The New Money Trail: Financing Congressional Elections from 1990-2022

• In Event: Electoral Spending Strategies and Political Influence

Abstract

Over the last several decades, monumental changes to American politics have changed the role and impact of money in congressional campaigns and elections. One such change is the evolving complexity of individuals’ and groups’ motivations and goals behind their increasing financial involvement in these elections. The nationalization of congressional campaigns and elections has coincided with several crucial factors that change the calculus of those who allocate money for these elections. These factors include a changing campaign finance legal structure (Boatwright 2015); an increasing focus on race-level electoral competition (Jacobson and Carson 2019); chamber-level competition and quickly-changing party majorities (Lee 2016); and negative partisanship among the electorate (Abramowitz and Webster 2016).

The literature to date has not comprehensively considered the impact of these well-documented forces on how congressional campaigns and elections are financed, nor has it considered whether these forces motivate different entities’ financial behaviors in different ways. We build on a framework from Hunt et al (2021) that proposes unique goals and motivations separately for the dominant entities in campaign finance, including individual campaign contributors; party organizations; and various non-party outside spenders in the business, labor, and ideological sectors. Using transaction-level campaign donation and independent expenditure data from 1990-2022, we demonstrate that these entities utilize differing financial strategies, allocating their resources to different types of races and candidates, and in ways that reflect their goals and motivations suggested by the literature.

Authors

• Charles Hunt, Boise State University

• Jaclyn J. Kettler, Boise State University