Archive for the ‘Campaign Finance’ Category

The uproar that John McCain might not be palatable to conservatives, even though he is now building a substantial lead in the Republican primaries, has reminded me that conservatives and Republicans are not necessarily the same animal. Of course, conservatives have been railing about McCain’s left leaning for while, but I began to wonder, “What is this conservative element about? and “Why don’t they like McCain?”

Robert Novak, of the Washington Post, figures McCain needs to melt icy relations with conservatives by assuring them he will not raise taxes and would nominate conservative Supreme Court justices. On the other hand, David Kirkpatrick, of the New York Times, thinks that  conservatives are already warming up to McCain as the lesser of three evils (Obama or Clinton).

The bothersome parts of McCain’s positions seem to be that he

• May or may not support extremely conservative justices 
• Might want to raise taxes
• Opposes continuing President Bush’s tax cuts
• Opposes drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Preserve
  
• Opposes a ban on same-sex marriage
  
• Allegedly aided only the super-rich and weakened powerful Republican donors through his attempts at campaign financing
  

Besides those controversial elements, here is a comprehensive list of McCain on the issues, some of which contradict the positions under scrutiny.

One of the central and underlying issues seems to be the conservative desire to stack the Supreme Court with justices favorable to their beliefs. For example, Pat Robertson’s Christian  Broadcast Network offers complaints about a liberal-dominated court, including:

• They banished prayer and the Bible from our public schools.
• They raised a “right of privacy” banner, under which 43 million babies have been aborted.
• They overthrew sodomy laws, opening the door to same-sex marriage.
• They called for the removal of the Ten Commandments from courthouses across the nation.

Conversely, Bill Scher at the Huffington Post rails against the conservative supreme court agenda,  lamenting the following:

• Limiting the rights of taxpayers to challenge government spending on religious education
• Let the EPA slide on the Endangered Species Act
• Allowed corporations to spend lavishly on political ads
  

So what makes a conservative tick? Here some research that suggests a politically conservative mindset might be shaped by psychological factors such as the following:

• Fear and aggression
  
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  
• Uncertainty avoidance
  
• Need for cognitive closure
  
• Terror management

Food for thought.

People commonly say that elections are determined by who has the most money. A look at the data gives some interesting and at times surprising insights to this conventional wisdom. Consider the following three items:

1. There are several websites that seem to do a pretty good job of tracking and presenting campaign finances and related issues. For example,

opensecret.org

The Campaign Finance Institute

CQ Money Line

Campaign Money

National Institute on Money in State Politics

There’s always a lot of talk about who has the most money, but what does it really mean?

2. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in Freakonomics suggest how much money a candidate has doesn’t matter all that much. They say,

Here’s the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are. . . Some politicians are inherently attractive to voters and others simply aren’t, and no amount of money can do much about it.

So a different perspective on campaign war chests might be that they are more of an indicator of who is going to win (and who is going to want to get paid back in some form). That is, people donate to candidates that they think will win, and the more a candidate looks like they will win, the easier it is to get donations.

3. And finally, on a different angle, don’t you have to be rich just to run? CNN Money gave a nice story a few days ago on how much money the candidates have, which is summarized below. The article provides an additional breakdown as well as an analyst’s evaluation of the candidate’s holdings.

Net Worth of Candidates