End Citizens United's Tiffany Muller on Ten Years of Citizens United

This is Larry Lessig. This is the third season of the podcast Another Way. The subtitle for this season is POTUS 1. Our effort to frame a commitment to fundamental reform and to get the presidential candidates to accept it. And today, I'm so excited to talk to a woman who has led one of the most important reform organizations in this field. Organization called End Citizens United, which, as you'll hear in the interview, I was so happy when it was not focused exclusively on Citizens United, but instead was focused on the project of recruiting candidates to Congress who would make fundamental reform the first thing they did. It's not an exaggeration to say that the candidates that End Citizens United helped bring to Washington in 2018 made it so that Congress passed HR1 in the beginning of 2019. They were reformers, and N Citizens United brought them together. N Citizens United is an organization that's just about five years old. And Tiffany has been at the center of the discussion and the debate and the strategizing about getting us a movement that could actually succeed in getting us reform. So stay tuned for an incredibly interesting conversation, I think, with her, an optimistic conversation. And in this moment, when we're struggling with whether the United States is entering a new war or not, what we all need is a little bit of optimism. Okay? So welcome, Tiffany Muller. So, as I've just explained in the introduction, N Citizens United has become certainly one of the most important reform organizations rallying people to the cause of reform. And I have to tell you, I am so relieved with seeing the strategy, the way you deployed it when you launched, I guess it was in 2015, the beginning of 2015, March or something. I was worried that you were gonna grab the idea of Citizens United and race out there with the idea that we're gonna amend the Constitution and that's the only thing that we can ever talk about doing. But so fortunate for us that you've built this incredible grassroots organization committed to the much more substantial, practical end of building support for fundamental reform inside of Congress. I guess the latest numbers, or something like four million members, maybe a half a million donors, three and a half million contributions. And those contributions are not three and a half million billionaires contributing. I don't think we have that many billionaires, but. But an average contribution of just under $15. So first, I want to say thank you and congratulations. That is such an extraordinary success. And follow that up by saying, is this surprising? Are you surprised that you were able to build such an extraordinarily powerful organization so quickly?

I think the answer to that is both yes and no. I think that what it is indicative of is just how powerful the issue of people taking back their own democracy, having a voice in the process, having a government that they know works for them and not the special interest. It really speaks to how powerful that notion is. So in that respect, I think that we were surprised at how far reaching and how fast it actually grew. I don't think that we were surprised that it was a popular idea though. But yeah, to your point, we are just coming up on our five year anniversary. In that time we've raised a little over $80 million, all from grassroots donors. We're up to almost 600,000 donors and an average contribution of just $14. And every day when I'm here and trying to help make decisions about what we're going to do next, I think about the fact that our average contribution is $14. And I've received notes from across the country from people who are like, you know, I don't know what my $15 can do against the Koch brothers money, but please do anything you can to fix the system. And yeah, one person giving $15 wouldn't be able to do much against that system, but millions of people joining together in this fight absolutely can make a difference. And your leadership in this space and your work on the presidential campaigns and your work on pushing for reform and on explaining how broken the system is and just being a voice that we can all follow and all look to has been so incredibly needed and helpful and I am beyond grateful for it.

Well, I'm grateful for that. Although we're going to impose a rule which you can't say anything nice about me on this whole podcast. So we finished that part.

That's not going to work.

But I want to focus on the strategy because this is what was so wonderful about how you developed this project. I mean, both the strategy of raising so much money from small contributions from so many people, that's essential, but also in the theory of change. So you list on your website that you're going to work toward the mission by the mission of addressing this problem by one, electing pro reform candidates, two, raising the issue of money in politics as a national priority. Three, working with ballot measure campaigns to pass pro reform laws in the states and four, using grassroots membership to demonstrate political power on. On the issue of money in politics. So the first question is the first line. Talking about pro reform candidates seems to speak to reform beyond just the question of money in politics. And I wonder whether you see yourself as addressing reform in a Bigger sense or is it laser focused on the question of addressing the outsized influence of money in politics?

