The Money Signal: A Conversation with Danielle Thomsen

In this interview, QUOI is joined by Dr. Danielle Thomsen, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, and author of two books, Opting Out of Congress: Partisan Polarization and the Decline of Moderate Candidates and The Money Signal: How Fundraising Matters in American Politics. Dr. Thomsen explains how early fundraising acts as a gatekeeping force that shapes who runs for Congress, who drops out, and how elections unfold long before voters weigh in.

Building from her earlier work on polarization and the supply of candidates, she describes observational and survey evidence that experienced candidates often exit races after weak pre-primary fundraising, amid intense pressure and a self-reinforcing ecosystem in which donors, journalists, candidates, and party leaders treat money as a key signal of viability. Thomsen argues that fundraising-based measures make many races appear less competitive than vote totals suggest, and shows that fundraising continues to pay dividends in office through party dues, committee assignments, and legislative effectiveness.

Dr. Thomsen and Jofre discuss reforms, favoring spending limits over leveling up approaches. They note legal barriers, public support, and smaller steps like reducing media emphasis on fundraising and party rewards tied to it.

Transcript:

Nicolas Jofre: Okay, great. We are very pleased to have with us today, Dr. Danielle Thompson, and I should ask you, doctor, do you prefer doctor or professor? You are an Associate Professor of political science at UC Irvine, and you're one of the leading scholars on who runs for office, who doesn't, why it matters. Your prior book, Opting Out of Congress, tackled why moderates are disappearing from congressional races. And now you turn your attention to the gatekeeping power that fundraising and early fundraising has on getting elected. And I'd like to start, if you don't mind, with your first book it was really based off your dissertation which itself was recognized, I'm going to kill the, is it the Schneider? Am I saying that correctly?

Danielle Thomsen: Schneider. Excellent.

Nicolas Jofre: Okay. For those who are not in political science it is really like the Pulitzer Prize of political science. And if you don't mind, I'd love to start there and understanding how your first book set a foundation for what you've been interested in over the last couple of years.

Danielle Thomsen: Yes. So first thanks for having me. It's really nice to be here and it's an honor to be talking about my work with you. So I have been studying political candidates and in particular who runs for office or who does not run for office for more than a decade now. The reason that I got interested in this question is because who runs for office and who stays on the sidelines really has enormous implications for the quality of representation.

In short, our institutions can only be as good as the people who sign up to run for office. And I just firmly believe that. My first book, like you said, was focused on polarization in Congress. And there's a lot of academic attention to the mass public, to, to voters, and to party activists, as well as to changes in leadership in Congress and the kinds of tactics that leadership uses to enforce party loyalty, but there's been much less attention to the kinds of candidates who both run for office and who stay in Congress, and in particular how the political environment itself turns some people, namely in my book moderates, off. So the kinds of things they're able to accomplish in terms of their policy goals, in terms of the kinds of party rewards that they were able to receive and then just having like-minded individuals around them really decreased dramatically over time as the parties became more polarized.

Nicolas Jofre: So you were really looking at it as a kind of a supply issue. Exactly. So often think of it as a demand issue. Exactly. Why does our society demand such kind of polarized candidates? And you were looking at it as actually let's look at who runs instead. 

Danielle Thomsen: Exactly. And the reason for that is because, it, there's a lot of debates around whether voters are polarized or which voters are polarized, but it seems to be a truism that if the only kinds of candidates who run come from the ideological extremes, it is really difficult to see how polarization is going to fade or go away anytime soon. So this was an account of how polarization has become self-reinforcing over time, and why the congressional environment is turning off moderates from launching candidacies and from staying in Congress as well.

So that's the background of my first book. But in doing that research, I found what I thought was a surprising number of candidates who took initial steps to run. They might declare their candidacy with a local journalist or I was using fundraising metrics. So they raised money, but they were ultimately not on the ballot.

And in particular, I was looking at state legislators. So these are the most likely to win. They're the best position to run. They've already, they have a track record of running of not just running, but having a successful campaign in the past ,and I found a surprising number that were dropping out, and so this kind of, this finding laid the groundwork for my next book and this next project because I wanted to understand who these individuals were and the factors that shaped their decision to drop out.

