John Amis/AP Photo
A number of Democratic presidential front-runners, including Joe Biden, have backtracked on their pledges to forgo super PAC money.
One of the few consistent traits of the new Democratic majority that won the midterms in 2018 was a refusal of corporate PAC money. From the headline-grabbing triumph of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York to the victory of centrist Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, the common denominator was not ideology or identity so much as a pledge to refuse campaign donations from corporate political action committees. That promise served a dual purpose, both as highly effective political messaging and as a policy signal that candidates would be willing to take on corporate interests and money in politics once they got to Washington.
All told, 185 Democratic candidates promised not to accept money from corporate PACs in 2018, according to an estimate from End Citizens United, a Washington, D.C.–based group working to reverse the decision in the 2010 Supreme Court case of the same name. At least 85 such candidates won primaries, and when the dust of the election cycle settled, 52 elected House members, including 50 Democrats and 35 first-termers, had pledged to reject money from corporate PACs. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sheldon Whitehouse all took the same pledge in 2018, joining several colleagues who’d previously done the same. Even a couple of Republican representatives, Phil Roe of Tennessee and Francis Rooney of Florida, got in on the action.
Swearing off big money, even as a symbolic measure for primary and first-term challengers (corporate PACs can only donate $5,000 apiece to campaigns anyway), lent credibility to Democrats proclaiming to be the party that would grapple with the corruption that’s become more deep-seated than ever during the Trump years. California Representative Ro Khanna, who swore off PAC contributions during his 2016 campaign, even co-founded the No PAC Caucus in the House, and handily won re-election in 2018.
The movement seemed to be growing when the 2020 Democratic presidential primary kicked off, as candidates pledged to swear off PAC money of all types. That included super PACs, the nominally independent, frequently secret donor groups given leeway to spend unlimited sums in support of their favored candidates. This represented a huge win for the activist wing of the party, which succeeded in making the no-PAC pledge a basic eligibility test for would-be leaders.
But now, as the field has narrowed, a counterrevolution has set in, as a number of front-runners have all but reneged on those dedications. On Wednesday, the Pete Buttigieg campaign became the latest to slough off its commitments to financial transparency and avoidance of PAC money. In the early days of his candidacy, Buttigieg made a show of his dedication, even returning some $30,000 in donations from lobbyists. But after securing the endorsement of VoteVets, a political action committee focused on veterans affairs, the Buttigieg campaign refused to rule out accepting super PAC funding from the group. Beyond that, Buttigieg has all but abandoned his previous pledge to be transparent in identifying his bundlers, which hasn’t happened since an initial reveal in April. And in October, he defended his courting of big donors by dismissing the small-dollar approach of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as “pocket change.”
Just a few days prior, Cory Booker, himself a taker of the no-PAC pledge in 2018, and vocal opponent of super PAC support as recently as June, featured in a campaign ad attacking Pete Buttigieg. That spot was paid for by the United We Win super PAC, which pledged to spend a million dollars in support of Booker in mid-November. “My campaign looks a lot more like Bill Clinton’s did, Jimmy Carter’s did, even Barack Obama,” Booker said on CNN after feigning surprise about the ad’s appearance. Hours before Kamala Harris dropped out of the race, a super PAC called People Standing Strong had booked airtime in Iowa to support her candidacy. Harris had affirmed her commitment to rejecting super PAC support only a couple of months earlier.
Of course, the man who kicked off all of this was Joe Biden. Afraid of a precipitous drop in the polls after quickly maxing out his big donors, posting subpar fundraising numbers, and stringing together a series of pitiful debate performances, Biden formally dropped his opposition to super PAC support. One was launched in his name just days later.
In a matter of weeks, a cycle-long Democratic dedication has essentially been wiped out, by candidates who, depending on where you look for polling, represent the lion’s share of the Democratic centrists (Booker, it should be noted, is likely poised for a mini-surge thanks to Kamala Harris’s bowing out and a recent boost in fundraising numbers). Not every candidate in the race has a super PAC, of course: Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg don’t need one to lap the field in ad spending with their own money.
There’s another way to describe Buttigieg, Booker, and Biden. All of them have jockeyed for pole position as the head of the so-called “Obama coalition.” Booker has hammered this notion in his messaging; Biden has long posited himself as the sole bridge to this elusive voting bloc thanks to his time in the Obama White House.
But it was Barack Obama who was the forerunner of the no-PAC-money pledge. In fact, in 2008, the then-candidate pioneered the trend by refusing contributions from PACs of all sorts during his run for the presidency, even avowing support for publicly funded elections. It turned out to be one of his most tactically sound moves throughout the election season. And when he reneged on that promise in 2012, it cost him legitimacy and may have factored, along with poor economic numbers, into a weak re-election performance: Obama was the first incumbent since Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 to win re-election with fewer electoral votes and a lower popular vote percentage than he’d secured the previous cycle.
What’s worse, the current super PAC embrace has ceded Democrats’ legitimacy in claims to take on Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that flooded American politics with corporate cash in a way that has overwhelmingly favored Republicans. Despite relying on some super PAC support himself, Trump chipped away at that weakness to great effect, pointing to Clinton’s more than $700 million in super PAC backing in 2016. Though he’s certain to be better endowed with super PAC funding this time around, it’s not unforeseeable that he’d return to that messaging in his re-election cycle.
The rationale for super PAC support is often that, until they change the law, Democrats cannot unilaterally disarm. But there’s little reason to believe that going long on PAC money of any sort is the best path to getting a Democratic nominee over the hump. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have turned in prolific fundraising numbers without it, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continues to set records of her own. The small-dollar revolution is so capable at harnessing large sums of money, in fact, that it led Biden and friends to pursue super PAC funds in the first place.
Even without considering how PAC money will influence policy, if embracing corporate cash relinquishes legitimacy on the subject of money in politics, the cost of such a maneuver should be seen as prohibitively high. And if it were to push Biden, Buttigieg, or Booker over the top, the bill would come due in the general, leaving that candidate vulnerable to attacks from Trump, who the Democratic candidate will be striving to paint as corrupt. At the very least, it’s a profoundly shortsighted move, reproducing one of the critical errors of 2016 while overlooking the party’s most recent successes.
