Nick Ramos on Campaign Donor Influence and the 2024 Election

Frederica Freyberg:
It’s widely reported that one big reason Joe Biden was pressured to drop out of the race was because of big dollar contributions to his campaign from major donors were on track to drop by half if he stayed in like, from $50 million in June to a projected $25 million. Now, we’ve gotten used to astronomical campaign funding numbers, but where does this big money in politics leave the average voter? We turn to Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks expenditures. And Nick, thanks a lot for being here.

Nick Ramos:
It’s a treat to be here.

Frederica Freyberg:
So to that question, who is running the show when it comes to choosing candidates?

Nick Ramos:
Oh, I mean, I think you have to look to the wealthiest of the wealth. I mean, if you look to just the way that our campaign finance laws are structured, especially in a state like Wisconsin, you can just look back to 2015 and under the Walker administration, that campaign finance law rewrite that we saw, it really created a scenario where it’s like the Wild West here. It’s a scenario where individuals are able to donate and max out instead of $10,000, you can max $20,000 to, within the state, to the governor, or to the Supreme Court. You can do unlimited amounts of campaign donations to political parties and committees. And then it took off the guardrails as far as the transactions between the committees and the political parties. And so it almost has created this money laundering scenario, where now we get into a federal election where, let’s say you’ve maxed out to your candidate of choice in a presidential election, you can only max out $3,300. But let’s say you got a lot of money that you want to spend, you’d go straight to the party of your choice, or you’d go straight to the committee of your choice, and you can just write a blank check and then they can take that and go straight to the campaign. And so for people like you and I, who I mean, I don’t sit on tens of thousands or even millions of dollars that I get to play with every day, we get to look on the outside looking in, and they’re over here playing kingmaker, trying to pick the candidate that’s going to do their bidding and going to serve their bottom line and do their agenda. And so we’ve been in desperate need of campaign finance reform for so long. And Citizens United has opened the floodgates and Pandora’s box in a way that it leaves the everyday citizen a little less powerful than what we could be if there were better regulations to actually give us a better seat at the table.

Frederica Freyberg:
So, over the course of the past 14 years that Citizens United has, that ruling has been in place. What are the numbers look like in this cycle in terms of spending?

Nick Ramos:
I mean, before we — before we were coming into this year, I was just studying last year and an off year and here in Wisconsin, I mean, we broke records. I mean, we were at $56 or $55 million spent on a nonpartisan Supreme Court seat. And then coming into this year, both the head of the Democratic Party and the head of the Republican Party, both said, we’re predicting that we’re going to break records this year. And now we’re in 2024, a presidential year. We’ve got new maps. We’ve got constitutional amendments. We have all these things happening. And so the electorate is really paying attention, and it’s looking like we’re on pace to break even more records. And like in the Senate race between Baldwin and Hovde, Hovde, they’re already in the top ten as far as money raised and money spent, in the entire U.S. And so we’re right now, I mean, like I said, the Wild West. I mean, I think that’s just minimizing it.

Frederica Freyberg:
Is there a particular party that has the edge in this money raising?

Nick Ramos:
I mean, as far as edge, I think — I don’t know necessarily if that’s the way to look at it, because both parties know what the animal is in the room, which is they need to outraise the other party. But when you look at, at least in a state like Wisconsin, I can tell you this much, from the numbers, it looks like the Republican Party has been taking more out of state money than the Democrat Party. It looks like that way. At least that’s how the trends are. And so and that’s interesting just because, I mean, here in Wisconsin, I mean, we live here and, people here obviously want to have skin in the game. And so if there’s people that are coming in from out of state and there’s dark money, they don’t want necessarily people making decisions on their lives if they’re just outside the state throwing money and then making decisions. And so, to that point, I think both parties are doing everything in their power to try and find the ways to try and shore up as much money and burn it as fast as possible so that they can try and get their candidate in office.

Frederica Freyberg:
Because it is an arms race. Nick Ramos, thanks very much.

Nick Ramos:
Thank you.