and the clean election frontier in Maine

AUGUSTA–As snow flecks the graceful, green dome of the Maine State House, the political dust from the November election begins to settle down below. Politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and journalists are beginning to assess the impact of the state’s first publicly funded legislative campaigns. The Maine Clean Election Act was the first law in the nation–enacted by ballot initiative in 1996–to provide this option for would-be legislators. Maine’s experience may suggest what’s in store for Massachusetts when its similar Clean Elections Law goes into effect for the 2002 vote. Some observations from the Pine Tree State:

1. The sky didn’t fall. Despite sharp warnings from its critics, public funding worked relatively well, though there were a few discombobulations. No neo-Nazis or other fringe folk were elected or even sought office with the aid of public funds. And it wasn’t that hard to get this financing. Only 50 contributions of $5 were needed for House candidates to qualify, and just 150 for Senate hopefuls. House candidates who had opponents received $1,141 for the June primary and $3,252 for the November election. Senate candidates received $4,334 for the primary and $12,910 for the general election. Candidates could get up to twice these sums in “matching funds” if non-publicly funded opponents outspent them.

Half of the senatorial candidates and 30 percent of House candidates campaigned with public funds. A survey of over half the publicly financed candidates by Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, the organization that had shepherded the initiative to victory, found that 55 percent were “very satisfied” and 45 percent were “satisfied” by the public funding system. “Nobody said they weren’t satisfied,” according to George Christie, who managed the initiative and is now board chairman of Public Campaign, a Washington, DC-based organization promoting Maine-style campaign reform at the state and national levels. Another survey–by the state Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices, which managed the new system–also revealed contentment among publicly funded candidates. “On a scale of one to five, we’re getting between four and five,” says attorney William Hain, who heads the commission’s six-person staff.

2. Democrats and Republicans were helped or hurt equally. Public financing had been pushed by “progressive” groups, which made Republicans suspicious. But in practice, the system favored neither party. In Senate races, GOP candidates went clean with as much enthusiasm as their Democratic counterparts; about half the candidates of both parties chose to take public money. The Republicans picked up three seats in the Senate, which is now tied at 17 members for each of the major parties, with one independent. In the House, Republicans shied away from public money. “They took a philosophical stance” opposed to elections paid for by taxpayers, says Brian Whitney, a GOP legislative aide. House Democrats were more enthusiastic about public financing, but no one is giving clean elections funding the credit for their eight-seat gain, since there always are a lot of other factors in election success.

3. More candidates took the plunge into politics. Many observers do credit public financing for a vigorous campaign season. Contested primaries were up 40 percent in 2000. “I wouldn’t have run without it. It freed me up to deal with the issues,” says John Ford, a first-time Republican candidate who almost beat judiciary committee chairman Sen. Susan Longley, a Democrat, in her mid-coast district. Term limits will keep Longley from running again in 2002, so Ford feels he’s in an excellent position to capture the seat next time.

Longley was also publicly funded, as were 45 percent of the women who ran for the Legislature this year. “It’s fabulous,” Longley says of public campaign money. “It made me a better candidate. My focus was away from fund raising and toward my constituency.” As judiciary committee chair, she was uncomfortable, she says, with all those past donations from lawyers, bankers, and real-estate interests.

4. Incumbency still matters. With the help of public funds, several first-timers beat incumbents or well-known politicians. In the biggest upset, newcomer Republican Edwin Youngblood knocked off Democratic taxation committee chairman Richard Ruhlin in a Bangor-area Senate district. In a suburban Portland House district, Susan Hawes, a Democratic community activist with a small child, a husband on disability, and no health insurance, beat traditionally financed Ernest Greenlaw, a Republican who had previously served seven terms in the Legislature. Despite these upsets, nearly 90 percent of incumbents were returned to office. Of the 37 House and Senate incumbents running with public funds, only one lost his re-election bid. Of the 37 publicly financed challengers, four won and 33 lost. In open races, about as many candidates won using public campaign funds as lost.