I think so many of these, the problems that we see with our system and the reforms really needed are pretty intrinsically linked. And it's one of the reasons why HR1 addressed not just money and politics, but addressed making sure that everyone had the opportunity and the right to vote and, you know, getting rid of gerrymandering and, you know, tightening up ethics laws and yes, starting to address some of the problems that big money has caused in our system. The system isn't broken in one way, but it's often broken by the same people who are trying to suppress people's voice, people's vote, people's participation in their own democracy. And so our solutions really must be intrinsically linked as well. And so, you know, when we started, we kind of looked around and said, there are so many good people doing amazing policy work, doing really good advocacy work. One of the pieces that was really missing was this idea that this issue held political power as well. And so that was why we started, was to try to help fill that void, to show that this issue mattered to voters, to show that it could help elect champions, to show that if you were on the wrong side of the issue and that you were being in the pocket of special interest, that voters would make you pay a price. And I think 2018 was an amazing case study of that, how we were able to work with reform champions across the country, get them to roll out reform agendas, to talk about it in their campaign, to motivate their own voters and to flip seats. And then the very first thing they did when they came into the house was H R1.

So the reformers then see themselves as democracy reformers. And I've seen that too. The issue triggered by Citizens United originally sounded like it was just about money. I remember that 10 years ago when people spoke and my first books sort of talked about this as a problem that was really primarily a problem of money. But the more fundamental problem, I think, is unrepresentativeness inside of our system. And money is just one way in which that gets manifested. And the commitment to reform beyond money. HR1 reform, I think, is the most important development we've seen in the last 40 years of this fight. But when you bring people into that. So your strategy has been to go out and support candidates who have committed themselves to reform. That's right. Right.

That's correct. And then to use that political momentum to help drive legislative reforms.

And so what's striking about it is you and I both know that if you are out talking to ordinary voters about this issue, it wouldn't be hard to find Republicans as well as Democrats to commit to fundamental reform or to commit to the belief that fundamental reform was needed. But it's been hard to find Republicans in Congress who've been willing to commit. And I don't remember seeing your side supporting Republican candidates who would be committed to reform. So what explains the gap between ordinary Republican voters and Republican leaders in Washington around this question of reform?

Yeah, I think you have definitely identified one of the frustrating parts of this struggle, which is that this isn't a partisan issue. Right. 78% of Republicans want to overturn Citizens United, 96% of people think that the amount of money in our politics is creating dysfunction. And the vast, vast majority of Americans think our government's working for just a few big interests and not for everyday working Americans. So you have a problem that's universally agreed on by Democrats, Independents, Republicans across the country. But here in Washington, D.C. it's incredibly partisan. And what happens is that we have multiple problems kind of layered up on top of each other. So, number one, you have representatives who have made a decision that their big donors and making sure they have access to that money is more important than what they think the voters will do and whether or not they will hold them accountable. Now, part of that is that we haven't had multiple cycles of holding those representatives accountable for not being for reform. So I think that is part of the solution as well, is making sure that voters know about it. So that's one piece, is that they have actually said, they've looked at the calculation. They've said, I don't think voters are going to be as mad about this. I think I'm going to get more from my donors. So I'm going to go with my donors. In your book, you have kind of. You've also identified how these things layer on top of each other. So another problem is the gerrymandering that we've seen in that it creates these seats that really force many folks to the extreme where they're worried not about the general election, but only the primary election, where they're worried about being primaried by someone from the right or someone from the left, in the Republican's case, someone from the right. And then, you know, so there are only 60 or so seats across the country that are actually competitive. And in those seats, what we've seen since Citizens United is prior to Citizens United, a candidate controlled their own message. There was only about eight times where outside spending had was more than the candidate spending in races. And since Citizens United, that has jumped to 126 races where outside spending has trumped candidate spending. And what you see is that these are often the same place over and over. So two quick examples. In the last couple of cycles, you see both Nevada Senate in 2018 and in 2016 having this where both cycles, those Senate races were $100 million, with the vast majority of that coming from outside spending sources. So if a candidate feels like they have to do what they're being told in order to get that outside spending, help. And so you're seeing kind of these confluence of factors keeping the Republicans from breaking ranks and voting for reform, even if they will tell you, yes, I believe the system's broken. Yes, I believe we need change. Yes, it's not right. We spend so much time fundraising, they're not willing to just break with their leadership and vote for it. We have to change the incentives.

