S6E8: The Campaign in Maine

This is Larry Lessig. In 2022, Maine had its most expensive contest for United States senate in history. $200 million was spent in Maine to determine the election between Susan Collins, the Republican, and Sarah Gideon, the Democrat. As American Promise summarized the spending in the election, quote, no main voter needs reminding that our most recent Senate race was the most expensive and quite possibly the nastiest in state history. And in their study, they were able to show that almost all the money in the race came through Super PACs, that those Super PACs were closely entwined with national Republican and Democratic Senate leadership and political operatives from Washington, that a majority of the money that flowed in the main election came from wealthy donors and interests outside of Maine, and that this money mainly funded negative attacks and disinformation in the campaign. This was true on both sides of the aisle. Democrat super PAC spending nationally in 2020 was $229 million. $27.9 million was spent in Maine. There was one mainer in that $27.9 million who contributed more than just $25,000. And of the $27.9 million, 27.4 was spent on negative ads and disinformation. The same is true on the other side as well. About the same amount of money was raised and spent nationally, $287 million by the Republican super PACs, 12.6 million was spent in Maine. Zero. Mainers contributed even just $25,000 to that $12.6 million. And of the 12.6 million, 12.5 was spent on negative ads and disinformation in Maine. Super PACs turned a race between a well known United States Senator, Sarah Collins, and her impressive and young challenger, Sarah Gideon, into a mudslinging contest that left most Mainers less aware of the issues that matter to Maine than they would have been without that spending. The fight for question one, the fight to limit contributions to independent political action committees won't directly affect, if it's passed, races for the United States Senate. But if it's passed and it's upheld, then, as I will explain more carefully in the next episode, it will trigger the return of a federal law that would limit super PAC spending in United States Senate races. Indeed, in all races. Question one won't solve the problem. But if question one survives, it will trigger the return to a regime of campaign finance where a tiny, tiny few no longer have the capacity to drive the largest amount of spending in these critical races. Instead, spending in these races will be large or small, depending upon whether many, many citizens decide that they want to support or oppose a candidate. Or put differently, spending in these races will become Democratic again, small D Democratic, not aristocratic. Now in those numbers about Sarah Gideon and Susan Collins, we can also see an important point about the politics of big spending. For many years, Republicans thought super PACs would benefit them. They thought this large outside spending would naturally come from very wealthy Republicans, and very wealthy Republicans would therefore dominate. And so even if they didn't like the idea, they were okay with the outcome. But the outside spending for Susan Collins was half as much as the outside spending for Sarah Gideon. The Republicans were outspent 2 to 1 in that race. So this problem is not one that Republicans face alone or Democrats face alone. It's a problem that all of us as citizens face. And as I've said throughout this season, it's a problem that Maine has a chance to help us solve. I'm recording this episode in the middle of August. The campaign in Maine. The ballot question committee citizens to nsuperpacs.org is about to launch its campaign to persuade Maine voters both of the importance of question one and why they should support it and what supporting it will do to give us the chance, us as in citizens of the United States, the chance to once again restore a system where something like a democracy exists to decide who our candidates will be. And more importantly, as the main 2020 Senate race shows, a democracy where the big spenders do not focus their message in a solely negative way because that's what the outside super PAC experts say they must do, but allows the debate in these races to develop as people on the ground in the states that are affected want it to develop. These super packs have poisoned American democracy. You may remember an anti drug ad that starts with a picture of some eggs and then has eggs in a frying pan. And a picture of eggs says, this is your brain and then eggs in the firing pan. This is your brain on drugs. Maine has seen democracy in the frying pan. Maine has experienced what it means to be flooded with propaganda generated in Washington, D.C. by experts who know nothing about the state. Maine has seen it. Maine has experienced it. Maine in this election could help stop it. The campaign is chaired, as I've said, by Kara McCormack, who was instrumental in getting the ranked choice voting initiative passed in Maine. The manager of the campaign worked with her in that Kyle Bailey. He's working endlessly to pull together the infrastructure that will help turn out votes and spread the message and get people locally to recognize why this matters. But to do that, he's going to be Competing against a very difficult media environment which will be flooded by lots of super PAC money about different types of races, most importantly the presidential race. And that will drive up the cost of advertising, digital advertising, as well as television and radio advertising. The campaign will need to rely on people first to spread the message. A more traditional person to person, issue driven way. Letters to the editor in local newspapers, people messaging others on their own social media accounts, whether Facebook or Instagram, people creating their own messages, which they then share, recognizing they share them against the algorithm that makes things spread best. People in Maine, like people everywhere, will need to come to see