5. “Clean” candidates fared about as well as “traditional” candidates. Much to the chagrin of those who turned down public funds, the nomenclature of “clean” and “traditional” has come into vogue to distinguish candidates who take advantage of public financing from those who fill their campaign coffers the old-fashioned way. But there is little to distinguish the two groups in terms of electoral success. Overall, 53 percent of clean-elections candidates won their contests, as did 53 percent of traditional candidates.

6. Clean elections may have helped reduce the flow of money into politics. The final verdict won’t be in until all the post-election campaign finance reports are made, but the role of money in legislative elections seems to have been reduced. The matching funds available to publicly financed candidates encouraged even their traditionally financed opponents not to exceed clean-election spending limits. Four out of five clean-election candidates got through the campaign without need of additional matching funds, and not a single candidate required the full quota of supplemental money. Besides the public-financing provision, Maine’s Clean Election Act also limited contributions to any candidate to $250 from any person or group, down from $1,000 from individuals and $5,000 from political action committees and other organizations. In a couple of Senate districts the total money spent in the general election dropped from the $100,000 range in 1998 to about half of that in 2000.

7. “Independent expenditures” proved to be a loophole. In the past, when special interests could give directly to all candidates and in higher amounts, so-called independent expenditures had not been much of a factor. But last year there was an increase in spending by advocacy groups to promote their favored candidates but without the candidate’s approval, most notably by political party committees, unions, and business groups. By the time of the election, $100,000 of these expenditures had shown up in campaign-finance reports, and more may be reported later. This spending often came at the very end of the campaign, when it exacerbated another problem of the new system.

8. Election-eve campaigning was hard to keep fair. The Clean Election Act requires that sizeable contributions and expenditures in the last days of the campaign be reported to the ethics commission within 48 hours, so that matching funds being held in reserve by clean-election candidates can be released in response to 11th-hour spending by their opponents or outside groups. But this requirement counts only business days. Plus, commission staff, who could authorize use of the funds by fax, were not answering the phone over that final campaign weekend, some candidates allege. Thus, some publicly financed candidates didn’t have permission to use their extra funds until it was too late to spend them.

These implementation problems were not entirely unexpected. “It’s as problematic as I thought it would be,” grumbles Sen. Beverly Daggett (D-Augusta) about the law. She was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful federal lawsuit to block the Clean Election Act. But Daggett’s negativism didn’t stop her from tapping public campaign coffers for her own successful re-election campaign.

9. How public financing will work in the 2002 governor’s race is still unclear. In Maine, as in Massachusetts, it will be 2002 before statewide elections go clean. But here, it will only be in the governor’s race. Maine has no lieutenant governor, and the other constitutional officers–attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, and state auditor–are elected by the Legislature. Even so, public financing for the gubernatorial election may be insufficient unless the law is changed. Because Gov. Angus King, a popular incumbent, spent little money running for re-election in 1998 against token, underfunded opponents, the formula in the Maine Clean Election Act may allow a candidate for governor as little as $700,000 in public funds–not enough for a competitive campaign against estimable opposition. “There does need to be an adjustment to that,” admits clean-election proponent Christie.

There probably will be enough money available for a higher level of funding. With a $2 million annual legislative appropriation, funds from a $3 clean-elections check-off on the state income tax form, $4 million now in the bank, plus interest, Hain expects to have $9 million to $10 million forcandidates in 2002.

10. The use of public funding will grow. With one clean election under the state’s belt, even skeptics are showing interest. “It’s a known quantity now,” says Christie. Whitney, the Republican aide, reports that when new Senate Republican leader Richard Bennett spoke to the state GOP committee after the election, he said one thing he learned from November 7 was: “Run clean.”

Maine politics are small-scale, almost amateurish, next to those in Massachusetts. Part-time citizen-legislators receive only $18,000 over two years as their base pay. Compared to the notorious partisanship in Boston, politics in Augusta remain relatively tranquil and polite. Comparisons between the two states ought to be made warily. Still, with public campaign-financing laws that are so similar, it just may be that as Maine goes, so goes Massachusetts.

Lance Tapley is a freelance writer in Augusta, Maine.