So the last podcast that we had was with Nick Penniman at issue one. I think Nick has been a little bit overly critical of, for example, John Sarbanes in HR1 for, as he says, failing to include Republicans. Because I know how hard they've been working to find Republicans who are willing to talk about money in politics or about a solution to money in politics. And Nick reports he's able to find lots of them who say there is a problem, but they've not been even willing to articulate a solution to the problem. And that might be because they are so committed to the money, but it's not clear to me why they couldn't identify what the better solution would be, even if they can't themselves push for it, or even if it seems inconsistent for them to be taking big money while pushing for a change to the way money happens. I mean, you're in the middle of these conversations. What is it that's blocking even the thinking or the identification of solutions on the right to a problem that people on the right and problem and people on the left would agree is a fundamental problem?

There are repercussions that can happen to congressional members who go against their leadership and step out of line. Right. You can lose committee assignments, you can lose committee chairmanships, you can have money cut off. There are a number of things that if you kind of step outside of the lines that have been drawn, that can backfire. Right? So there's a lot of fear around, I think, engaging in this topic, knowing that it has so much public support but knowing that leadership, and you know, let's look at, you know, Senator McConnell. His life's mission is to make sure that reform doesn't happen. And he also controls hundreds of millions of dollars, right? The elections this cycle alone, the outside spending will hit at least $2 billion. And he can control a vast, vast amount of where that goes. So there's real fear, right, that if they step out of line, that they will just be swamped and they will be targeted or that they will be left a really important point, that they will be left vulnerable and without any help. So that's number one. The other thing, you know, Nick and I have had really good debates about this, right? Like, should HR1 have been bipartisan? And you know, I come down on the side of we welcome Republican support, and you know what, we welcome them putting forward a plan to fix our broken system. But if they're not, to your point, even willing to talk about the problem or define it, let alone put their own legislative proposal down on the table, that doesn't mean that we should stop our work. The, the voters are, they've lost faith in our government. We have this complete breakdown in our system. And to say that because the Republican Party currently won't join with the solutions needed to fix it, that is not something that Democrats then should just say, oh, well, okay, if you're not willing to do it, we won't do anything on this. No, we need to put forward solutions that would really fix the problem and bring the American people, and hopefully Republicans along with us.

So has most of your spending been in the general election races almost exclusively?

I'd say probably 95% of the spending has been in the general election rather than the primary elections. We've had a few cases where we have engaged in a primary election.

So is this a possible alternative or complementing strategy to begin to look at primary races in safe seat districts, especially among Republicans? But even in context where you've got a non reformed Democrat, and obviously the primary races are less expensive, what we found in the work that we did in 2014 was that if people believed that, that the reformer was going to displace their party in power, they weren't going to listen to reform. But if they believed that the reformer was, you know, from their party, so they didn't worry about losing control for their party, then they were very open to reform. So it was easy to get Republicans to care about reform in a primary context much more than it was in a general election context. And I wonder whether if we devoted a or launched a strategy to recruit, you know, 30 reform Republicans. And God knows there are many, many reform Republicans out there who would step up and be willing to be reform Republicans in a primary contest that there wouldn't be a greater chance to see some sensibility in the Republican side of the debate.

I am all for it. Do you know you, I'm sure you know John Pudner from Take Back Republic.

Yes, of course. We've spoken to him on this podcast.

Oh, wonderful, wonderful. He loves to tell the story of helping run Dave Brat's campaign against Eric Cantor in Virginia 7 and how he used this issue in the primary against Eric to help unseat Eric Cantor. Right. And we saw the same thing down in Alabama last cycle where Roy Moore, of all people, actually used this issue against Luther Strange to help win that primary. So I think you're right. I think that there is an appetite out there among the voters. Right. There's a populism and a desire to own your own democracy that definitely exists. And I hate to mention it, but even Trump used this successfully in the 2016 election. He would stand up on stage in those Republican primary debates and say, I don't need anyone's money. I know how this system is rigged. I used to give $5,000 because then I knew that they would pick up the phone and call me back anytime I needed anything. And he was really saying things that resonated with voters. And his message of drain the swamp, you know, wasn't. He obviously hasn't lived up to any of those things, but his message actually won over these same non college voters and independent voters that we see our messaging working with and that we saw so successful successfully work in 2018. So I think that there absolutely is the space out there for it.

