The U.S.
presidential election is thirteen months away. At this point, more than fifty candidates are vying for nomination by the two major
parties. The field includes the lone member of the United States Senate
to stand as a Socialist and a New York City businessman who has four corporate
bankruptcy filings to his name. Members of the voting public may be said to
fall into two camps at this point — political junkies who simply cannot ever get enough of campaign politics and
the majority of Americans who plan to tune in about a year from now. The former
group is hell-bent on getting enough attention from the latter to raise the
country’s dismal
voting percentage to its presidential-election average, which hovers around
60 percent (ten points lower than the average for OECD countries).
Voter turnout is a big deal. Not just to political junkies
and clipboard-wielding party volunteers but also to American foundations.
According to Foundation Center’s newest mapping tool, Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy, 180
foundations have spent more
than $150 million on voter education, registration, and turnout since 2011,
a period that includes one presidential and one midterm election.
Seems like a lot of money to get Americans to do what people
in many other countries die for. But we’re good at spending a lot of money on
our democracy. Even this early in the campaign, big donors are talking big
numbers, promising (threatening?) to spend $100 million or more each on their favorite
candidates or issues. And political junkies are predicting
that more than $4.4 billion will be spent on TV ads alone — while election spending
in total could run as high as $10
billion. Suddenly, nearly $150 million of foundation funding over four
years doesn’t look so big in comparison to $10 billion for a single election
cycle.
The huge sums of money have become as much a part of the
quadrennial American narrative as the quirky unknown candidates, their
inevitable stumbles and blunders, and the occasional important policy
discussion. Part of the interest lies in the sheer magnitude of the sums involved.
Imagine what we might accomplish in social services, education, or health care
if we spent an additional $10 billion.
But some of the interest also is driven by persistent efforts
to make campaign spending more transparent. Because presidential elections only
happen every four years, there’s a better-than-average chance that each one
will be “the most expensive ever.” Telling that story, tracking the numbers,
and highlighting the huge sums provided by a (tiny) subset of political donors has
become part of our republic’s ritual.
Organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation, MapLight, and the National Institute on Money in State
Politics find, clean, and load (in useful formats) the fundraising and
spending reports that candidates, campaigns, and various aligned political
organizations are required to file. The costs of doing this are more than you
might at first imagine, as we tend to think that simply posting data sets is
all that’s necessary to make that data useful. As proponents of transparency
and those trying to obfuscate know, raw data by itself as a first step is not
sufficient for sensemaking. Open and accessible is a requisite first step, but
cleaning, verifying, analyzing, and using it are still very much required. Even
so, various political
agendas have stymied efforts to require e-filing of these
reports as a first step, a regulatory change that would go a long
way to lowering the cost of making sense of political fundraising.
In the looking-glass world in which we find ourselves, the
more raw data on political fundraising and spending that becomes available, the
more we need nonprofit intermediaries, including investigative reporting
organizations, to help make sense of the data. For all its potential to make
information available at ever-lower cost, opening up data requires complementary
investments in mechanisms to make the data useful and help us make sense of it.
If the issues swirling around campaign finance reform sound
familiar to those of you who work in nonprofits, they should. The same set of
questions about e-filing and data disclosure also applies to nonprofit tax
filings. Earlier this year, the IRS lost a
legal challenge aimed at accelerating its heretofore-glacial efforts to put
nonprofit tax data online. Any year now we should see mandatory nonprofit
e-filing and the release of tax data in a machine-readable format.
If the nonprofit space follows in the footsteps of our
political system, the end result of a law to require nonprofits to e-file won’t
be a straight line to cheaper and more convenient access to that information. We’ll
also need more investments in the intermediaries and infrastructure that can help
us make sense of the increasing quantities of data we generate.
We’re reaching the stage where ready access to data on
spending in politics, on politics, and from foundations and nonprofits can be
assumed. This bodes well as a catalyst for greater understanding, more
insights, and, potentially, more participation. Not because the data will make
the responsibility of being an active citizen in a democracy any easier, but
because it will gives us more tools with which to work. Democracies depend on
participation and accountability, and broadly accessible useful information is
a precursor to both.
