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Jennifer A. Steen

Jennifer A. Steen is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College and the author of Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections.

Sarah Laskow interviewed Steen on February 6, 2008.

In general, how do you think voters perceive self-financing candidates? Is it an asset or a liability?

I think that, in general, it’s neither, and sometimes it’s both. Which is sort of a convoluted way of saying it’s a wash. It also does depend on the candidate in question, but what I’ve found from looking at public opinion surveys, or talking to pollsters for candidate clients who are willing to let me know what they found, is that efforts to make it a liability for self-financers fall flat. Voters do not buy the idea that there’s something unethical and horrible about buying an election with your own money.  That’s very frustrating to people who run against self-financed candidates.

On the other hand, some self-financed candidates like to run on a platform of saying, “I’m independent of the special interests, and no one can buy me.” Voters do not tend to buy that. Some may believe it, but it does not influence their overall favorability or the way they evaluate the candidates. It doesn’t provide a boost to a self-financed campaign.

We looked at the records over the past year and saw that, while Romney is the only [contending] presidential candidate left who loaned money to himself, a number of candidates that didn’t get much traction — [Mike] Gravel and [Dal] LaMagna on the Democratic side, Tommy Thompson and Duncan Hunter on the Republican side — also loaned themselves tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. In one case, one million dollars.

Who did a million?

John Cox. He was an Illinois businessman who was running for the Republican side. I was wondering what you thought about why we see these candidates loaning themselves money but not top-tier candidates, like [John] Edwards?

Well, I’m sure you know that John Edwards self-financed his campaign for United States Senate. That’s how he got himself into office, but, as is typical of the handful of self-financers who manage to get themselves elected, they rarely self-finance subsequent bids.

Once you’re in office, especially if you’re running for reelection to the same office, it’s easy to raise money. Everyone wants to be friends with a congressman or a senator, right? So it’s just not hard.

In Edwards’ case, I suppose that once he was a U.S. senator and once he was a credible candidate for president in 2004 that he graduated to the top tier where he was actually able to persuade people to contribute money to him.

Somebody like newcomer John Cox — is it surprising that he wouldn’t be able to raise money? That’s not shocking, and it’s not shocking that he wouldn’t be able to gain any traction. You don’t just run for president right out of the gate. Some people have tried, but it certainly takes more than one million dollars to be taken seriously, and much more than that to have a shot at success.

Another thing we saw was that some Democratic candidates who did get some traction, like [Chris] Dodd and [Bill] Richardson, donated to their campaigns, but they stayed within [the] campaign finance limits [that apply to the general public]. For instance, Dodd gave $4,600. That’s different than giving tens of thousands of dollars.

In my opinion, that doesn’t even count as self-financing. I wouldn’t call that self-financing. If it’s below the contribution limit, they’re not doing anything that any other citizen can’t do. You said it was Dodd and who else?

Dodd and Richardson, and [Dennis] Kucinich gave himself a small amount of money, as a candidate-to-candidate donation. It was above the limit; it was around $10,000, but it wasn’t a large amount. It was a donation, as opposed to a loan.

One might differentiate Kucinich from the other fellows. I suspect that Dodd and Richardson are the type of guys who give the maximum donation to their preferred candidate for presidential candidate every four years. So this year, they happen to be their own preferred presidential candidate. I don’t really put that in the same sphere or category as someone like Mitt Romney, who has reportedly self-financed $35 million on this campaign.

Now, Kucinich — I don’t know [what] the form of this donation was; perhaps you know whether it was a cash donation or maybe an in-kind — I certainly have seen lots of candidates, especially before BCRA [Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002] when the limit was $1,000, do that all the time. They would pick up their own expenses, especially when they were out on the campaign trail. They would pay for a meal. The little stuff would end up adding up to more than $1,000.

I don’t get the sense that that’s what you’re talking about with Kucinich. It sounds like he just wrote himself a check. That’s in a different league from somebody who gives several hundred thousands or a couple million dollars. It’s small potatoes.

It’s very common among congressional candidates to self-finance at that modest level above the limit of what you can give to somebody else, but really not making a difference in the campaign at all. It’s very, very common for congressional candidates to contribute $5,000 or $10,000 early on to cover minor expenses before the fundraising has really gotten going. Or, often, they feel like, “this is what I can afford to put into my bid, so here you go.”

What about candidates like [Rudy] Giuliani who do have significant assets? It seems to me like he could have given his candidacy a boost and yet he asked his staffers to work without pay.

Maybe Rudy Giuliani saw the writing on the wall. I don’t know how much you’re contemplating he might have been able to contribute.

I don’t know. I was just talking to someone who found it sort of shocking and maybe unfair that, here’s a [candidate] who’s pretty well-off who’s asking his staff to go without pay for, I guess, the greater glory of himself.

I personally agree with that. If you’re asking the people who work for you to make a sacrifice, maybe you ought to make a sacrifice. Nobody has to work for free; any of those people could have declined to work for free, so that was their choice of how to “spend” their money that they weren’t earning. I don’t know if I would have done it. I might work for free for a candidate, but probably not for a candidate who’s not willing to make a similar investment in himself. It suggests that Giuliani knew what was going down, that he knew self-financing was not a good use of his money.