So then why haven't we seen more of it? Like what explains, I know that in the context of John Pudner's organization, they're working incredibly hard to raise the money they need and they would only be able to engage like this if it were real Republican money supporting the fight. You couldn't have a bunch of Democrats funding primary contests in the Republican Party or Democrats Democratic contributors. But has there been an effort to think like this that's been blocked by something? Or is it just this is the next logical step and we just need to take it?

I don't think there's been a unified effort. I think we've seen these one off efforts and I don't think that there has been anyone who's really unified it. The other thing on the Republican side is that they just created their small dollar donor giving platform. One of the things that has been so successful on the Democratic side is that we have really invested in making it easy for folks to give small dollar donations and to use that to propel campaigns across the country or organizations like ourselves on the Republican side that just started like a year and a half ago. So I think that as that continues to grow, and I think it will on their side, they would actually have the ability to do that.

And so then the question is in the reform community whether we can tee people up to see this as the great necessary step. Because I think the compelling point that Nick makes, I don't know if he would put it exactly like this, but the thing that I fear about one sided reform or one party reform is, is that it turns reform into Obamacare in the sense that it becomes identified as a single party initiative and then it focuses the attack of the other party going forward. When what we know historically is the only way fundamental reform actually succeeds in changing things fundamentally is if it brings people, politicians from both sides in the same fight. It doesn't have to be the same proportion, but there needs to be a credible number of Republicans and we have to find a way to inspire Republicans to send those people to Washington.

Yeah, I don't disagree. I think, you know, besides all the kind of tactical ways we're talking about it, I think the other thing that's incredibly powerful, that we don't often give enough credit to, is just the voice of the American people. And if they are loud enough, then they can actually move the position of what feels like immovable positions among elected officials. Right when the health care debate was coming up in 2017, everyone, all pundits, everyone thought, oh well, Obamacare is going to be immediately overturned. McConnell was making that promise, Paul Ryan was making that promise, Trump was making that promise. And it was the, the organization of just everyday people being outraged about the possibility of going back to a system where pre existing illnesses weren't covered, going back to a system where they couldn't count on whether or not they would have health insurance, going back to a system that would kick 11 million people off of insurance. And it changed the outcome. Right. And it created an outcome that no one thought was possible. So I actually think that is the other piece that has to happen is that we have to continue to figure out and find ways to bring their voice into the system in a way that's powerful enough to force people to move again. I think that other than money, elected officials fear being voted out of office. And so I think that that is the other piece we could do.

Well, this is the other really important thing that I think your organization is doing. Beyond supporting candidates both directly and indirectly, you're contributing by doing a lot of really effective research to understand where people are on this issue. In 2018, you published this really fantastic piece that was demonstrating how this was a top issue for both Republicans and Democrats alike, pushing back against the conventional wisdom, especially among the pundits, that this is just not an issue that people care about. But this creates what has always been a puzzle for me. And you're closer to the data, so I'm eager to see if you have an answer to it. Though those of us in the movement believe this issue is important to people, it still never seems to become the salient central issue that the media wants to address in the context of talking about political contests. So even in this presidential race, even though we've seen a lot of great candidates push the issue of reform onto the stage, from Andrew Yang talking about his democracy dollars to Bernie bringing up public funding of elections, it's still not the case that we've had any. We still have not had any question asked by any of the debate moderators about fundamental Democratic reform. And that just begs the question, what is it that makes it so hard for them to see this as an important issue or a central issue when people like you and me and the sort of people listening to this podcast feel like it is fundamental and first?