And I found that, probably unsurprisingly to most people, and anecdotally many candidates who drop out, they directly attribute their decision to do so to an inability to raise money or to raise as much money as they had hoped to, especially early on in their campaign that this was a really large part of the story. So that kind of fed into this next project on the real essential piece of money in establishing viability and in building campaigns.

Nicolas Jofre: The headline as you were describing is that in an ideal world, we as the voting public would get to judge candidates by their ideas and their experience, but instead, often what really counts in practice is whether or not they were able to raise sometimes jaw dropping piles of money in the first quarter, essentially.

So I wonder if you could walk us through what this actually looks like for a candidate. So you're somebody who wants to potentially make a difference somebody who wants to run and be successful. What does it look like for them to get into a race? 

Danielle Thomsen: So it is really hard to overstate the amount of pressure that candidates face to raise money.

So in writing this book, I interviewed and talked with a lot of candidates who actually ran for Congress from a variety of different cycles, beginning in like the early two thousands, and most of them in more recent years, including 2022. And they spoke at length about the pressure associated with raising money.

I included one quote in the book that I think is especially powerful that I'll just read here. So this candidate said, "The advice that you get all the time from the National Party and from your consultants is that the only thing that really matters is raising money. That definitely gets into your head. The pressure really lives in every night when you go to bed, either you think, I raised a lot of money. How the hell am I going to do that again tomorrow? Or I raise no money today. How the hell am I going to raise money tomorrow? It becomes the only thing you think about when you go to bed. And it becomes the only thing you think about when you get up in the morning."

That's the pressure I'm referring to. Scholars haven't really delved into this aspect of the meaning of money in elections as much. So they've mostly focused on the impact of campaign contributions on the behavior of elected officials. So whether money buys votes in office and the effect of spending on votes on election day. So whether those who spend more are more likely to win on an election day. But the goal of the book is to really think about money differently and as a main yardstick by which candidates and lawmakers are measured. So part of the value of money, of course, is material.

So like what kinds of things can you buy with money, ads, staff, infrastructure, offices, stuff like that. But another part of the value is rooted in its widespread use as a signal and focal point by a bunch of really important political actors. So congressional elections, it's also important to emphasize our pretty low information environments, right?

Fundraising is publicly available and candidates wanna leave this correct impression about their campaigns to those who are watching. So who is watching? So money is a metric that's used by pretty much everyone who's deeply involved in politics today. So candidates use fundraising to evaluate their competitors. Donors look at money, early money, to decide how to allocate their future support.

Journalists use fundraising numbers and statistics in their coverage of candidates. And party leaders give better committee positions to those who are better at fundraising. So this process is self-reinforcing, and it leads to a positive feedback loop where better fundraisers are seen as more formidable to other candidates, they're more attractive to donors, they're more they're seen as more competitive to journalists who wanna cover front runners and more electable to party leaders who of course wanna win majorities. So there's a bunch of positive benefits that come along with having these early fundraising numbers.

And by the same token, those who struggle to raise money face a very difficult path to victory. I think this is especially pronounced among those who have run for office before, and they potentially have more at stake. Like these state legislators or experienced candidates, they see a lackluster fundraising total really as the writing on the wall.

So in the section on dropouts, I find that candidates who struggle to raise money are more likely to drop out, and this relationship is particularly strong among experienced candidates. And it's helpful to add in quotes from the candidates to give you an idea of the kinds of decisions they're making.

So one candidate I spoke with, he had served in the state legislature for years and he was seen as the front runner when he entered the race, and he said that he decided to exit the race almost entirely because he didn't raise as much money at a fundraising event as he had hoped. So these kinds of moments in campaigns of not raising as much as you think you need or as you expected to, can really make or break a campaign.

And importantly these events are happening long before the voters are involved, like you alluded to. So they're happening months before the election, and it's this jockeying in the pre-primary period that is really crucial for how the ballot, what the ballot looks like at the end, but is really hard to study the individuals who took certain steps to run but dropped out.

And it's hard to see the events that lead up to election day with when we only look at the ballot. So you have to look earlier in the cycle to understand how money really infiltrates American politics. 

Nicolas Jofre: And so this is an interesting thing that you looked into, can you explain a little bit more about this issue of competitiveness? 

