Daily Herald opinion: The practical struggle for relevance: Campaign finance picture shows the challenge of being taken seriously
Our Russell Lissau’s campaign finance update for the November election last Sunday painted a grim picture for Republican candidates at the state and federal level in Illinois. Even more important is the grim picture it forebodes for American politics broadly.
First, consider the immediate circumstance. As Lissau reported, Democratic candidates are overwhelmingly better fortified financially than Republicans, with many of their coffers swelling with $1 million or more. For the GOP, only one candidate reports having saved more than $100,000.
In such a setting, Republican candidates cannot hope to keep pace with their opposition in getting their message out to voters through public appearances, online and broadcast advertising or other avenues. As a result, in the manner of a vicious circle, potential donors are holding onto their money, which only deepens the candidates’ predicament.
College of DuPage political science professor Melissa Mouritsen described the situation in chilling terms.
“This little cash so late in the game,” she said, “means few are taking them seriously.”
It is troubling enough when a candidate in even one race is so irrelevant that he or she is not taken seriously. When the condition applies to a large body of candidates or even an entire party, that is a disturbing commentary on the state of our politics and the health of our democracy.
Nor does the situation involve simply a lack of money. To an even greater extent, it involves the ability of some candidates to amass too much money, often from sources with much to gain from political favor. In such cases, the vicious cycle works in reverse, steadily expanding the war chests of candidates with an already decisive edge.
Even before the 2010 Citizens United decision threw open the doors to unrestricted political donors and donations, many political observers fretted about the influence of money in politics. Sixteen years later, the situation is reaching a state of crisis.
This crisis is exacerbated by another political factor — this one, too, enabled by a compliant Supreme Court seemingly indifferent to the quality of American self-government. It is the remaking of political boundaries that allows a party in power to tilt voting outcomes in its favor, commonly known as gerrymandering.
To be sure, the Trump-shackled Republican Party suffers from certain self-inflicted ailments related to failures on traditional issues like guns and butter. But even discounting those, gerrymandering and all-but-unrestricted campaign fundraising have combined to put Republicans in Illinois in a life-or-death struggle for relevancy.
This is not exactly a surprising or new observation, and its opposite is abundantly present in states like Republican-entrenched Florida, South Carolina and many more. But what is surprising is that more candidates of both parties are not rebelling against the conditions that so threaten the health of our political system.
The solutions to gerrymandering and financial inequity among campaigns are not simple, and likely demand the difficult and complicated intercession of constitutional amendments. So, it is understandable that politicians avoid the complex, ugly work of producing systemic change and instead shift their messaging toward topics that involve people’s lives more directly and immediately.
But it also should be obvious, as Republicans in Illinois offer ample evidence, that getting those messages out — not to mention getting them across — is growing more difficult by the year. At some point, and we urge candidates to make it soon, we’ve got to begin building more prominent messages about the fundamental scaffolding required to take seriously discussions of those direct and immediate issues.