So we know that, yeah, this is a great place, a great example of a place where the media is really out of step with the voters. Right. And I think part of the problem is, is that no one's even been asking the question consistently of voters of where does cleaning up political corruption fit in their list of priorities? If you ask folks what their top priority is, and then you don't even give them the option of talking about cleaning up the system or getting out corruption or getting money out of politics or whatever it might be, there's no way for them to choose it. Right. I also think that there's been this understanding that I don't know at what point it was created, but that kitchen table issues are the only issues that really matter to voters, and particularly swing voters. Kitchen table issues being those that impact their pocketbook, prescription drugs, jobs, the economy, wages, that those are the things that impact their vote. But as you and I know and the folks listening to this podcast know, the issue of money in politics and reform are fundamentally linked to those Same issues. Right. We can't get a reasonable prescription drug, lowering the cost of prescription drugs because we have so much pharma money in our, in our system. We haven't been able to have a real debate around what we can do to address the effects of climate change in over 10 years. We can't get common sense background checks passed to reduce gun violence because of the amount of money that the NRA is putting in. So what we have to do is figure out how we one start listening to voters, because voters actually already really get this and obviously the candidates get it. You've been talking to them as well. And your work with POTUS1 has been so incredible. And, you know, we rolled out that we had seven candidates who had committed to reform being the very first thing. I think through your work, we've built that up to almost everyone in this primary right now. And they're saying, like, as a new president, this would be the most important thing, the very first thing I would do. And yeah, we share your frustration that we have not gotten the media to cover that the way that we should. It is frustrating. I am hopeful that maybe the Iowa debate, they will ask a question, but it really is about changing their understanding of what voters care about. Because what we have seen over two and a half years of doing polling and research and asking the same questions again and again and with different samples and in different states, is that cleaning up political corruption is almost always the number one or number two issue amongst all voters, and it is always the number one issue among independent voters. The voters who decide these elections care about having a system that works for them because they feel so cut off from their own government.

So I've seen you release these results as, you know, periodically. I don't know how many of the polls that you've run, have you ever considered just dumping the whole of the polling into the world in a really comprehensive way that says here is absolute confirmation of something that has been argued by people for many years and that you, the media, need to pay attention to this. I mean, it's striking that we have this gap, this deficit in understanding. And it's a really important challenge to figure out how to get over it.

We actually have a polling archive on our website that has almost every poll that we've ever done on it.

That's great.

I couldn't find it. However, I, I love your idea of, like, figuring out how we can use all of that data in one kind of package to get people to maybe take another look again. I am always trying to figure out ways to break through their skepticism. I was really hopeful that after 2018 and seeing so many candidates run on this issue, seeing this massive change around whether or not they were taking corporate power, money, and how powerful that was in the election, I was really hopeful we would see kind of a shift around that. But so far, that hasn't really been the case.

Yeah, what's striking is that there's been in political science for a long time. There's been very good data to show that, in fact, it's not the kitchen table issues that people really care about. They really care about this basic sense of the. The corruption or the fairness of the process. There's an amazing book from. I think it's around 2001 or 2002 called Stealth Democracy by John Hibbing and Elizabeth T.S. morse, where they demonstrate through massive empirical studies that when you really focus on what drives people in their attitude and support of government, it is fundamentally about perceptions of fairness and justice in the system. So this is why people are okay even with a conservative court, because they don't think the conservative court is corrupt. They think the court might be politically giving the answers they don't want to be given, but they think that they're doing their job. But when they think about Congress, they think of an institution where their perception is every time Congress does something that they don't like, it must be because of the money. So this deep skepticism is driven by the perception that the process is broken, which I think feeds the supports. The conclusion that your data is suggesting that people are desperate, hungry for a way to believe that the system could be fixed so that they have a reason to turn to government again.

Absolutely. I think it is really, really difficult to have an institution where the members of IT speak spend 75% of their time doing nothing but raising money and not, you know, attending hearings or working on bills or working with folks across the aisle to fix problems that our country is facing, but instead just to raise money and then taking money from all of these industries and then to turn around and say, oh, no, that doesn't actually influence anything or corrupt the system. I think voters just find that unbelievable, and they should. It is unbelievable. What we've seen is that this has just gotten worse and worse. Congressional campaigns used to cost, I think right before Citizens united, the average one was like, $1.5 million. We saw some of these congressional candidates last cycle raising in the realm of 15 to 20, $20 million. They were like Senate races. And the amount of time that they were having to put into that. And then they come to D.C. and the very first thing they're told isn't where the bathrooms are or how to introduce a bill or what they need to be focused on legislatively or what hearings to attend. The very first thing that they're told is you need to do 30 hours of call time every week. You need to raise X amount of money every day. And so we have this system that's just broken. Right. And so voters think. We've actually been asking voters how often they think donors are helping drive policy decisions in Washington. They actually think it's 90% of the time that elected officials are doing what their donors want rather than what the voters want. I don't even know if it's actually that broken, but that is how fed up voters are. So I really. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Right. Like the. Just the money coming in absolutely creates this corrupting, not just corrupting influence, but the look of corruption. And it just turns voters off.

