Do you know how much money your congressional candidate receives from out-of-state sources? According to a new report by the D.C.-based campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets, it's quite a lot. A recent study by the nonprofit found that in states with smaller populations like Wyoming, political funds flow from the outside in. And it’s been getting more pronounced. Wyoming Public Radio’s Jordan Uplinger spoke with OpenSecrets Executive Director Hilary Braseth about this trend.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Jordan Uplinger: You just wrapped up a review of how congressional campaigns are funded, and you found that the share of money candidates raised from their own constituents was the second lowest on record. What did you pull from your study?
Hilary Braseth: We looked at essentially all of our contribution data across federal candidates for members of Congress, whether that's the House [or] the Senate. We looked at those figures over a little more than a decade, since 2012, and noticed that there's been a steady rate of decline [in in-district or in-state contributions], save for historic low in 2020, which I think probably could be attributed largely to the pandemic. Last year continues to show this sort of steady downward trend in terms of how much money a candidate is getting inside the district versus outside the district.
JU: I'm curious if the study was able to kind of parse through the data and find if individuals were sending donations out-of-state to other congressional candidates as well. Or if this is primarily large sums of money crossing state lines, from a firm or a richer individual, let's say.
HB: That's actually an addendum that we hope to build on this study for, is examining what type of money that is. Is it small donations, ie. classified as sub-$200, typically from the individual or family? Or were they really big dollar donations typically funneled through the vehicle of a super PAC [political action committee] that tends to collect money from anywhere, from corporations to nonprofits to individuals in large sums, and then distributes that across candidates? That's the second phase of this analysis that we hope to build on.
JU: We will definitely be touching on super PACs later as they're a very key part of this whole thing as well. But to bring it back home here, in your report you said smaller states like Vermont and Wyoming, as two examples, rely on out-of-state donations. In Wyoming, 89% of House fundraising was out-of-state. In the Senate, 92.5% were out-of-state. Why is that, and how does that reliance impact state politics?
HB: Those are some pretty staggering figures if you really think about it, that around 10% or less of a candidate's money is coming from within the state of Wyoming.
Is this typical? I think one of the reasons that we tend to see this happening is that in states with lower population numbers like Wyoming, where there's only one House candidate. We see a lot more outside money coming into those cycles. You could come up with a number of theories for why that might be the case.
Potentially that means that you could have greater influence, because there are fewer other votes happening within that state to represent the state, and so there might be more interest from out-of-state folks in wanting to build relationship via giving a donation to those candidates.
JU: OpenSecrets reported that Rep. Harriet Hageman received $15,000 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Sen. John Barrasso has received over $70,000 from a private equity firm based in New York and California [from 2019 to 2024]. And Sen. Cynthia Lummis received over $100,000 from the Club for Growth, a conservative PAC [from 2019 to 2024]. In the face of more powerful organizations like those, how do individual or local donors in Wyoming make their voice more impactful? Or their donation more impactful?
HB: What allows somebody to be elected is votes, right? I think if nothing else, our perspective as an organization that follows the money in politics is, and makes that very easily accessible on our website, is ideally for Americans to use that information to inform themselves about the sources of funding for any candidate that goes before them on the ballot.
If Wyoming citizens don't love that Wyoming candidates get their money from outside of state and make that known by virtue of their vote, by all means that absolutely could have a mark to bear on the strategy going forward of any candidates who decides to run for office.
JU: We're now 15 years past the landmark Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed for corporate, union [and] nonprofit money to flow into political action committees. How has this changed politics over the last decade?
HB: Let me just paint a little bit of a picture here. The total cost of the 2000 elections, presidential and congressional combined, was around $3.1 billion.
Twelve years later in 2012, just three presidential cycles later, and the first presidential election cycle after the landmark Citizens United case as you mentioned, that doubled to $6.3 billion.
Then, just two presidential cycles later in 2020, so we leap from 2012 to 2020, that figure again more than doubled to $15.2 billion.
Then last year, we're punching in right about, if not above, that same total cost of the elections, presidential and congressional combined.
So it is undeniably drastic in terms of the flow of capital into our election cycle. A lot of that is through that vehicle that you just mentioned, the super PAC, which essentially paves the way for corporations, unions, nonprofits, individuals to spend unlimited sums of money on elections. If you look at the number of million dollar plus donations since before Citizens United, it's also exponential growth.
What we're seeing is not only is there more money, but there's more money from fewer individuals who are giving these really large sums of money through the vehicle largely of the super PAC.
JU: If Wyoming now is a state that sees a lot of money from outside the state, do you expect that trend to continue? And should voters in Wyoming feel excited that their state is getting so much attention, that so many people wanna be a part of the conversation at the Wyoming table? Or should they be a little concerned that so many people want to be a part of the conversation at the Wyoming table, even though they weren't there to begin with?
HB: Based on the figures that we've seen and the trends over the last decade-plus, it's likely that we see those figures continue to increase in terms of money coming from out-of-state versus in-state. All that to be said, I do think it's up to Wyoming to decide if this is okay or not. And if they're not okay with it, there's policy pathways.
If they are okay with it, then I think there still needs to be transparency on where the money's coming from for the sake of trust and integrity and democracy.
-
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
