Here & Now

Mike McCabe on Out-of-State Recall Election Spending

Frederica Freyberg: More election related news now. We’ve grown accustomed to hearing about the mega millions of dollars campaigns and special interests spent on Wisconsin's latest round of recall elections. But did you ever wonder who was making a profit from those expenditures? The answer according to the watchdog group, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, is mostly people who don’t even live in the Badger State. Mike McCabe is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. And, Mike, thanks a lot for being here. Mike McCabe: My pleasure. Frederica Freyberg: So we’re reporting, you’re reporting, that these were some pricey recall elections, like $100 million. But what was the take-home of your most recent analysis? Mike McCabe: Well, we looked at 13,000 campaign expenses, payments to ad agencies and production firms and printers and telemarketing operations, and all these suppliers of political services. Those payments totaled about $101 million that we looked at. And two-thirds of that money went to companies outside of Wisconsin. Only about a third of the money was spent on suppliers of election services here in this state. Frederica Freyberg: Well, the question there is why? I mean, aren’t there people in Wisconsin who can do these same things? Mike McCabe: Of course there are. There are printers here and there are ad agencies and there are all of these services could be purchased here. I think one of the big reasons that we’re seeing so much of the money flow outside of the state is that so much of the campaign activity is now being sponsored, not by candidates, but by interest groups. And so many of those interest groups are based in Washington DC or California or Texas or New York. And so they’re using suppliers of political services in their own backyards in order to produce material that then is used to try to sway Wisconsin voters. Frederica Freyberg: Do you suppose that given that a lot of this is taking place outside of the state of Wisconsin that the messaging is any different than it might be if it was, kind of, homegrown? Mike McCabe: I assume that the campaign managers and the professionals who do this are probably crafting the messages and they have to feel like they’re– you know, they’ve got something that will work here in Wisconsin and resonate here. But when they actually go to pay people to produce the ads that include those messages ,or they pay some telemarketing firm to put out all these robocalls, the people they’re actually paying to do all that are not based here in Wisconsin. Frederica Freyberg: And yet some people based in Wisconsin, or at least who employ people here in Wisconsin, made out big, of course, in these elections and other elections in the past here, and that’s the TV and radio stations. What kind of money did they take in? Mike McCabe: Boy, mostly TV stations too. Out of the $101 million in expenses we looked at, $52.5 million went to television advertising. So it was far and away the biggest expense. The next biggest expense was $13 million and that was direct mail. You get down to radio and you’re talking $3 million. And the robocalls that we all hate, a million dollars was spent. Now, people hate those blasted things, and they’re constantly on our voice mail, on our answering machines. The reason that there’s so many of them is that they are so incredibly cheap to produce. You can send out hundreds of thousands of messages for, you know, figuratively pennies. And so, you know, the big expense is TV. That’s what’s driving the campaign arms race. Frederica Freyberg: Good for those commercial TV stations. Of course, we don’t get any of that. Your analysis, you say, didn’t include the $30 million spent by what you call phony issue ad groups, and yet they’re spending the bulk of the independent expenditure groups went in for negative messaging. So what was the breakdown there? Mike McCabe: Overwhelmingly we saw that the vast majority of messages were negative, and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, because people had to endure all of this very trashy attack advertising. And that’s exactly what we found. Now, I think if we were able to see exactly how those unregulated groups that don't disclose their spending, we had actually been able to see how they spent their money, considering how many of them are based out-of-state, that money flowed outside of Wisconsin, and that advertising was overwhelmingly negative. If anything, it would have made the picture look even worse than the picture we’ve been able to paint based on campaign finance reports that we were able to examine. Frederica Freyberg: Now, did both Republican and Democratic candidates and their allies, spend outside the state by about the same percentage? Mike McCabe: Actually, if you look at candidate spending, they are much more likely to spend money here. They spend a fair amount outside of Wisconsin as well, but they’re more likely to spend the money here. Then if you look at the interest groups, that’s where the percentage is overwhelming. So much of that money is spent outside Wisconsin. So the more our campaigns are taken over by outside interest groups, and the less they are about candidates being able to get a message out themselves, the more I think we’re going to see money flowing outside of our state. Frederica Freyberg: All right. Mike McCabe, thanks. Mike McCabe: My pleasure.