Here’s a technical question that you might know about. If candidates loan money to a campaign rather than donate it, but they don’t pay themselves back, can they write the loan off as a loss on their tax returns?

No, they cannot. The loan converts to a campaign contribution.

There aren’t too many well-known examples of self-financing candidates in presidential races, but you studied congressional races. How successful do self-financing candidates tend to be? We sort of talked about that, but I wondered if there’s anything you could say about if they meet success.

They have a remarkably unsuccessful track record. The overwhelming majority of them lose their campaigns. Noticing that is what got me interested in studying self-financing as a phenomenon, because it seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom about big campaign spending being able to buy an election. It’s just not true.

Putting millions of dollars into a campaign can only lead to victory if the product that’s being sold has some sort of appeal to voters. A lot of self-financers are not that appealing. I think probably a bigger problem for them, though, is that they’re amateurs. They’re usually newcomers to the political scene, and they just don’t know what they’re doing. So they waste a lot of money, spend it unproductively, flush it down the toilet.

There certainly are exceptions. We’ve already mentioned Senator Edwards, who was able to leverage a personal investment in his campaign into a victory in 1998. There are several others like him, but, as a percentage of self-financing candidates, the number of winners is very, very small. It’s not a good way to get elected to office.

What would need to happen for someone like, in the past, [Ross] Perot or [Steve] Forbes, or, now, [Mike] Bloomberg — who keeps saying he’s not going to get in — to win the White House?

Well, that’s a good question. Money isn’t everything. I think that a major obstacle that would confront Mayor Bloomberg is that he’s not a member of one of the major political parties. There are lots of people who are really hoping and wishing that the time is right for a third party or for a movement of independents, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of American voters do identify with one of the major political parties and are very reluctant to defect to an independent or to the other party. There still are folks who are loyal Republicans and loyal Democrats. That’s a huge disadvantage right off the bat for someone like Bloomberg, despite the kajillion dollars he might be able to put in.

It was a problem for Perot. Perot might have done better if he were willing to run for a major party nomination.  A huge number of voters were simply off the table from the outset. 

Someone like Steve Forbes is just a classic example of a very low quality candidate, and you can spend all the money in the world, but people are still not going to buy what you’re selling.

The analogy I love to use is New Coke. Coca-Cola, when they introduced New Coke in 1985, they put a ton of money behind the advertising and the promotion for New Coke, but people just didn’t want to buy it. So self-financers are like New Coke. Sometimes you just prefer the classic!

When we talk about this, I’m using the term “self-financing candidates” vaguely. I’m wondering what your idea is of what that means.

That’s actually something I grappled with when I was writing my book: How was I going to define who’s a self-financing candidate and who’s not? What I decided was that, rather than having a stark category where you’re either in or you’re out, was to talk about self-financing at different levels. Some people put zero dollars into their campaign. They are, unambiguously, non-self-financers.  I had another category called minimal self-financers, and that’s like what we were talking about earlier, with Dodd and Richardson. Fifty-thousand dollars was the cut-off for my definition of minimal self-financing. I felt like I did have to differentiate them from people who put in zero, but that the amounts they were putting into their campaigns were really trivial.

I defined extreme self-financers using the criteria that are in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Anybody who self-financed enough to potentially trigger the millionaire’s amendment in BCRA — which is $350,000 in the House and, then, in the Senate, there’s complicated formulas depending on state population — but basically anyone who self-financed enough to trigger that, I classified as an extreme self-financer.

That’s where I drew the line. I thought about it a lot. It was hard to figure out where exactly the cut-off should be, especially when you talk about Senate candidates, because there’s such a wide variation in how much Senate campaigns actually cost. California is much more expensive than Idaho. So, that’s where I drew the line, but someone else might put it a little bit higher or a little bit lower. It’s a subjective call, but I think I’m in the ballpark of what is an amount that really can make a difference in a campaign, that really signifies that the candidate is the primary source of support.

Is there anything else that you think I’ve missed or that you’d want to talk about?

There’s one major point that I make in my book that’s maybe not as relevant to presidential campaigns, but you can decide. Given that self-financing candidates have such a poor track record, what I concluded was one of the significant advantages of self-financing was that most people don’t really focus on the bad track record. They just say: “Oh, no! Joe Blow is so rich and he said he’s going to self-finance whatever it takes to win this election.” That has a chilling effect on candidate emergence; you know, it discourages other folks from running in a particular election. I documented that. That’s clearly an effect that self-financing has.

And it shouldn’t have an effect, because self-financers are usually such bad candidates. Their money is daunting, but it’s not insurmountable. What I concluded is that the best thing that money does for them is it clears the field or scares out potentially strong opponents, especially in primary elections. You do see some self-financers winning the nomination, and sometimes they’ll win in the general election, but one of the main reasons why they are able to do that, in many cases, is because stronger candidates have decided not to run against them.

That really doesn’t come into play in presidential elections. No one says, “Uh oh, Mitt Romney’s self-financing; so I’m not going to go for the GOP nomination!” People are just not deterred by that in a presidential election, but at lower levels, in the Senate and definitely in the House, that’s true.