Financing candidates’ campaigns with public dollars has been largely prohibited in California since 1988, when voters enacted a ban by passing Proposition 73. Prop. 73 also placed restrictions on incumbent officeholders’ use of tax money to send newsletters and mass mailings, which the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office said at the time would save taxpayers $1.8 million.
“Keeping government spending under control is hard enough,” the late Joel Fox, then president of the California Tax Reduction Movement, and Dan Stanford, one-time chairman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, said at the time. “Imagine how much harder it will be to keep politicians from spending more tax money on the most important thing in their lives — getting elected and reelected.”
Their point still applies today.
Should Prop. 4 pass, it’s not hard to imagine that limited taxpayer-provided resources would be diverted from public safety services as well as schools, with some funds even ending up in the hands of extremist candidates, from “Communists or members of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Under Prop. 4, taxpayers could be forced to support candidates whose positions they oppose on moral grounds and justifiably feel they have been coerced to finance a political system they would prefer to stay out of. For some, it would exacerbate their already low trust in political institutions while increasing “the perception of self-dealing” by powerful insiders.
To hear supporters tell it, public financing of politics will counter the “increasing costs of political campaigns,” which “can force candidates to rely on large contributions from wealthy donors and special interests,” giving those donors and interests “disproportionate influence over governmental decisions.” But this is hope over reality. A recent federal General Accountability Office report to Congress looked at various public financing programs found no hard evidence to support the theory.
Supporters also tend to ignore the greater opportunities for grift that open up when taxpayers are dragged in to finance politicking. New York’s Public Campaign Finance Program, launched four years ago, “appears to have allowed unscrupulous candidates and consultants to corruptly obtain taxpayer funding for campaigns,” says the Federalist Society. In one instance, a Democratic state assembly candidate from Queens “allegedly used fake donors and forged signatures to obtain over $160,000 from taxpayers for his campaign.”
The candidate lost the primary election, gaining only 6% of the vote. “The apparent hijinks surrounding his campaign,” the legal group says, caught the attention of the federal investigators.
Prop. 4 is not the first effort in recent memory to establish a public campaign-finance scheme. Sacramento passed legislation in 2016 that allowed a “public officer or candidate” to spend or accept public funds “for the purpose of seeking elective office if the state or a local governmental entity established a dedicated fund for this purpose.”
The public-financing provision of the law was challenged in court and the plaintiffs won. So now supporters are trying to get in through another door, this time a ballot initiative.
While the ban on taxpayer campaign finance doesn’t apply to several of California’s largest charter cities that, unlike general law cities, are not bound by the state election code and have some form of public funding, it seems most voters don’t want Prop. 4 — 53% say they will vote no while only 42% say they’ll support it according to a PPIC survey. That’s a gap that’s too wide to close by Nov. 3, but another defeat won’t stop the activists who want taxpayers to fund politics. They’re patient and they’re going to keep probing the defenses until they find a weak spot.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.