Tag: political donors
Donors Are Poor Way To Measure Political Support

Donors Are Poor Way To Measure Political Support

To get onstage at the last Democratic debate, a candidate had to have received contributions from at least 225,000 donors. That disqualified Mike Bloomberg. He has only one donor: himself.

That rule sounded nice and democratic with a small “d,” but actually, it is a highly flawed way to measure a candidate’s ability to win a national election. The Democratic National Committee has wisely just removed that requirement from the next debate, scheduled for Feb. 19 in Nevada.

This will almost certainly give Bloomberg a place at the podium in Las Vegas. All he has to do is reach 10 percent in four national polls, and he’s almost there.

Some believe this change was made to help Bloomberg. They may be right. But there was something odd about keeping a Democrat who is obviously a top contender off the debate stage. Recent polls show Bloomberg — along with Joe Biden — best able among Democrats to defeat President Donald Trump.

It’s time to stop dismissing Bloomberg as nothing more than a gazillionaire trying to buy the election. He was a three-term mayor of New York City. That’s a bigger and harder job than any of the other candidates ever held. The borough of Brooklyn alone has four times the population of Bernie Sanders’ state of Vermont. And the differences between New York’s and Vermont’s ethnic, racial, religious and economic diversity can hardly be compared.

Money is money. If buying the election is the concern, then the sums spent should matter more than where funds came from. That would also apply to Sanders. He dropped an astounding $50 million in the last three months of 2019 on his campaign — at least $15 million more than Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg each spent.

Sanders and Warren boast that they take money only from small donors. That seems more democratic but mainly on the surface. Their claims are partly false. Both campaigns have tapped millions obtained from deeper pockets.

The argument that politicians relying on small donations can’t be bought by moneyed interests goes only so far. You could say the same of a multibillionaire who isn’t taking money from anybody.

Even less valid is the case that legions of small donors reflect electability. Sanders has a core of passionate supporters who have contributed nearly $60 million in donations less than $200 in the 2020 cycle. But passion does not necessarily win elections. Votes do. How come Biden, whose fundraising has been pathetic, still does better than Sanders in most national polls — among Democratic voters as well as the general electorate?

Like Sanders, Trump has a cultlike following and has amassed his own mountain of small checks. According to OpenSecrets, in the 2020 cycle, he has raised over $44 million from small donors. Warren raised slightly less.

But now the question must be asked: What about voters who don’t give money to any candidates? If you’re poor, you may have higher priorities for that $25 than a politician’s campaign.

And if you have two jobs and three kids running around, you’re probably not online on political websites hours a day. You’re not at rallies. And if you’re not engaged that way, you probably aren’t being solicited for campaign contributions. But there’s a good chance that you will vote.

Yes, Americans should address the role of big money in their politics. But now is not the time for the Democratic Party to unilaterally disarm. We don’t know how Bloomberg will fare in primaries to come. But there are reasons he currently belongs front and center among the top candidates — and they go beyond his vast fortune.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Why Perry Hates Those Regulators: They’re Bad For (His) Business

Like so many Republican officials of the Tea Party persuasion, Rick Perry despises the Environmental Protection Agency – a feeling he has expressed repeatedly in speeches, lawsuits, legislation and even a book titled Fed Up! Perhaps that is only natural for the governor of Texas, a “dirty energy” state where the protection of air, water, and human health rank well below the defense of oil company profits for most politicians.

But Perry has at least one other reason for smacking down those bureaucrats so eagerly. When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Perry’s largest political donors.

The outstanding example is Harold Simmons, a Dallas mega-billionaire industrialist who has donated well over a million dollars to Perry’s campaign committees recently. With Perry’s eager assistance – and despite warnings from Texas environmental officials — Simmons has gotten approval to build an enormous radioactive waste dump over a crucial underground water supply.

“We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license, and we did that,” Simmons boasted in 2006, after the Texas legislature and the governor rubber-stamped initial legislation and approvals for the project. “Then we got another law passed that said [the state] can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.”

Most Americans have never heard of Simmons, despite his fantastic wealth, because he wisely keeps his head low, generally refusing press interviews and avoiding media coverage. Last year a local monthly in his hometown published the headline “Dallas’ Evil Genius” over a scathing and fascinating investigative profile that examined not only the peculiar history of litigation between Simmons and his children (who no longer speak to him), but his political machinations, corporate raiding and continuing corporate penchant for pollution.

In D magazine, reporter Laray Polk explained how Simmons and a company he owns — innocuously named Waste Control Systems — manipulated state and federal law to allow him to build a nuclear-waste disposal site in West Texas. But construction has been delayed for years in part because the site appears to overlay the Oglalla Aquifer, an underground water supply that serves 1.9 million people in nine states, raising obvious concerns over radioactive contamination. In the Simmons profile and subsequent posts on the Investigative Fund website last year, Polk explored the controversy over the proposed WCS facility, including strong objections by staff analysts at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who found evidence that atomic waste might indeed leach into a huge pool of drinking water.

Now reporters for the Los Angeles Times have revived, advanced and updated the WCS story with much additional detail, including interviews with the Texas environmental officials who oversaw the approval process for the facility. For a period last summer, that process appeared to have been slowed down to allow serious consideration of the scientific data collected by the commission’s staff.

In other words, the regulators were trying to do their job, which meant expensive delays and perhaps an eventual ruling against the nuclear waste site. That would have protected the Oglalla Aquifer and cost Simmons hundreds of millions in lost investment and profit. But then Perry’s appointees on the commission voted by two to one to issue licenses for the WCS site.

This year, officials on another Texas commission appointed by Perry — who oversee low-level radioactive waste in the state — voted to allow the WCS site to accept nuclear waste from 34 other states in a highly controversial decision later ratified by the state legislature and signed by Perry himself. Not long after that, according to the L.A. Times report, Simmons gave $100,000 to Americans for Rick Perry, an “independent” committee supporting his presidential candidacy. (Back in 2004, Simmons was a major contributor to another “independent” political committee, the notorious Swift Boat Veterans group that distorted Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s war record in a series of TV ads.)

According to a spokesman for WCS, the Texas governor’s happy and lucrative relationship with Simmons did nothing to help the company except to turn the billionaire into “an easy target…It made the state redouble its efforts to be thorough.” But the Texas officials who opposed the approval on principle have since quit their jobs with the state. As one of them told the LA Times reporters, “This is a stunningly horrible public policy to grant a license to this company for that site,” Lewis said in an interview. “Something had to happen to overcome the quite blatant shortcoming of that application. … The only thing I know in Texas that has the potential to do that is money in politics.”

As for the Texas official (and Perry appointee) who overruled his own scientists and approved the deal, he left state government, too — to work as a lobbyist for Simmons. He says that no undue influence led to the favorable outcome for his new employer.

Texas must be the only place on earth where anyone would believe that.