legislation that could come through the committee that member of Congress on. And it creates a really perverse situation where members of Congress are raising large amounts of money for their political party, really, to get this monkey off their back.
Weston Wamp:
The last thing I want to clarify here, because often this is missed when we talk about party dues. A lot of the focus is usually rightfully on how much time this consumes and it’s time that’s away from serving the people. It’s time that’s not legislating. It’s not solving the country’s problems. It’s not doing casework, but it’s fundraising. And that’s fair. There’s been a huge, overwhelming estimates about the loss of man hours due to fundraising. What I see is almost a more acute problem is that the amount of money that the NRCC or the DCCC, these partisan campaign committees can take from a donor is far more. It changes every cycle. It’s tens of thousands of dollars though, Kevin. So it’s orders of magnitude larger than members of Congress are candidates for Congress can take into their own campaign committees.
Weston Wamp:
And so what this means is that a member of Congress who, let’s say he needs to raise $250,000 to remain in good standing within his party, he will be able to go raise that money and as much as $50,000 at a time, whereas you can only raise $2,800 at a time for your campaign. And so this is one of those believe this or not moments. It is commonplace in Congress that an influential member of Congress will have a real big dog business person, multimillionaire, maybe a billionaire back home, who every two years is willing to stroke, not a $2,800 check for their reelection, but is willing to stroke in the name of their member of Congress, a $50,000 check to the national campaign committee of their party in order to free this member of Congress from part of their responsibility to fundraise. And you can just imagine how unhealthy that relationship could become between that billionaire donor and the member of Congress who’s just trying to raise his dues to remain in good standing within his party.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, I recall a few years ago, organization that you are part of, Issue one partnered with an organization I used to be part of, R Street Institute. They issued a report, it was Mary Anne Kerinder and Michael Beckel who wrote a report. And one things that touched on was that members, and this is something Issue One has done a lot on, members of Congress also raise money for the parties for the sake of earning committee chairmanships. Isn’t that right?
Weston Wamp:
Yeah. There are some, in fact, the podcast that I host at Issue One, it’s called Swamp Stories. One of the very first episodes we did revisited this arms race, so to speak, and its origins in the nineties. I think it’s really the nineties that Democrats alleged it’s when Gingrich came to power, this also is counter-intuitive, but there is some belief that what you’re describing and that is that your ability to fundraise for the party actually leads to the likelihood of you, not just getting a good committee assignment, but potentially even becoming a chairman. But when on the Republican side, term limits, not in terms of how long you can serve in Congress, but limits on the number of years you can serve as a chairman of a committee, when they were put in place, it actually created this almost unintended consequence of races, you would know, okay, well, that person is going to term out as the chairman of the appropriations committee.
Weston Wamp:
And so there’s this battle royale, from a fundraising perspective, of who that wants to be the chairman of the appropriations committee can raise the most money to curry the most favor within his party’s leadership to then have an inside track, to take over a major committee. And that is obviously, for obvious reasons, leadership on the left and the right, tries to disguise what’s really going on here. Because it’s a bad look and both sides know it’s a bad look, but it has become the tradition that this is how the NRCC and the DCCC, the two national campaign committees, this is how they derive a lot of their funding. They have managed to design a system wherein our elected representatives, it doesn’t so much work this way on the Senate side, but on the house side, our 435 elected representatives function as professional fundraisers. And you can imagine because of the power bestowed upon them within their positions, that they’re quite effective fundraisers because they’ve got a lot of leverage.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. And different committees and committee chairmanships have different jurisdictions over which they see. If you go work on the house committee on administration, which kind of oversees internal operations of the house of representatives and the legislative branch support agencies, that’s not a very good position for raising money because you’re not overseeing the regulation or direction of any private sector actors. On the other hand, if you’re on the committee that has oversight over the banks, well, you’re in a different spot. Now, let me talk a little more and ask you about a term you used earlier, which was dark money. What is dark money? I guess it would contrast with light money. And is it friend or a foe of the member of Congress?
Weston Wamp:
Well, great question. Sort of a two-part question. First, the history of dark money goes back at least to the election of Teddy Roosevelt. So dark money has existed in American politics. I would put a disclaimer to say that dark money’s definition has changed throughout time, depending on what loopholes were being abused in order for, this is I guess the key part of the definition, in order for money spent to influence a campaign or an election, being undisclosed. So that’s the concept of dark money is basically money that is meant to influence an election, but is not known by the voting public. The system is 100% in my opinion, without a doubt, bad for the American people, no matter your party affiliation, or if you don’t have one, it has been a long-standing American principle. The Supreme court has been pretty consistent that there ought to be disclosure of those who seek to influence American elections with money, whether or not dark money benefits candidates, or particularly incumbents is probably a more complicated answer.
