It seems every election year we hear a lot of talk concerning the need to get money out of politics. Candidates like to accuse their opponents of buying votes, exclaiming that government is not for sale. Of course, more should be done to curtail the influence of moneyed special interests. However, money is not the be all and end all in political campaigns.
To prove that money isn’t everything, I point out that we never had a President Perot or Mayor Lauder. Suggesting that a candidate can just buy his or her way into office is not giving the voters enough credit. We should not assume that the electorate blindly goes for whichever candidate saturates them more with a deluge of fancy mailers and high-priced commercials.
Clearly, in determining the outcome of any election, many dynamics are in play besides money. Certainly, it cannot be argued that any one factor is dispositive. Actually, incumbency is the strongest indicator of electoral success. Indeed, over 90 percent of incumbents have been re-elected to the City Council over the last two decades, with similarly high numbers for the state legislature and Congress.
Incumbents have the benefit of name recognition and public offices through which they can assist constituents and community organizations, earning them good will and appreciation that is expressed in the voting both. The political graveyard is littered with the bones of challengers who have outspent officeholders, only to find the power of incumbency too much to overcome.
Organizational backing is key, of course, in the form of unions and party machinery, though from time to time a candidate emerges who has his or her own organizational base through civic and professional affiliations.
In fact, studies have shown that in contested primaries operated under the New York City Campaign Finance System, despite the rough parity the system nobly attempts to afford, candidates with either the backing of the party or organized labor won nearly every race, with a few exceptions.
Definitely, money helps. A lot. Money allows a heretofore-unknown candidate to increase his or her profile and name recognition. Money permits a campaign to communicate its message and reach greater numbers of voters. But if the candidate is inept and the content of the message is deficient, no amount of money in the world could persuade voters otherwise. The electorate is not to be manipulated.
Voters are not for sale. They make judgments based on any number of factors, from whether they consider themselves better off than they were four (or two) years ago, to which candidate they believe is more aligned with their position on the issues, or which candidate’s values they share, to partisan and ideological affinity.
This Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of voters across Queens will go to the polls, and who they elect will not necessarily be the candidate that raised or spent the most money. Money talks, but it does not walk.
Daniel Egers is on the staff of Mike Bloomberg’s campaign, Executive Director of the Queens County Republican Party, a Trustee of the Bayside Historical Society and President of the Friends of Oakland Lake, among other affiliations. The views expressed in this column are his own.