that, to restore, to reclaim, to rebuild a democracy. We have first to fight against artificial intelligence AI algorithms that seek not to help us understand, not to help us make the right decisions in an election, but to engage us, to drive our passions, our anger, our fury. And as I've said through throughout this season, that's just not the story about the fight against Super PACs. Of course we could be angry in the abstract that our democracy is corrupted, but that's not the sort of anger that triggers engagement for most people. It triggers resignation. It triggers the thought that why engage? Why do anything? It is just also corrupted and broken. So the fight that this movement has is to reach around the algorithms, to reach directly to your neighbor, directly to your friends, to get them to spread and understand what's at stake, so that when election day happens in November, there are enough people who have seen what's at stake and who've decided to support the campaign to win, and then enough people to make sure the fight wins. Maine is an interestingly purple state for this issue. 36.2% of registered voters are Democrat, 29.5% are Republican. But right behind the Republican percentage is the percentage of Mainers who refuse to enroll in either party or in any party. The unenrolled, who account for 28.8% of Maine voters we have at beat in Massachusetts. The number one party is the unenrolled party in Massachusetts. But what that unenrolled speaks to is this general frustration that people have with the character of their parties. And not to defend the parties too much. We should recognize that the parties themselves get captured by these algorithms. They speak in ways that their data scientists tell them will drive the spread of their message best. So they're frustrated, the unenrolled and angry, and understandably so. And no initiative, no single initiative, Question one, certainly on its own, will not fix all of that. But it would, if it's successful, remove the most important Driver of. Of polarizing and destructive media in American politics today. And that's the super pac. So the fight in Maine right now is first to increase the number of visible local supporters. The number of people who put a sign in their yard that says yes on question one. The number who are willing to write letters to the editor of their local newspaper saying, this is important because we have to stop this politics of corruption. The number of people who will express openly in some form by signing another petition or by putting notice on their own social media accounts that they too support question one. And when you see the character of Maine voters when it comes to the question of money in politics, it's hard not to be optimistic that when you add all that together and the work of this campaign and the talent of people like Kyle Bailey in driving the exercise of the resources in the campaign to maximize the number of votes, it's hard not to be optimistic that on election day we will prevail. But so what keeps me up? What should we be worried about? What might take this obviously popular initiative and challenge it? Well, I know what doesn't keep me up. I don't think I or anyone is afraid that we're going to have a bunch of ads attacking question one, defending the idea that the super rich deserve the special power our system gives them. We're not going to see the super rich arguing against James Madison when he told us we'd have a republic dependent on the people alone. By the people, he said he meant not the rich, more than the poor. There are people who think that. Who in private conversation will say that? I've met them, I've spoken to them, I'm astonished by them. But they are there. And many of the people who benefit from the current system of super PACs in their heart of hearts, love the idea that they have this outsized influence, love the idea that politicians are dependent on them. So I'm not saying that the idea isn't out there. I'm just saying that in a political campaign, you're not going to win many votes by arguing that it makes sense that the super rich have wildly more power over our politicians than the voters. So that doesn't keep me up. I can understand an attack against rich people supporting the anti super PAC initiative. It's the attack I talked about at the end of the last episode. An attack grounded in suspicion. What's in it for them? Why are they spending their money to reduce the influence of money in American politics? What 4D chess move does this represent? I get that skepticism that Cynicism. It's an age of conspiracy theories. There must be some secret way in which disarming the super rich is just a more effective way to arm them. But I think that argument runs out pretty quickly. And indeed, to the extent we can find more people to focus the fact that there are super wealthy people willing to spend their wealth to reduce their political influence, it will be harder to make that attack on the surface. It triggers. I get, I get it. It triggers an obvious response. But I think that we've seen Maine voters think a little bit beyond the surface, and that's all it takes to see that sometimes big spending is for big purposes, not for big returns. That happens all the time on both sides of the aisle. I get if you're pro life, that's your religion or that's your deep belief, and you're spending money supporting pro life, you're spending it for a big purpose. I get that. And the same thing on the other side. If you're spending to support climate change reform, that's for a big purpose. I'm not saying all spending in this space is for the private gain that one gets when politics bends to your will, certainly not. But we have to recover a really core idea of a republic. The idea that citizens are to be equal. Not equal in wealth, not equal in talent, not equal in any form of persuadability, not equal in their persuasiveness, not equal in every dimension except one as political citizens. One person, one vote. And that needs to be true in every place where citizens play a role in selecting and directing their government, including in the funding of their campaigns. That's why Maine in the 1990s brought forward the clean election system, to make sure that people could run without relying upon the super rich to get elected. That idea we need to recover. And to say to the super wealthy, your ideas might be good, but you can't build a political system that's dependent on you so that you, more than anyone else, can influence what they do. The third attack will be attack on the legal theory that we've advanced to say why, in fact, this initiative is constitutional. