How Dialing for Dollars is Undermining our Democracy — And How to Stop It
Our broken campaign finance system has taken central stage in this election cycle in a way that we haven’t seen in recent years, as voters on the right and the left share a growing disdain for the state of money in politics. While candidates are talking about the issue nearly daily and voters’ frustration is palpable, the prevailing debate misses the full picture.
As a political donor and a former Congressional candidate, I’ve seen the problem of money in politics firsthand. In 2014, while running for Congress in upstate New York I raised more than $2 million from thousands of donors and contributed additional millions to my campaign, and my husband and I continue to support candidates and political organizations across the country. As one of the few individuals who has been a candidate, a large donor, and an advocate for reform, I’ve had a unique perspective on how political fundraising happens in America, why it’s so harmful, and how we might realistically improve the system.
The dominant critique of money in politics focuses on the outsized role large donors have on who can win office and how they use that influence to lobby for policies that go against the public good. It’s a familiar and frustrating cycle: Wall Street investors dish out generous contributions and are rewarded with lenient regulation. Real Estate tycoons support candidates in return for generous tax breaks, and oil executives spend millions to protect subsidies and block new environmental protections.
But just as corrosive as the role large donors play in elections and in the halls of legislatures is the enormous and largely unseen opportunity cost of campaign fundraising. While raising money has always been part of American politics, never before have our elected officials been caught in a system where they are encouraged to act more like telemarketers than lawmakers, trapped in soulless call rooms, spending hours a day pleading for contributions. The current mechanics of fundraising require that candidates devote an unbelievable amount of time to chasing contributions above everything else: speaking with their constituents, reading legislation, or interacting with their colleagues.
For those of us seeking reform, a pragmatic approach must address not only Citizens United and the power of large donors but also the day-to-day mechanics of how fundraising happens. The good news is that a handful of states and cities across the country are models for how we might do things differently.
Most political fundraising today takes place not at glitzy events but in “call time” — shorthand for political telemarketing. (You can watch Representative Steve Israel vividly describe the experience, here.) As with all telemarketing, it’s a numbers game. Finance staff prepare an endless stack of call sheets for candidates with potential donors, bundlers, and event hosts. Getting someone on the phone requires calling through cell phones, homes, and office numbers of prospects — often a stranger, or if the candidate is lucky, a classmate from college — and attempting to create a quick personal connection before soliciting support. It is a painful process of interrupting unexpecting donors in meetings and during meals, often to their great annoyance, or leaving voicemail after voicemail for veteran prospects who screen calls. “Double dialing” or “triple dialing” is when the candidate and his or her staff churn through call sheets at the same time in order to get a donor on the phone more quickly.
Unfortunately, we’re not talking about a few of hours of call time here and there. A presentation from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2013 suggested that new members schedule four hours a day of fundraising in call time and additional hours for meetings and events. In reality, for candidates in competitive districts on both sides of the aisle, the number is higher, and representatives in safe districts who aspire to leadership devote much of their time to raising money for their colleagues. Both parties even have their own call rooms near the Capitol, where on any given day you can find representatives from across the country, squeezed into cubicles with their staff, dialing for dollars. As a candidate, I had the frightening privilege of inhabiting one of those cubicles during my trips to Washington. There were few moments more depressing than seeing what victory looked like: a future of endless call time in a room that greatly resembled the moving company call center I worked at in college.
Why so many hours in call time? It boils down to math. If you’re a candidate looking to raise $2 million in a year, and assuming you only fundraise on weekdays, then you have to raise over $7,500 every single day. That’s not easy. Even with a strong online fundraising program, getting to that number means churning through a lot of high-dollar prospects, and that means many, many hours of call time a day. Unlike in presidential campaigns, where viable candidates have an army of bundlers who raise on their behalf, the mechanics of fundraising are even more time consuming for those in lower office whose donors expect a personal touch.
