But Politico reports that not only are state parties are having trouble competing with SuperPACs for funds, the PACs are taking over some of the traditional functions performed by state and local parties - like organizing voters.
The article suggests that the reason is that limits on campaign spending by individuals and groups have been found to be unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. In 2305 we will be discussing the campaign financing and the Citizens United decision. One of the consequences appears to be that SuperPACs may now be able to challenge political parties as the dominant political entity in the nation.
Click here for the article:
State party officials across the country say the explosion of money into super PACs, nonprofit groups and presidential campaigns has made fundraising more difficult. And some of those outside groups are starting to take over the traditional local roles state parties play, spending big on voter contact and outreach operations.
The effect is candidates who can be more beholden to national organizations or single-issue groups rather than state party leaders. That’s leading to a change in candidates and their beliefs and the issues that come up in elections and statehouses.
The GOP takeover of North Carolina in 2010 and 2012, for example, was bankrolled largely by the network founded by GOP megadonors Charles and David Koch and primarily directed through the nonprofit Americans For Prosperity. AFP’s former chairman, Art Pope, now serves as North Carolina budget director.
In Texas, two Democratic outside groups have essentially built a party organization outside the official Texas Democratic Party. Several Obama campaign veterans are running the group Battleground Texas as a field and turnout operation, while the Lone Star Project is doing opposition research and tracking against Republicans.
There is a greater incentive now for individual donors with deep pockets to fund these groups, not the state party. Will this indirectly suppress voter participation by limiting the ability of parties to fulfill this traditional function?
Aside from the Citizens United case - which unleashed the amount of money that independent groups can change - campaign finance reform laws passed in 2002 removed a major source of funds that parties had access to - soft money:
Ironically, until Congress closed a key campaign finance loophole in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance overhaul, most state parties were flush with cash.
The loophole allowed essentially unlimited funds known as soft money to be raised by the national political parties to be spent on party building activities and issue ads. Between 1992 and 2002, soft money fundraising for both parties skyrocketed — going from from $86 million to nearly $500 million. Much of that cash was spent through state and local party organizations.
In closing the soft-money loophole, the law created a complicated system of rules that state parties had to abide by when working on federal elections.
Under the rules, for example, state-party run phone banks for federal candidates had to be staffed only by volunteers. They could make calls only for presidential elections — not congressional races. Mail, campaign literature and get-out-the-vote operations around federal races were regulated by similarly strict rules, conditions and requirements regulating volunteer time, coordination with the national party and what kind of funds could be spent.
Those rules seem almost quaint now.
Proposals are being floated in Congress to rescind those rules - stay posted.