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in the next episode, so let me just bracket that for now. The fourth attack will be an attack on the outsiders, including me, no doubt, who've been central to bringing this issue to Maine voters. But we should be careful to recognize the difference between the kind of outsiders that were the target of question two last election season, the question that limited foreign money in main elections and the outsiders who've stepped up to support gathering signatures to get this initiative on the main ballot. Because in America, we are always as citizens, citizens both of our state and of the United States, and that as citizens of the United States, we speak to other citizens of the United States and debate with them about issues that affect all of us. So outsiders helped tee up the opportunity for Maine to vote on this initiative because the initiative is about an issue that affects all of us as Americans. And I think it's totally appropriate to recognize that we are engaged as Americans in a debate about how democracy in America will work. That debate should not be influenced by Canadians or Russians or Chinese or Australians or the French or anybody else. It's our debate. It's a debate for us to have, but it's a debate for us as American citizens to have. It's also a debate for Maine citizens to have. So, as I said in the last episode, the organization I run is not raising money to run ads in Maine, is not driving the strategy of the campaign in Maine, is not controlling what happens in Maine. Everything about this campaign is in Maine. All that we've done is make it possible for this campaign to happen. And when Mainers decide based on what that campaign does, they'll be deciding both about what makes sense for Maine and what makes sense for America from Maine's perspective. As I said in an earlier episode, I've been coming to Maine for more than 15 years to talk about democracy ideals. And the main that I think I understood in those 15 years of talking to Mainers is a main, which is, like many in America, skeptical, cynical about the corruption of our democracy. So when Mainers in Maine decide what makes sense for Maine about this initiative, I don't think the fact that people in America who don't live in Maine also agree with this initiative will give Mainers in Maine a reason not to like it. To the contrary, it will give Mainers a chance to say, as practically every other American let's, you know, be conservative at least 70% of other Americans, that the political system that has evolved to give so much power to so few is not a system our framers would have recognized. It's not a system that any theorist of democracy has ever described as democracy. It's not a system that will solve the problems that all of us understand our nation must face, from climate change to healthcare to tax systems to overregulation to the military. Whatever your issue is, none of those issues will be solved until we solve this issue first. So when I wake in the middle of the night and think, what is the threat we face? I can see the threats, I can see the attacks. But I'm optimistic that in the end of the day will recognize that whatever attack they gave in the campaign, people in Maine came to understand the other side enough to support the continued fight to end this corrupting money in Maine's and in America's politics. Okay, in the next episode, we'll talk about what happens if Maine votes to support this initiative on November 5th, what the next steps are. And as we describe that, I'll also unpack what some of the weaknesses to the argument we've advanced are you. And as some have asked, what's the worst that can happen if this question gets to the Supreme Court? Those are important questions, too. Stay tuned for that discussion. This is Larry Lessig Still. This is the sixth season of the podcast Another Way. In this season we've been talking about the initiative in Maine to end super PACs. And I've asked people to send their support not to the organization that I founded equals citizens us, but to main citizens to end super PACs. The website is citizens to end super PACs dot org. If you're in Maine, you can go to that website and you can sign up to volunteer to join the fight and to spread the message, including a message to local newspapers, from letters to the editor. And I'm hopeful you'll also use whatever social media presence you have to spread the message in a perfectly authentic, you write it way. And of course, you can support the campaign at that website through donations that will help make sure that the message is spread to everyone in Maine to get Mainers to understand why this is so important to them and to America. And if you're not from Maine, but you're an American, step up, step up. Because this is the shot America has to end this corrupting influence of money through super PACs. It's a bank shot. I get it through the furthest, most eastern, northern part of the country, but make that bank shot. Support the campaign@citizenstoendsuperpacs.org so that we can win overwhelmingly in this purple state, so we can carry that mandate into a legal fight that won't itself be determined by the popularity of this initiative, but because the initiative is so obviously targeting what every American thinks of as a deep, deep corruption of our political system. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening. Sa.