Okay. So this depressing story has to stand next to what I have felt. And I don't know if this is just senile old age reactions, but what I have felt is the most optimistic moment that I've seen In the past 30 years of this fight. I've only been in the fight for about a dozen years, but it's something I've cared about since the beginning of my academic work. But we've never had a race where a larger number of candidates have been committing to this idea of fundamental reform as the first thing they'll do. There's a really great video you guys have done, really beautiful. Your videos are always incredibly compelling. But this is a video where you have the candidates in studio and you shoot them as you ask them both about their commitment to reform and their commitment to make reform fundamental. And you begin to, you know, see this incredible level of commitment that we were excited to. Just 10 days ago we had Bernie Sanders on stage, Zephyr, Teachout and I in New Hampshire. And you know, we've always been anxious because though Bernie has talked about reform and talked about the power of the billionaires, and he's talked about increasingly what I think is the most exciting reform proposal for money, which is democracy vouchers, he's never really crystally said this is going to be the priority. And so we put it to him. And his first response was, it goes without saying. And, you know, my response to that was maybe, but I'm so glad you said it because it is critical that we have people make clear for the American people that on day one they will make reform happen so that all of these other things are possible. And he gives, I think, the best summary. And you know, we have a clip that we've now put out a best summary of how nothing can happen until we get this reform first. So this is why I'm optimistic that we have at least the candidates where they're supposed to be. And now the challenge is to bring the public around to recognizing that this is where the candidates are supposed to be. And, and making it much more central to the debate, which of course is hard when you're dealing with a president who's killing generals in foreign countries. But I wonder when you look at your strategy for 2020, what are the buttons you're going to push to make it the thing that everybody recognizes is the thing that has to happen so therefore must drive the decision we make in selecting the next president.

Yeah, I, we have, we have definitely spent a lot of time talking about the problem and how broken it is and all of those things and but like you, I actually, I am so optimistic today. I actually think that we are on the precipice of the, of real change, of the opportunity to create something truly transformational and long lasting and that really begins to shift where the power resides in our elections and in our government. And that I could not be more excited about it. And you know, I think that if we look at, I'm so excited about where the presidential candidates are, but I think it actually comes first from what we've seen the House do. And what we saw were House candidates across the country running on this issue, using it in their own paid advertisements to voters because they saw how powerful it was, using it on the stump, rolling out these really comprehensive reform agendas. And then we were really proud. We helped organize a letter in October right before the election. And as you may know, it is really hard to get candidates to do anything in October right before the election. And we got 107 of them to sign a letter to Congress that said, look, the very first thing we need to do in a new Congress is comprehensive reform that addresses these main issues. And it was voting rights, money in politics, empowering small dollar donors, you know, ending gerrymandering and, and cracking down on ethical problems. And we've had Congressman Sarbanes leadership in the House and in the caucus and his leadership on working on these issues for so long. And Speaker Pelosi tapped him to help lead this effort to create what became H R1. And she threw her weight behind it. Right. We don't get HR1 without Speaker Pelosi's understanding of how critical this issue is, how important it is, and tied to her other priorities and her leadership on making sure it happened. And that really created a situation where then there was pressure on the Senate to do something. So then you have the Senate introduce a companion bill with every single Democratic senator on the bill. That's huge. It's really hard to get Joe Manchin and Jeff Merklin to agree on anything. And that created the situation where every Democratic presidential candidate running understood that they had to address this issue. Every single one of them, you know, not taking corporate PAC money, most of them going further, not taking lobbyist money, some of them not doing fundraisers at all, or like Senator Warren, not doing call time at all. You have them putting out these comprehensive reform agendas, like you said, not only saying, yes, HR1, but let's build on it, let's go even further. So we've been incredibly excited, I think, that this 2020 election, we have a real opportunity to change the makeup of the Senate. Senator Schumer has already said it's one of his top three priorities. Plus we have a real shot at getting someone in the White House who says it'll be the very first thing that they do. So I feel like we're in a moment and we just have to marshal all of our forces and dig in as hard as we can for the next year to get it done.