Weston Wamp:
I think some would say that it could benefit them because there are a lot of nefarious creatures and frankly, on both sides of the aisle, very wealthy Americans who may have a vested interest in a certain person keeping their seat, and they can put money into their reelection without their identity or their business’s identity being known. But honestly, in campaigns, sometimes I watched this play out two years ago, three years ago now when Marsha Blackburn and Phil Bredesen were running in a very high profile and extraordinarily expensive Senate race in Tennessee, as I remember it, there was more outside money 501c4’s and Super PACS. There was more money spent outside of the two campaigns then was actually spent by the campaigns. And at times it created a messaging challenge where you could tell that the Blackburn campaign or the Bredesen campaign was trying to drive this message.
Weston Wamp:
And then there’s tens of millions of dollars coming from outside groups that are either conflating or confusing or even driving a different message altogether. So I don’t think dark money benefits anybody. It certainly does not benefit us the voter, the citizen. But I think we’ll find in time that the proliferation of dark money, which we’re seeing right now, we had a historic amount of dark money in congressional Senate and the presidential race in 2020. I think we’re going to realize it’s unsustainable. If it does benefit one side or the other, it will only benefit them for one election. And the other side will find a way to gain the system better. That’s why this system ultimately needs to be fixed.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. For sure. We do see in the run up to election, these mysterious organizations with very chirpy sounding names, like People For a Better America…
Weston Wamp:
That’s right.
Kevin Kosar:
Cropping up like daisies. And then when you try to figure out who’s in charge of them and who works there it’s all very difficult to do. So let me toggle over to my final question. All this fundraising, all this money chasing, how does it impact governance?
Weston Wamp:
Well, I think the two are connected. So let me just step back very quickly to clarify one thing on dark money. You asked about dark money. I defined it very broadly as money that comes into elections that’s not disclosed. It primarily comes through one type of transaction in the last couple of election cycles, and the transaction is that donors will give money to 501c4 nonprofits. Most people are familiar with the term 501c3, which is a true tax deductible nonprofit. And 501c4 is different, but it is a very effective vehicle through which political donors have realized they can give a donation that is not going to be disclosed under the auspices of advocacy. And there is no cop on the beat, so to speak, that’s preventing that 501c4, which usually the entity that has the pretty benign sounding name that you referenced, that 501c4 then transfers the money to a Super PAC.
Weston Wamp:
And the Super PAC is required by federal law to disclose its donors. But in this case, it would only be disclosing well, we got a million dollars from citizens who love good government. Well, who the heck is citizens who love good government? Oftentimes it’s the 501c4 that due to its IRS status is not required to disclose its donors. The loophole that’s being abused is that 501c4s are not supposed to engage in politics as their primary purpose. But that primary purpose part of IRS code is not being enforced by anybody. So that’s actually the mechanics of how dark money works. What does all this mean for governance, is awful. There is no upside and rarely can you say with absolute certainty, regardless of your political perspective, there is no upside in the role of money and politics. And I mean that frankly all the way to the $2,800 donor, from there to the million dollar Super PAC donor, none of this is upside.
Weston Wamp:
Now we at Issue One don’t believe you’re going to take money out of politics. It’s been in it basically from the very beginning, but I just think we are best served by being sober and honest about the fact that there’s no real good in it. And all the transactional possibilities and expectations are fraught with downside. It’s just getting worse. And really you can see it almost as a mathematical equation. In the same way that a $2,800 contribution comes with a potential conflict of interest, you had better believe that a million dollar contribution to a Super PAC in support of a candidate comes with massive conflicts of interest or certainly potential ones. And then the issues like dialing for dollars, this notion that members of Congress would have to pay a certain amount or raise a certain amount of money to stay in good standing on their committees.
Weston Wamp:
This is insane. It’s insane because it conflicts our members of Congress. It’s insane because it wastes their time is demeaning to the institution is demeaning to even just the most basic definition of representation. So all of this is bad. I say that I get maybe a contrarian perspective from a Republican, but in my whole life around politics, my dad first ran for Congress in 1992. He was elected and served for 16 years, beginning of 1994. I never saw, and I’ve never experienced even as a candidate myself, money in politics being good for governance.
Kevin Kosar:
All right, Weston. Thank you for helping us understand how legislators raise money for election and reelection.
Weston Wamp:
Thanks, Kevin, enjoyed it.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Elaine Allen and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress by Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TunIin. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging @AEI. We hope you have a great day.
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