Danielle Thomsen: So one chapter looks at competition electoral competition through the lens of fundraising. So how close the leading candidates fundraising halls are to each other and compares how close fundraising is with how close vote totals are. And the basic takeaway is that competition looks better with vote share measures than with fundraising measures.

This is like particularly alarming in the current moment because most people think that while the national electoral environment is very competitive, most congressional elections are not. So like over 80% of members of Congress are elected in safe districts where their party enjoys like a 10 point advantage.

So most people today do not think that the modal house member is elected in a particularly close race, which is why, the number of seats that are seen as up for grabs for both parties is pretty darn small. So the implication here I think is really notable that elections might be even less competitive than what we think, which is already not a very competitive state at all.

So the reason for this discrepancy between vote totals and fundraising totals is that in some races. Particularly racist with more candidates. There are candidates who raise little to no money, by which I mean zero, $0, but they still receive some like nominal share of the vote, so 5 or 10% of the primary vote.

Another way we can think about it is like, what is the gap between the top two fundraisers? And the gap between the top two vote getters and the gap between the top two fundraisers is always on average, higher than the gap between the top two vote getters. So we might think this is good news because individuals can outperform.

Like a lackluster fundraising share. But the problem is that in the vast majority of cases, it is still true that top fundraisers usually win. But the reason for the distorting of money metrics compared to votes is because in these races, we have candidates who are outperforming their receipt share at the ballot box, but they're bad candidates who are doing that. They're long shot candidates who raise, in many cases, most cases, $0 and getting a very small fraction of the vote, right? So most people don't think of this as like real competition. It's just a function of having a bunch of bad candidates in the race and competition is a really hard thing to measure. And we can think about it in a lot of different ways. I think one of the value of using fundraising is to capture the pre-election environment that. That it's impossible for vote totals to, to capture. And I think it's important for thinking about how the process to arriving at those votes differs across candidates with more and less resources.

Nicolas Jofre: The thing that becomes really interesting is what incentives that creates for potential donors. Because it means that and there's a really great quote from the former executive director of Open Secrets that highlights that while we've seen the incidents of smaller donors increase over time, what we see ultimately is that it's really large dollar donors that have the biggest impact. And so we've effectively created a system where what matters most in terms of competition is who has the biggest share of fundraising dollars? And I'd love for us to turn a little bit toward the question of how these different parties react to this reality of early fundraising being so important, and so why don't we talk first about donors, if you wouldn't mind.

Danielle Thomsen: So I use data from across the election cycle. So looking at how first quarter fundraising predicts second quarter fundraising, and found that those who raise more money in their first quarter are more likely to, are raising more money in their second quarter as a result.

So donors want to back the winner, and donors use the first fundraising report as a metric of who they think is most likely to win. I also conducted a survey among primary voters and then subset that to those who had given money in the past and those who hadn't. So this is a very elite sample; It's non-representative in terms of the American public, but that's okay for me because I'm interested in that population. So among both Republican and Democratic primary voters who also donate to candidates, when given a choice between candidate A and candidate B, and they differ on a bunch of dimensions, the dimension that we're most interested in is those who raise a lot of money and those who don't raise much money. Donors are far more likely, 15 points more likely, to support candidates who are described as raising a lot of money. And this is helpful to pair with the observational data because in the survey experiment you can hold these traits kind of constant, which is difficult and it's impossible to do with observational data.

There's a bunch of other things that could be driving the result. But with the survey, you can get a little bit more leverage and show that donors actually, like all else equal across a bunch of other candidate traits, they're prioritizing and valuing and more broadly, seeing fundraising as an indicator of success.

Nicolas Jofre: And for clarification, the donors that you were looking at, what scale were their donations, generally speaking? 

Danielle Thomsen: That's a great question. I do not have that data unfortunately, because the survey just asked, had you given to Republican or Democratic candidate in the last year?

Yeah but some of my current work, which I know we're not getting into, but is about 

Nicolas Jofre: We love the premium. 

Danielle Thomsen: it's about large dollar donors, because I think they're really understudied in American politics. There's a lot of attention to small dollar donors, which is understandable in the current moment.

Nicolas Jofre: Is it also just because the data is, there's more data available? Is that part of the story?

