Now that the 2018 campaign season is truly underway, mainstream media chatter about the "blue wave" narrative is about to become cacophonous. To be clear, there are lots of reasons for optimism. Donald Trump's presidency has inspired a widespread mood of resistance and motivated political organizing to an extent that it's no exaggeration, for once, to call it "unprecedented." Progressive boots are hitting the ground, progressive hands are knocking on doors and progressive wallets are opening up, funding both Democratic candidates and progressive organizations.
But it would be unwise for those on the left to get too complacent about their certainty of a blue wave. Republicans have a lot of unfair structural advantages, not the least of which is a major financial edge that has been dramatically boosted by campaign finance deregulation.
"Across the country, we're seeing Democratic challengers put in the hard work, galvanize the grassroots and, in turn, outraise their incumbent Republican opponents," Adam Bozzi, the communications director for End Citizens United, told Salon. "It's a promising sign for Democrats, but it doesn't take into account that the system is rigged so that special interests can pour outside money in for Republicans, who have been stonewalling campaign finance reform."
Last week, Politico ran a report headlined, "Democrats crush House Republicans in fundraising," in which writer Elena Schneider declared that fundraising totals to this point were "just the latest indicator of a November nightmare developing for Republicans."
Politico's analysis found that 43 incumbent House Republicans were being out-raised by Democratic challengers, a number that's especially striking when you consider that Democrats need to flip about 24 seats to win a House majority in November. (There are five vacant seats at the moment, creating a bit of uncertainty.) But those official campaign finance numbers, experts warn, may be misleading.
"In the past eight years," said Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, "unlimited spending and fundraising by outside groups has played an increasingly important role in federal elections. Any analysis that fails to take into consideration outside group spending is incomplete.”
Official campaigns and political parties have hard limits on how much money donors can give, and corporations are forbidden from directly donating to those entities. However, the infamous 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v FEC, allowed the formation of super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited funds on elections. Corporations are free to spend handsomely through these groups. In addition, there's been an explosion of money funneled through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, which can legally spend up to 49 percent of the money they raise campaigning for candidates, all without registering with the Federal Election Commission or disclosing the names of donors.
Such back-door corporate donations are known as "dark money," and the lack of disclosure means that rich Republicans can suddenly -- and completely without warning -- dump tons of money to boost candidates who are falling behind on official fundraising numbers.
"If you want to fly under the radar and operate a dark-money group and raise tens of millions of dollars and spend it in the 2018 election, you could do that," Ryan said, "and no one will know about it until you start making ad buys. Even then, they won’t know where you got the money or how much you have left in the bank.”
Between super PACs and dark money, outside groups can completely reshape an election, regardless of how well the candidates themselves do with fundraising. In 2016, there were 27 congressional races where outside groups outspent the candidates. With Democratic voters organizing so vigorously, there's even more incentive for wealthy Republican donors to unleash millions in outside spending, in an effort to drown out the effects of grassroots Democratic enthusiasm.
The recent special-election campaign for a congressional seat in Pennsylvania, between Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Rick Saccone, provides a good example.
"Lamb’s campaign has raked in nearly $3.9 million to Saccone’s just over $916,000," Matthew Kelly of OpenSecrets.org wrote in March. "But outside spending has more than made up for the Republican state lawmaker’s lack of support from individual contributors."
Realizing that Lamb seemed likely to win a seat Republicans had believed was safe, conservative outside groups dumped $10.6 million into the race in its final weeks, hoping to boost Saccone. That number dwarfed the outside spending on Lamb's behalf of about $1.8 million, half what his official campaign had raised. Lamb ultimately won in a squeaker, by about 0.2 percent of the vote, which suggests that the outside spending likely narrowed the gap.
President Trump seems eager to put his thumb on the scale and now has both a super PAC and a dark money group (America First Action and America First Policies, respectively). He has announcing a plan to raise $100 million to spend on Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms.
Republicans' resistance to campaign finance reform is easy to understand, Bozzi observed. They want to ensure that "outside groups can spend unlimited amounts of money to prop them up and drown out the voices of everyday Americans," he said.
According to OpenSecrets.org, nearly $380 million has been raised by super PACs this year. Of the top 10 super PACs recorded, six support Republicans and have raised over $94 million. The four Democratic-leaning groups in the top 10, in contrast, have raised $52 million.
In theory, outside groups are not legally allowed to coordinate with the official campaigns. In practice, Ryan said, campaigns "know exactly what the outside groups are doing. They’re sharing the information in increasingly sophisticated ways that generally avoid violations of law."
To make it worse, he added, the use of outside group spending adds to the increasingly negative tones of campaigns. "Candidates, for the most part, keep their ads quite positive and leave their attack ads to the outside groups," Ryan added. "When voters complain about the tone of the election, the candidate says, ‘Yeah, I agree, voter. I don’t like all these negative ads, but I can’t do anything about it.’”
This effect was seen in the Saccone-Lamb race, where a large proportion of the last-minute ads paid for by outside groups involved dog-whistle racist accusations that Lamb had put "illegal immigrants who commit crimes back on the street."
The Democratic energy of 2018 is undeniable, but that's all the more reason to believe that wealthy Republicans will do what they did in Pennsylvania and pour millions of dollars, much of it secret, into tight campaigns late in the game. Enthusiasm can defeat big money sometimes, of course, as it did in the Pennsylvania special election. But there can be no doubt that a tidal wave of right-wing money is coming, and it hopes to overwhelm this year's blue wave.
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