Yeah, I still feel like the candidates have got to do a better job helping the public understand this. I sometimes worry that a lot of the posturing might be one way to describe it, or principles might be the other way to describe it. That presidential candidates display in order to one up each other about their commitment to reform makes sense in a presidential race, but we know just could not work if we're talking about electing. I mean, you know, AOC has no problem, or Michele Bachmann had no problem raising the money that they need to run for Congress from small dollar contributors. That's because they are prominent national figures, but they're the exception. What we need to be able to elect a Congress that's independent of special interest money, that can make decisions based on what makes sense as opposed to what pays. Campaign contributors is a system of public funding of congressional elections. And that's not what we get by focusing on, you know, whether you're making call time or not or, you know, whether you're taking one kind of contribution or not. It comes from explaining to the public that this fundamental change is something that should have happened 40 years ago. And if we have to make it happen, if we're going to address any of the problems that we know that we have to address, and it's so surprising, even among our reformers, how hard it is to get people to say it again. I think Bernie is the only person who's explicitly used the word public funding of elections in a debate so far. Although, again, Andrew has talked about his democracy dollars and others have talked about the matching fund proposal. But I wonder whether you share my anxiety that we need more explanation to make it so ordinary people get it, so that when the next president is elected, ordinary people will say, okay, here's what you promised. I want to see it happen.

I think that voters, what voters are going to vote on is who do they think will go and clean up the mess. They pay a lot less attention to all the details under that. Right. They, but they want someone that they feel like they can trust who won't be bought by special interest and who will take the corruption on. Right. And thankfully, we're in a situation where I think no matter who our nominee is coming out of the primary, we're going to be in that position where we're going to be able to make a really strong case in the general against Donald Trump. I think what we have to do on the back end is continue to assure folks that voters aren't afraid of public funding, that when you talk to them about the fact that someone is going to own their elected officials, that they really understand that and that it's about who gets to own it. Do the people get to own their own government or are special interests paying for it all? And they understand that whoever's giving the money is having a bigger say. So they, they actually are really pretty comfortable with public financing and public funding. But there's long been, just like we were talking about earlier, that there's long been this myth that the only thing voters vote on is kitchen table issues. There's long been a myth that public funding is just a killer in an election. And so you can't talk about it. We've done a lot of research on this and actually talked to voters across the country on it, both in qualitative data and quantitative data. And voters are so fed up with this broken system, they're ready to throw it out and try something new. They're ready for big radical change in how we're funding elections. So I actually think we have a great, we're in a great space to be able to make those arguments.

So among the Democratic candidates, I think you're right. We have a general commitment. Where do you think people should be working to get candidates to be clearer or stronger or more articulate? So people listening to this podcast tend to be really engaged and do things when we ask them. If you could ask them to help, where would you ask them to be helping?

I think in a couple of ways. One, I think going to town halls or anywhere else and asking questions like how are you going to clean up the corruption? Will you commit to making reform? The very first thing you do, even if they've committed to it, hearing it from people on the ground is really, really important. To just continue to have that voice in their ear that this is important, voters on the ground care about it and just that repetition is really important. The other thing is we've talked about that one of the biggest problems is just that the media isn't covering this. So every, you know, writing op eds, having the opportunity, if they're at a debate or something in New Hampshire, putting in audience questions on this issue, trying to find ways to inject it into the media stream, I think is really important.

These candidates that you're selecting right now, at the congressional level, when you're looking at these candidates, what's the way you're making a judgment? I mean, sometimes it's obviously going to be easy when it's reformed Democrat against a non reform Republican. But I mean, I've seen you already come out, for example, in the main race in a context where there's a couple really interesting Democratic candidates, Betsy Sweet, for example, who has been a substantial reformer. So how do you think about that trade off in the context of making that choice?