Danielle Thomsen: I don't know if it's that because the large dollar donor's data is actually better because you can, because it's itemized, and so you can get their occupation, you can get their address, you can get a lot more information.

At least before Act Blue and it's a little bit more complicated now, but the data for large dollar donors is better, but I think the small dollar donors has captured the imagination of people a little bit more in the sense of democratizing elections. And there are these reforms and these donors who are able to push back on the sort of large donor class.

But if you look at the share of fundraising that's coming from large dollar donors, from PACS and party committees, and even small dollar donors in the very beginning of the campaign, large dollar donors and max out donors, they're making up like almost half, about 55% of early money. So as a share, they're just an enormous amount of money. That's coming from 30 to 50 max out donors in the candidate's first report. 

Nicolas Jofre: And that's really exciting because it means you're going to have in your future work, you're gonna have much greater visibility into what's driving their behavior.

And I think we have some suspicions based on what you're seeing. The big finding here was they want to back a winner. But it'll be fascinating to see you know what, why they're behaving the way they're behaving. 

Danielle Thomsen: Exactly. And another way of like thinking about this is, most of prior research and the scholarly approaches to money has thought about money as independent variable.

So what is the effect of money on why, which is what we're talking about right now, which is great. A lot people wanna know about that for corruption. They wanna know about that for election outcomes there, there's a lot of reasons for that, and my book is definitely in that category.

So what is the effect of money on perceptions of viability among all these kinds of different actors? What is the effect of money on candidate behavior? What is the effect of money on who journalists cover? But we can also think about money as a dependent variable, which is why are some candidates raising more money from large dollar donors? Who raises early money, and what are the predictors of who raises more money than others? And that has gotten a lot less attention in the literature. Among academics, probably part for data reasons. But also just because the focus of the literature has mostly been on money as an independent variable, as a predictor.

Nicolas Jofre: You spend quite a bit of time on the media and so you speak about how congressional campaigns tend to be low information environments. Ideally, the media would be one of the ways that. One of the tools that that voters have in order to decipher what's going on in these races.

And yet what we find is perhaps because it is a low information environment, that media itself also narrowly focuses on on fundraising. And so I'd love if you could share a little bit about what that looks like. 

Danielle Thomsen: So the analysis of journalists and media coverage, I think is maybe not surprising.

So the main finding is that journalists are more likely to cover money today, and they're doing so earlier and earlier in, in the cycle. I think it's really important for the broader argument and for how we approach the meaning of money. Before I kinda get into that a little bit I do wanna highlight two other changes that I go into in the book that I really think are important for understanding why money matters, why early money matters, and providing a context and setting a stage for what's happening today. So the first is that I alluded to a little bit before is that the number of lawmakers, so members of Congress who are elected, in competitive districts has declined dramatically over time. So in recent congresses, like I said, more than 80% of house members are elected from safe districts where their party has like at least a 10 point partisan advantage. As a result of this, primary contests are the arena where many representatives are selected and decided.

So this changing timeline of congressional elections has made the pre-primary stage even more important than it used to be. So much of the action that happens today, it occurs in the months leading up to the primary. And the reliance on early money as an indicator of viability stems in part from this change in this in the congressional landscape more generally.

So it's unsurprising that money is likely to matter a lot more in elections where there's no partisan queue. In general elections, Republican districts vote for Republican candidates. Democratic districts vote for Democratic candidates. But the primaries are more up for grabs and the pre-primary period is a lot more critical as a result than it used to be three, four decades ago.

The second change that I think is really important to acknowledge, even though it sounds very simplistic, are technological changes. And in particular the rise of the internet. So campaign receipts and spending, they've been publicly available for over 50 years. But this technological change and the internet and the accessibility of campaign receipts that it has afforded people has led to this widespread availability of fundraising data.

So I spoke with a staffer at the FEC who has worked there for over two decades, and he talked about the end of the pre and post internet era. And he said that, in the pre-internet era, you'd have journalists, and less so academics, mostly journalists, and other people who are interested but not so many, who would write or they would call the FEC to ask about reports and ask about fundraising numbers.

And they had these manila folders on tables with presidential candidates and they were color coded for like House candidates and Senate candidates. And people would come into the office with their coolers and have lunch and camp out to, to monitor the fundraising reports. But since 2002, the cost to obtaining this information really went down when all of this information went online.

