Cranky old AZ Republic columnist Doug MacEachern started off his Monday column with some tantalizing clickbait for the crowd that hates Clean Elections and blames it for everything wrong in the state.
Seen our state Legislature lately? Somewhere, a Democratic political strategist is wincing. But he was hardly alone. Promoters of publicly financed campaigns both in Arizona and nationally sincerely believed it would make elections more egalitarian, more open to regular citizens.
Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com
The filing deadline for partisan Arizona candidates has arrived and it appears that most of the GOP lawmakers who joined with the Democrats to approve the Medicaid expansion will not, after all, face serious primary threats as punishment for their votes. Which doesn’t surprise me at all since I’ve been paying attention to GOP primary voter behavior for several years now and have observed that it is rare for those voters to sacrifice incumbents in races that Dems could possibly win.
AZ Capitol Times seems to be clued in to this reality, as they reported Tuesday:
Crossposted at DemocraticDiva.com
This FiveThrirtyEight piece has been getting passed around by both opponents of Clean Elections operating in bad faith and by well-meaning people who think it’s legitimate because it’s on Nate Silver’s site.
In 2010, Arizona enacted an immigration law so stringent that the U.S. Supreme Court was forced to intervene. Four years later, the governor had to veto a nearly successful effort to allow businesses to deny service to, among others, LGBT people. After that measure failed, the Arizona House of Representatives last month passed a bill meant to increase scrutiny of abortion clinics.
These bills are coming from lawmakers who’ve assembled the most conservative state legislature in the country. That’s according to Princeton University’s Nolan McCarty and University of Chicago’s Boris Shor, who tracked the ideology of state legislatures over the past 20 years and found that Arizona’s lawmakers are more conservative than those in Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. Modern, tea-party Republicanism has found no more accommodating home than the Arizona statehouse…
…Given all that, why do these hyper-conservative state legislators keep getting elected? Because the Arizona electoral system allows for extreme candidates to compete on an equal playing field with their more moderate competitors.2
Arizona has one of the most advanced clean election laws in the country. As long as a candidate for the state legislature reaches a minimum fundraising level ($1,250), the state essentially funds her campaign.3 (Only Connecticut and Maine have similar laws on public financing for state legislature candidates.) That allows candidates to stay viable even if they don’t have connections to the state party or local business leaders.
This is the perfect formula for the tea party to take on the GOP establishment. Imagine a tea partyer who doesn’t owe anything to established business interests in her district — that’s the kind of state legislator who might support a “religious freedom” law even if businesses are hurt by it. Indeed, a study by Harvard University’s Andrew Hall and a separate study by the University of Denver’s Seth Masket and the University of Illinois’s Michael Miller both show that clean election laws lead to more extreme candidates.
Fresh on the heels of the SB1062 veto, and with national columnists hungry to meet deadlines with something “insightful” about Arizona, the Chamber of Commerce crowd is really pushing the “Clean Elections done it!” myth hard.
Here’s New York Times liberal Gail Collins repeating the narrative:
“I remember having a meeting with some folks I’d call country-club Republicans, and listening to them bemoan the fact that they have no more influence because of the Clean Elections law,” said Rodolfo Espino, a professor at Arizona State University.
We will come to a screeching halt here and re-examine that thought.
Yes! Part of the super-weirdness of Arizona politics appears to be the result of the state’s 1998 public financing law, which provided tons of matching funds to unwealthy-but-energetic candidates from the social right at the expense of the pragmatic upper class. The Supreme Court took the teeth out of the law in 2011, but, by then, the traditional Republican elite had lost its place at the head of the political table.
So, here's the deal…
Arizonans passed the Citizens Clean Elections Act in 1998, but since the Arizona Legislature likes to do whatever they want to do and not necessarily what the people want, they have been trying to kill Clean Elections for years.
The Supreme Court helped them out in 2010, when it said matching funds to help level the playing field for Clean Elections candidates was unconstitutional because it violates free speech. (The Roberts Court made this decision basically the same week as the infamous Citizens United case which said corporations are people and money = speech.)
Now, Rep. Eddie Farnsworth– obviously doing the bidding of corporate masters– has proposed HB2306 which would increase the influence of big money on Ariozna politics.
From Arizona Advocacy Network:
HB 2306 would double the allowable PAC contributions to candidates, thus disregarding limits set by Arizona voters in the Clean Elections Act. Not only does this spurn voters, but it also violates the Voter Protection Act because it does not promote the intent of voters to reign in Big Money influence.
Find out how you can stop this legislaion after the jump.