Jamie Howell
  Staff Writer

Last Thursday, Dr. Peter L. Francia from East Carolina University gave a talk on campaign financing in the 2016 Presidential Primaries called “The Money Game.” It was the second in a series of three talks being conducted to follow the progress of the 2016 primary campaign.

Dr. Francia began his talk by explaining how much money is involved in campaigns.

“Money is pouring into politics,” Dr. Francia said.

He said that the 2016 election is estimated to end up costing $5 billion. For comparison, Dr. Francia noted that the 2012 election cost around $2.6 billion. He emphasized that this means in four years, the cost of presidential campaigns has doubled.

Dr. Francia noted multiple ways campaigns receive money. According to Dr. Francia, candidates receive money in a myriad of ways: PACs, Super PACs, 501(c)(4)’s and bundling are some of the ways campaigns raise money.

PACs or political action committees came about because in 1907 the Tillman Act stopped corporations and national banks from donating directly to federal campaigns. A PAC is a way for corporations to get around this by allowing them to create accounts separate from their primary business accounts, which are meant only to raise money for a campaign, but there are limits to how much money a PAC can donate to a candidate.

The Citizens United v. FEC case helped lead to the creation of Super PAC’s. A Super PAC is a way for corporations to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money toward a campaign.

In order to more easily define what a Super PAC is, Dr. Francia showed a clip from the “Colbert Report” in which Stephen Colbert and his lawyer, Trevor Potter explained.

Stephen Colbert started his own PAC in 2011, but there was a problem because technically the corporation that owns comedy central, Viacom, was contributing to it. Colbert brought his lawyer Trevor Potter on the show and together they took a satirical look at how to bypass this.

Potter suggested that Colbert could simply turn his PAC into a super PAC and Colbert responds by asking, “Is that like a PAC that got bitten by a radioactive lobbyist?”

Potter explained that super PACs were created by the FEC because of the Citizens United case which ruled that, in Steven Colbert words, “corporations are people, and people have free speech; therefore, money is speech, and corporations can give unlimited money to political issues.”

Potter explains that the FEC created Super PACs as a medium for corporations to practice their right to spend money independently and in unlimited amounts.

Super PACs, according to Dr. Francia, cannot coordinate with any campaign they support, but coordination is difficult to prove. Dr. Francia said that many of the candidates running in the 2016 Presidential Primaries have Super PACs supporting them. Jeb Bush, Dr. Francia says, has Right to Rise behind him; Hillary Clinton has Correct the Record and Priorities USA Action supporting her.

Bundling is another way that Dr. Francia says donors can get around donation limits. Bundling means that wealthy people can collect checks from their wealthy friends and bundle them together to create one big donation out of multiple smaller donations.

According to a New York Times report from 2012, 769 bundlers spent $186.5 million on President Obama’s re-election.

Dr. Francia then moved onto mega donors. These are people, he says, who are astonishingly wealthy and who can legally donate money toward campaigns by creating shell corporations. He said that they can use these “pretend” corporations to generate Super PACs, which can spend as much money as they want.

Dr. Francia said that these mega donors can spend 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, for example Sheldon Adelson spent $92 million on Newt Gingrich’s campaign in 2012. According to another New York Times report, 158 families have spent nearly half of all the money that has been spent on the 2016 election so far. He says that the mega donors spend so much money that “the regular bundlers feel disenfranchised.”

Dr. Francia stated that these donors cause a representational distortion because they tend to be older white males who overwhelmingly favor Republicans.

Dr. Francia said that in the 1970s, 80s and 90s it was much more common for candidates to take public funds from the government regardless of the fact that it meant they would have spending limits, but all of that started to change when very wealthy people started running for office.

Dr. Francia ended his presentation with a quote from Trevor Potter. Potter said, “Elections are going to look a lot like the 1904 campaign, which was the last one before there were federal laws regulating money in politics.”