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I’ll admit to taking guilty pleasure from two highly significant miscalculations of this year’s election cycle: the infusion of gazillions of corporate dollars to sway voters, and efforts to (ahem!) “true the vote.”
All those SuperPacs, with their own consultants and PR “experts,” mainly succeeded in muddling campaign messages with a constant din of ads that frequently worked against their favored candidates.
A lot of their money was wasted—and not just on inconsistent messaging. Broadcasters have to sell time to candidates at a discounted rate; they don’t have to offer that favorable rate to independent entities, which didn’t get much bang for their bucks.
More consequentially, super PACs and 527s nationalized elections to an unprecedented degree. Unhappy state party chairs, who initially welcomed the prospect of big bucks flowing into their coffers, have found their own influence and control considerably diminished. (It’s the Golden Rule, fellas: He who has the gold, rules.)
When Citizens United was decided, there was considerable glee among Republicans, especially, who felt—not without reason—that the ensuing flood of dollars would mostly benefit them. Many of the political people I know on both sides of the aisle believed a virtually unlimited supply of corporate money would assure a Romney romp to victory and grease the numerically probable Republican takeover of the Senate. Neither happened.
Bottom line: If a candidate is gaffe-prone, clueless or generally unlikable—or has a message voters reject—campaign cash alone usually won’t fix that. Money can buy a lot of lipstick, but as a general rule, if people decide your candidate’s a pig, lipstick isn’t enough.
Another tactic that backfired was an unprecedented effort by the GOP to suppress the vote.
This year’s national strategy joined the long-standing and utterly bipartisan efforts to game the system with which we are all familiar. Despite politicians’ pious assurances that “every vote counts,” Republicans and Democrats have long colluded to construct a system in which many votes really don’t matter.
Votes for state and local offices probably make a difference, more or less, but increasingly, thanks to gerrymandering and winner-take-all allocation of Electoral College votes—votes for president and many other offices really don’t.
In this year’s presidential election, Hoosiers who voted for Obama might just as well have flushed those votes down the nearest toilet; whoever wins the state takes all of Indiana’s 11 Electoral College votes. Even in razor-thin elections, where the win is only by a point or two, votes for the loser simply don’t count.
The presidential votes of a Republican in Massachusetts or a Democrat in Indiana won’t be reflected in the Electoral College results. (A couple of states allocate their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of the state’s popular vote—the Constitution permits states to make that decision—but Indiana and most others don’t.)
In this election cycle, there was an effort to erect even more daunting barriers to exercising the franchise, by restricting the number of polling places, and/or limiting the hours polls were open so voting would be more inconvenient for people with jobs or without cars, or by requiring all sorts of documentation that older, poorer folks and minorities are less likely to have.
Republicans and Democrats alike predicted that these measures would hurt Democratic candidates. Instead, these transparent efforts at suppression created a backlash, strengthening the resolve of voters in the targeted constituencies, who turned out in large numbers.
The law of unintended consequences bites.•
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Kennedy is a professor of law and public policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. She blogs regularly at www.sheilakennedy.net. She can be reached at skennedy@ibj.com. Send comments on this column to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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