So today, detailed fundraising data are a click away. We can all access them whenever we want from wherever we want. And these technological and political or electoral changes really provide the foundation for understanding why early money in particular, takes up the amount of space than it does.

Like we have talked about a little bit, congressional elections are low information environments, and there's a quote from a journalist that I interviewed and he said there's very little way of saying, here's a big field and these are the ones that I think have a chance. He said he takes money seriously because it's one of the few metrics that I can look at that tells me who's in the game and who's not.

And in the absence of polling, which is rare in primaries, what other way is there to separate the serious candidates from the ones who aren't? So all of these things. The timeline of congressional elections being moved earlier and the increased importance of primaries, fundraising data becoming easier to access with the rise of the internet and the immediate availability of how much they raise, how much they spend, from whom they raise X number of dollars are very detailed.

And there just aren't a lot of other metrics that these actors that we've talked about have other than fundraising to decipher which candidates are in the game and which ones aren't. So everybody's operating in this big data era where people love data and an informationally constrained environment, and they use the data that they have that is not meaningless.

Fundraising data, it certainly has meaning. It just, it's more loaded than other kinds of metrics that we could use. 

Nicolas Jofre: Yeah, absolutely. And so you're describing the case for journalists is that they're probably just doing the best they can. And to be fair, as you're saying the fundraising data is a very strong predictor of what will likely happen.

And at the same time, it creates this situation where, particularly if you're an outsider to the system, you start to piece together how it actually works. It does feel remarkably like so much of this is determined before candidates even get to say anything about who they are and what they're there to do.

As as we get closer to the end of our time here, I'd like to to ask you two questions. The first one is there's just this this really interesting question of how the national parties and party leaders think about these issues.

And in some ways the parties themselves are investors in this process because there, there are also funds that get apportioned. There's this Mitch McConnell quote after the 2022 midterms where he complained about candidate quality, and I think what he was really speaking about

is how some of these very polarized candidates end up getting into elections and in some cases losing. My question is whether you have any thoughts about what the limits or what the challenges are to the system given this very populist movement that we're in.

Danielle Thomsen: Yeah, so there are patterns in congressional elections where candidates who run against firebrands, they usually outperform in the money chase than what you would expect.

So candidates who run against Marjorie Taylor Greene, candidates who run against Jim Jordan, so Democrats in those cases, they do out raise expectations given the partisanship of their district. We've seen other examples of candidates raising a lot of money and not winning. So raising money is not determinative of winning,

but nor is it the case that they're slowing down in the money chase. So I talked to one candidate who said, basically there's not really a good way to build name recognition without raising money. So you hear among the activist class, so some popula, some more activist oriented people that they're gonna run a grassroots

social media campaign, and that can happen, but it's quite rare. And he said that for everyone who pulls off an AOC style upset, which is very few and far between, there's a lot more people who think they're going to be able to do it and can't. Money is the only reliable way to get your name out there.

And I think what McConnell was saying is that he wants more candidates who are able to reliably get their name out there, and it is the case that almost all the time, those who raise the most money do win. So top fundraisers win 92% of the time in primaries. In general elections, they also win over 90% of the time.

What I think McConnell's referring to as quality candidates, so those who have held prior office before, who have a long reputation in politics, they're also better fundraisers, and I think he's alluding to the lack of experienced candidates, which really dampened the party's

chances of winning in a handful of very high profile cases. And it's a puzzle about like how these candidates are winning primaries and then ruining their party's chances in November. But there is no one magic bullet. Top fundraisers don't win a hundred percent of the time, but it's more about decreasing the uncertainty associated with elections, which is McConnell's priority and improving the odds of success.

Nicolas Jofre: Before we close, I would really love to ask you one of the things that you point out in the book is that fundraising actually matters once people are in office. And so you looked specifically at committee assignments. Would you mind briefly touching on that? 

Danielle Thomsen: So there's this widely held view that money talks in Washington and that it buys powerful committee positions and that those who raise more money from the party team are given more privileged positions in a host of ways. So one part of the chapter just looked at how much money

candidates are directing to party congressional campaign committees from the early 1990s to today. And it is the case that today most members of Congress now pay some party dues-- they route funds to the party committees. So both parties have formal dues structures and there are mechanisms in place to shame

candidates who basically failed to pay up. Fundraising is at least perceived to be rewarded in office. And the goal here was to look at this question more systematically with data across a longer time period. And in, in looking at the office benefits of fundraising in a few different ways.