For members of Congress, the DCCC’s recommended schedule is not really a suggestion. Incumbents are expected to raise their “dues” to the party, and candidates in competitive districts have their fundraising tracked on a weekly basis. In my own race, despite the fact that I was able to significantly self-fund, almost every interaction with the party and party leaders centered around money. “How is this quarter looking?” “What did your opponent raise?” “How many hours of call time do you have scheduled this month?”, were frequent questions from party leaders. “What are you hearing on the campaign trail?” “What issues are resonating with voters?” “How many community events did you attend this week?”, were not questions I often heard.
Whether or not you believe representatives are directly influenced by donors on specific votes, there is a significant opportunity cost of candidates spending hours a day talking to millionaires and hearing their priorities and perspectives on policy. Every hour candidates spend on the phone with donors from across the country is an hour that they are not speaking with their constituents, going to community events, and hearing about the day-to-day reality of Americans who are unable to write a big check. Every hour that party leaders spend urging their candidates to raise more money is an hour that they are not building a compelling platform to help Americans and communicating that message effectively across the country.
Believe it or not, most candidates and elected officials I’ve met decided to run for office out of a sincere belief in public service and their ability to make life better for their constituents. But because of the increasingly bleak reality of fundraising, their day-to-day reality has drifted significantly away from service and toward a relentless grind of hitting quarterly fundraising goals. I do not mean to suggest that lawmakers are to be pitied, particularly those who have opposed campaign finance reform or not fought hard enough for it, but the opportunity cost of this system becomes clearer each day as more decent lawmakers retire, citing their frustration with fundraising as a significant factor. And it is increasingly difficult to recruit strong candidates to run for office, at any level, once someone lifts the veil and informs them of their future hours in call time. We will be caught in a downward spiral if the best and brightest are deterred from public service and are represented by the few who can stomach — and excel at — the grueling pace of fundraising.
Let’s imagine a different world for a moment, a world in which instead of retreating to the call room after every vote, our elected officials spent those four hours a day meeting with constituents, interacting with colleagues, or reading the legislation they’re voting on. Imagine a world in which fundraising events were $25 and $50 affairs with neighbors coming together to meet their representative, instead of lawyers or lobbyists gathering in a conference room to support a candidate from across the country. Imagine a system in which talented and diverse Americans from every walk of life could realistically consider running for office and would want to do so.
That world isn’t a pipe dream. Cities and states across the country have built models of how campaign finance can work differently. States like Maine have created citizen funded election systems used — and praised — by both Republicans and Democrats. Cities like New York and, and just last year, Seattle have enacted similar programs. In New York, for example, every small contribution to city candidates is matched 6:1 by a citizen funded election program, which bolsters small contributions — online and offline — and enables a completely different style of fundraising. Candidates running for Mayor and City Council have told me how they can do the work of meeting constituents and fundraising at the same time by holding house parties and meet and greets, a far cry from call time at the Congressional level. In Seattle, I was proud to support a voter referendum last year that created a citizen funded election system in which every city voter is now eligible to receive four $25 vouchers to contribute to a local candidate of their choosing. It’s a creative experiment in how we can elevate the voices of everyday Americans, and voters supported the measure at the ballot by nearly two-to-one.
While we cannot shy away from how terrible our current campaign finance system is on many fronts, this is a very promising moment. Poll after poll shows that voters are frustrated, and this year, they will have the opportunity to vote for reform ballot initiatives across the country, from Washington state to Miami. There’s good reason to believe that they will pull the lever for change.
That is the realistic roadmap for reform: racking up wins at the state and local level to build pressure for federal action while proving that there are better models for campaign fundraising. But the solutions we pursue — and the rhetoric we use — cannot just be about “getting money out.” We must build a system of citizen funded elections that recognizes the mechanics of fundraising today and frees candidates from the call room. Only then can we diminish the incredible opportunity cost of fundraising that’s undermining our democracy.