It's hard and we never do that, take that lightly. We have a endorsement process that has a few different steps. One, we have a questionnaire that goes through both policies and what people are doing in their own campaign, what money they are or aren't taking. We obviously ask about a lot of the different policies that are currently proposed up on Capitol Hill that could help reform the system and where they stand on all those policies. And then we also take a look at the viability of the campaign and the race. We want to make sure that we are helping get people into office who will make this a priority. And so if we feel like one candidate has a much better shot of winning, then that sometimes will weigh into our endorsement decisions.

Okay, so we are 13 days away at the recording of this podcast. It'll obviously come out closer to the event, but 13 days away from the 10th anniversary of the case that gave birth to the title of your organization, though not the exclusive focus of the work of your organization. How should we celebrate or memorialize or mourn the 10th anniversary on 21st January of this decision that launched the most radical change in the funding of elections since the turn of the last century?

Yeah, I don't think it can be overstated how awful this decision was for our democracy and what it has done to our elections. And we, and we've talked about that kind of throughout this conversation. But, you know, we're looking at an election cycle coming up where the last presidential election cycle cost $6 billion. Estimates are that this one is going to be much higher. There will likely be $2 billion of outside spending, hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money flowing into our elections, which we know from the last two elections can also include foreign money. You know, this is wrecking our democracy. It's wrecking our progress on all priorities to our country and to voters. And it's a national security risk as well. And so here we are 10 years out, and sometimes it feels to me like people have just decided that there's nothing we can do about it. But that's absolutely not true. And we need everyone to join with their voices and to make sure that they are helping raise the awareness of this issue. Please feel free to follow us on Twitter op bigmoney. I am iffanyuller. You can join our organization at incitizensunited.org we're going to continue to fight every day to both overturn Citizens United and in the meantime, work to elect champions who are committed to that and who are committed to doing everything they can do legislatively between now and then.

Yeah. So we have a pretty strict rule at Equal Citizens that we don't ask for money except during a brief period where we raise money. But the rule doesn't say that we can't ask people to support other organizations. And so it's not so much about giving money to your organization, but I really would urge people to join and Citizens United and to support the incredibly large number of others who have made this so central to the grassroots movement for reform. I mean, you've picked up the mantle from a lot of historically critical organizations who continue to do the work, but needed the new blood of what you've done done to make it so salient and important on the 21st. Are you holding an event or are you doing something that people could attend that would signify the horrible thing that happened 10 years ago.

We're actually doing almost a month of different events across the country with candidates, members of Congress. We are still finalizing exactly what we're doing the day of, but we are. Yeah, I know. I have about 10 trips planned to do to do events in districts across the country. You know, Andy Kim in New Jersey, Jason Crow in Colorado, Dean Phillips up in Minnesota. I think I'm coming back to New Hampshire over the next month. We're going to be announcing an end Corruption Copy caucus here in Washington, D.C. with some members of Congress. Yeah, we have a month of different activities going on because one day is not enough to commemorate how awful this has been.

Okay, so n Citizens United is the website. And Tiffany, I'm so grateful for the time that you've given us and much, much more grateful for the spirit you've given to the movement. I know that we will get to the promised land sooner than later. And when we do, I'm so eager to be celebrating with you. Thank you so much for your work.

Thank you so much and thank you for your leadership. And it has been such an honor to work with you on this issue.

Okay, that's Tiffany Miller. That's the end of this episode of Another Way. These podcasts are Produced by Equal. EqualCitizens US. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us and find this podcast@equalcitizens.us. anotherway. There's a place on that webpage to share the podcast that you should do and to give us your feedback and your ideas, especially ideas about people you think we should be talking to that it's not likely I or our team would know. I'm especially interested in people doing the work in the field to convince others about the incredibly important need for reform, especially people doing that among Republicans. So please share this, please give your feedback, and please help us make this issue fundamental so that by 2021 we can move on to other issues. Too many of the ideas discussed in this season of Another Way are also discussed in the new book that I've published, this just this last fall. They don't represent us. And you can see that book and order it@hc.com representus that's HarperCollins as abbreviated and hc.com representus or Amazon, or hopefully at your local bookstore. And if not, tell them they should have it. Stay tuned for the next episode. This is Larry Lessig. Thank you for your support of Equal Citizens and of the cause for reform. Until then,