How to Fix Politics

At Harvard, many of us don’t watch TV regularly, so we’ll be mostly immune to the barrage of political ads that will flood screens across the country in the coming month. We won’t entirely miss it — every time you watch a YouTube video or scroll through your Facebook feed, we’ll probably run into an ad, but we’ll experience nowhere near the level of advertising swing districts are getting.

All this campaigning has a cost: nearly $4 billion.

As one writer put it, the money spent on this year’s races will likely total more than what it cost to produce 19 Marvel superhero movies. If you’d rather compare it to something a little more tangible: it will cost more than One World Trade did. It’s enough to pay the tuition, room, and board of every student at Harvard College — nearly ten times over.

The number that is most often tossed around is the cost of the presidential campaign cycle. But while that figure has also grown, it has stayed a lot closer to what it was 60 years ago than the congressional side. Adjusted for inflation, Richard M. Nixon’s campaign in 1972 and Barack H. Obama’s in 2012 were not all that far off from each other. In fact, Donald J. Trump’s 2016 run cost less in inflation-adjusted dollars than either candidate spent in 1960.

It’s Congressional races that have seen the bulk of the growth. According to official figures, our $4 billion cost today represents more than 16 times what was spent on the 1960 Congressional races.

Even though other metrics like health care spending, GDP, and even income have grown considerably since 1984, campaign spending has far out-paced them. While income a little more than doubled between 1984 and 2012, campaign spending ballooned an astounding 555 percent. It’s grown more since then.

What that dollar amount translates to is hours and hours of fundraising. And though we at Harvard may not feel these effects every day, they make a real impact.

The non-partisan U.S. Term Limits group estimates that members of Congress spend anywhere from four to eight hours of their day fundraising. It’s no wonder that they have to spend this much time though. For 535 people to raise those $4 billion in two years, each member of Congress needs to be raising over $70,000 every week, or more than twice the median income in this country.

It’s a lot of money, and it’s a lot of even more valuable time.

But it’s not just constituents that should be and are worried about the time and effort Congress dedicates to this fundraising. Recent Institute of Politics speaker and former Florida Congressman David W. Jolly ruffled quite a few feathers back in 2016 when he introduced The Stop Act, barring federal office holders from soliciting funds while in office. Though it received bipartisan support (notably from Democratic party sweetheart Robert F. “Beto” O’Rourke), party leadership failed to let it into committee hearings.

Our professors have recognized this issue, too. Law School professor Lawrence Lessig in 2015 declared a campaign for president focused solely on the issue of passing meaningful campaign finance reform. He argued that solving this issue would be the first step to easing our political challenges.

Our country faces pressing issues every day, but if our elected representatives allot less than half their time to solving them, it’s no wonder many of our issues are passed from election cycle to election cycle. While elections continue to get more and more costly, the time dedicated to solving them will continue to decrease so long as fundraising and campaigning needs increase.

Because big money favors party leadership, it is unlikely that such a change would come from the top down. As Harvard students, many of us will leave this campus and emerge as our nation’s leaders. Whether we become business leaders with the power to control corporate donations, political leaders considering campaign finance reform, or just voters choosing between candidates, remember to preserve the integrity of our political system. We must demand campaign finance reform. Not necessarily because money isn’t a form of speech or because the money makes our representatives beholden to special interests — while those are two valid points, this one is more straightforward.

Our representatives need to spend more time representing us and less time fundraising from us. Maybe then their accomplishments will speak for themselves, and we won’t need as much campaigning to convince us in the first place.

Patrick C. Barham ’21 is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.