Campaign Spending in Perspective

Bradley Smith, former chair of the Federal Election Commission, writes a Wall Street Journal article putting campaign spending in perspective. In 2008, it totaled $5.3 billion. Is that amount too much?

The amount was just over one-third of what American spent on bottled water in 2007 alone; it is a bit more than one-quarter of what was spent on ice cream in 2008, and less than one-sixth of the $33 billion spent on weight-loss products in 2007. It was about 20% less than a single company, Procter & Gamble, spent on product advertising in the same period. And what about the Obama-McCain presidential race, the most expensive ever? The $2.4 billion spent on that race is close to what Verizon spent advertising its brand in 2008. Perhaps it simply costs more to explain to Americans the benefits of Verizon than the qualifications of candidates and their positions on complex political issues.

But political spending is higher than it used to be, right? Well, yes and no. In raw dollars, federal campaign spending rose by roughly 450% between 1988 and 2008. Adjusting the numbers for inflation, however, and we find that the growth drops to 141%; adjust for inflation and growth in GDP, the increase is just 23% over 20 years.

Campaign spending as a percentage of GDP remained essentially unchanged between the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (the statute prohibiting all corporate spending in elections that was struck down in the Citizens United case) and 2008. In the cycle ending in Nov. 2008, spending on American election campaigns was equal to approximately 0.3% of GDP. By contrast, Indonesians spent over 1% of their GDP in election campaigns ending in April 2009. Nations that are much poorer than the U.S., such as Venezuela, have historically spent more money per capita on elections than we do.