So just to give you a descriptive fact. So on average since 2000, rank and file members of Congress contribute between $100,000 $200,000 to party committees most cycle. So it's a fair amount of money. In the analyses I look at newly elected members of Congress as well as members who are transferring to a new committee.

And I find that legislators who contribute more to the party campaign committees, receive better committee assignments. In addition to that, their policy priorities are privileged at stages of the policymaking process where leaders have more control. So I'm using Volden and Wiseman's legislative effectiveness data,

and I show that top party contributors, they have more bills that receive action in committee as well as beyond committee. And perhaps most importantly, top party contributors also have a greater number of bills that pass the House chamber and even become law. So there's this due structure, but some pay more and some pay less. So those who are paying more, they're getting a return in some way in the legislative process in being more successful in terms of their policy priorities. In addition to that, I look at who receives more money from different sectors, so like agriculture, energy transportation, health and defense, and labor.

And I show that those who receive more money from these different sectors are also likely to be more effective in those policy areas. So the main takeaway is that fundraising continues to pay these dividends after the election. Starting when legislators enter the chamber and extending to their later policy successes.

Nicolas Jofre: So it seems like common wisdom proves to be correct. But there's this interesting question, which is the money causing, that success in specific sectors, or was the candidate in fact, not to say selected, but was the candidate preordained to be successful in those specific areas. And I recognize that's not something that your research looks at specifically, but I think it does raise the question

in what direction is that causality happening? And the answer is probably like both. 

Danielle Thomsen: This has long been very tricky for scholars and the conventional wisdom is that lobbyists provide a legislative subsidy that is valuable for members of Congress to have. I think one of the benefits of using newly elected members

is that, sure, maybe the same individuals who are better at fundraising are also better at other things, but it's easier to make the case that they're brand new elected lawmakers too. But before they were elected, they contributed to the party more than other newly elected members who were not, and they were rewarded in office.

Yeah, so you can use different samples, but you're exactly right in the sense that this has long been very difficult for scholars to untangle, and the goal was to really think about showing this association between party rewards and fundraising that is at least on the minds of many lawmakers and hasn't really been tested systematically.

But the causality is a thorny issue indeed. Yeah. But at least we are now able to ascertain like this thing that we believe appears to be true is in fact true, that there is this association with your fundraising performance relative to both where you end up in committees and what gets done.

Nicolas Jofre: And so is there any hope to sum up, so you're somebody who is thinking about these issues all the time, it can be frustrating because there are so many limits to what you can do methodologically to bear some of these things out as you just described.

So where do you land personally? And in the book, you discuss paths for reform, but if there is any hope, where do you see it and what should we do about some of these things? 

Danielle Thomsen: Yeah, I am an optimist. I think in part because I think the amount of money in politics today is quite unseemly by most metrics, which I think it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

The amount of money, it's like hundreds of millions of billions if you look at elections more broadly. But even so in the Georgia 2022 Senate race, the two candidates raised a quarter of a billion dollars alone.

It's just so much money. It's certainly the case that the pathway to reform is uphill. Spending limits have faced a lot of resistance from the court for over five decades, beginning in with Buckley v. Valeo, and it's been upheld since this free speech argument.

But I think a couple of things, Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of change. Pew report, a bunch of public opinion data shows that three quarters of the public thinks there should be limits on how much money individuals and organizations can spend. There's partisan gaps in this, but they're not that large.

So it's 70% of Republicans support spending limits and 85% of Democrats. Two thirds of Americans say that new laws could be effective in reducing the role of money in politics, so a majority of the public is clearly already on board. And sometimes it's helpful to look back when you look forward.

So it wasn't that long ago when we did have spending limits in the us. So in the early 20th century Congress set spending limit for House candidates in general elections at $5,000 and the Senate at $25,000. So in current 2021 dollars, that's like a $100,000 and about $400,000. All of these laws lacked enforcement mechanisms,

so they were not enforced, but we had spending limits, and we had spending limits not all that long ago. And now we have an enforcement agency with the Federal Election Commission. So I am more optimistic in a longer term sense that these changes are possible in part because we did have them not too long ago.

