Following the Money in District 1
Congresswoman Dina Titus and Col. Mark Robertson are blazing forward on the campaign trail as they head into the final days of the race. With about 40 days left in the race, the candidates will have to develop a smart strategy that helps them ensure turnout from their base, and also capture independent and undecided voters. While it is certainly not the deciding factor, the amount of campaigning dollars in each candidates’ coffer will play a decisive role in how their campaigns reach Nevada voters in these last crucial days.
The rules and realities around campaign finance are complex, dynamic, and they change over time. As Sides explains, the current landscape of campaign finance is the product of the balancing of certain competing values about elections and how they should work in this country. One of those values being, the right of citizens and candidates to express themselves, without money certain modes of expression aren’t possible, and the other being the need to insulate candidates from the potentially corrupting influence of money. These values animate the rules that have been set over time. Some of these decisions, like The Tillman act and the Taft Hartley Act which outlawed direct corporate and labor union donations to campaigns, were reforms put in place to insulate or protect the process from corruption at that time in history. Most significantly, the The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) regulated federal elections and requires the disclosure of donors, and that candidates maintain a central committee that records all donations. These reforms have made elections more transparent, but they coexist in a space that also reflect an interest in the other value mentioned above; the right of citizens and candidates to express themselves politically.
In the wake of these reforms, we saw the rise of independent expenditure groups, more commonly known as Super PACS. These groups are not subject to the same contribution limits or disclosure requirements that individuals and other groups are. In this space, they’ve grown in size and have been handed legal victories in the form of Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. This has all created a landscape where the rules and realities mean that the goal for candidates is to infuse their campaigns with a creatively cobbled together patchwork of donations from as many sources as possible. So what does this mean for the race in NV-01?
According to the Federal Elections Commission report filed in June of this year, The Titus For Congress Campaign reported $1,731,324.25 in total reciepts and 1,690,874.49 in total contributions.
source: https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/H8NV03036/
To compare, Col. Robertson and the Robertson for NV-01 campaign reported $720,533.48 in total receipts and $526,024.75 in total contributions.
source: https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/H2NV03153/
This amounts to a big advantage for Rep. Titus. Her contributions include a significant number of PACs. Some examples include $23,00 contribution from Democracy Defenders PAC, and a $2,000 contribution from the Inland Empire Strikes PAC group, a group tied to Rep. Mark Takano (D) from CA District 41. There are a host of other PACS on her list, all banding together from a variety of regions to help Rep. Titus, and other vulnerable Nevada Democrats hold onto their seats this cycle. That spending advantage could turn out to give her just the edge she needs to engage with the electorate more effectively, and access all media platforms in a louder and more effective way than her competitor. She seems poised to do just that.