And then everybody hates fundraising. Members of Congress hate fundraising, political candidates hate fundraising. The public's overwhelmingly supportive of spending limits for candidates, organizations, and political parties. In fact, I did this survey of 2022 candidates and it was representative of a bi-party, which is rare for academics

for a bunch of reasons. But I had as many Republicans and Democrats respond, I think mostly because I said it's a survey about fundraising and everybody hates fundraising. And they wanted to talk about why they hate fundraising. So the prevailing reform that's promoted today is not spending limits,

it's more about a fundraising system that's weighted towards small donors or what people say is like a leveling up in campaign dollars by providing more public funds to candidates rather than level down by imposing caps on spending. And this comes out of the Supreme Court's stance

on spending limits. Which I completely understand. And the Democrats, in 2019, they passed HR 1, which proposed like a bunch of changes to current campaign finance regulations including this government matching program for small donations. So I completely understand the logic behind this,

but I also think that we should be more bold and wary of a leveling up solution in a country that's already a huge outlier in spending. I think that the most dramatic reform would be to change the cost of running for office, not to allow more people to pay. And then finally, I think there are smaller,

though less transformative, but probably more realistic changes that are possible too. So there is this money ecosystem and the incentives are such that they perpetuate more and more money each year, but it doesn't have to be that way. So candidates are unlikely to change their behavior because they're the most constrained in terms of needing to prove their viability.

But journalists could talk about dollars less. They could discuss other candidate attributes more. Money is a very easy to find signal. It's very convenient. It's cheap to access. But things like experience and qualifications are also important for voters to know. And party leaders could also sever the connection between fundraising and rewards in office.

So there are all of these constraints that I really go into in, in the book, but there are smaller, more actionable steps that all of the actors in the book that I mentioned could take to diminish the emphasis on and really the meaning of money in American elections today. 

Nicolas Jofre: So if I heard you is it fair to say your opinion is that creating limits would probably be, at least in your book, the thing to do? 

Danielle Thomsen: Yes. 

Nicolas Jofre: Got it. Yeah I have had conversations with folks that work on the other side of things that work on the fundraising side, and the more cynical approach is to level up and make transparent which is basically get rid of the limits and then bring it all to light. And so it seems like you fall in a much more optimistic world where if we are being true to the democratic tenants of how our electoral system works, then we really do need to think hard about what role money is gonna play.

Danielle Thomsen: So that's exactly right. There's other comparative research and spending limits in other contexts, and there's a variety of positive benefits that have been shown. They improve competition. They increase the representativeness of the candidate pool.

So there's a lot of other benefits for democracy in terms of competition and the kinds of candidates that are running, as well as like perceptions of democratic legitimacy. 

Nicolas Jofre: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Danielle Thomsen: So we did not want the public to think that our office holders are being bought, which many members of the public do think that. Yeah. So if you tamp down on spending, it's harder to believe those kinds of narratives. If you see a quarter of a billion dollars spent in one race, it fuels these perceptions.

So I'm very pro spending limits. I am obviously also very cognizant of the realities of those of that kind of reform, but I do think having ideas circulate in the public sphere and ideals. So like ideas and ideals is a really important part of thinking about reform, not just from the perspective of what's realistic, but what do we want our world to look like and what kinds of reforms would be most likely to lead us to that world?

Nicolas Jofre: Certainly we are in dire need of this kind of optimism and we appreciate the role that you play in bringing some, both the ideas and the ideals to the public sphere. And I think we're really fortunate to have a talent such as yourself really tackling these hard questions. And we're really excited to know where your future research takes you and and again, thank you very much for spending time on this and thank and spending time with us

Danielle Thomsen: I should have started here, but instead I will end here and I wanna thank you to QUery On Inc for the opportunity to do this research and for the generous financial support that allowed me to make real progress on this project and their commitment to research on money and politics as well. 

Nicolas Jofre: So yeah not enough foundations out there funding this kind of work. What we find is that it tends to be pretty, pretty pessimistic. I think most people with money would likely want to get their candidates elected instead of thinking about the system.

So thank you very much for spending time and and we look forward to continuing to staying in touch. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.