Arizona state politics were verging on comically corrupt before the turn of the century.
In 1988, Governor Ed Mecham was impeached for misusing government funds and obstructing an investigation into that violation.
And just three years later seven state legislators were charged in a corruption scandal — dubbed AzScam — for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from an undercover agent posing as a Las Vegas gambling promoter.
Faced with a political system rife with corruption, in 1998 Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, also known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act.
The act created a system to limit campaign spending and fundraising for statewide and legislative elections and created an independent commission to administer the law.
The Clean Elections Act also, crucially, established a public campaign financing scheme.
Under the original act, if candidates got a certain number of $5 donations from constituents, agreed to personal spending limits on their campaign, and consented to controls on their accounts, they would receive financing from the state.
What made Arizona’s public financing system unique was its matching system.
If someone participating in a race as a “Clean Elections candidate” was outspent by an opponent not opting in to the restrictions, the state would issue matching funds up to three times the initial public subsidy.
This system dramatically widened the pool of Arizonans who could afford to run for public office and be competitive. Candidates became more diverse, and challenges to entrenched incumbents were easier to mount.
And without the same pressure to bring in large donations, candidates theoretically were not as beholden to lobbyists and other monied-interests.
The financing system also freed up candidates to really speak to their constituents. As Barnard Professor Michael Miller explained to Vox, “candidates who accept these subsidies are much more likely to interact with voters on a weekly basis, to the tune of about 5 hours.”
“The time they would’ve spent raising money is directly reinvested into voter engagement,” Miller continued. “You’re talking about hundreds or thousands of interactions with voters that would not have occurred in the absence of public funding.”
Arizona’s new financing system drew attention as a potential model for the nation during the first few election cycles after it went into effect. Then corporate interests got involved.
The libertarian Goldwater Institute and Arizona Free Enterprise Club both filed legal challenges to the matching fund provision, arguing that it disincentivized privately funded campaigns from spending to avoid triggering public funding matches for their opponents.
And because the Supreme Court had ruled in 1976 that restricting campaign spending is tantamount to restricting political speech, the plaintiffs argued that the provision violated the First Amendment.
The court ruled on Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett in 2011, deciding by a 5-4 margin to effectively prohibit public campaign fund matching schemes.
Public financing is still available to candidates in Arizona and a handful of other states and cities, but without matching it’s impossible to compete financially with well-heeled campaigns.
Candidates for Arizona governor that opt into public financing, for example, are eligible for a little over $2.5 million in clean funding across primaries and the general election. In the 2022 gubernatorial election, candidates raised and spent $60 million — and that’s not even counting the tens of millions spent by outside groups.
There are other options for public campaign financing — like New York City’s small donor matching program where candidates for office receive $6 for every $1 given in donations of $175 or less. But by making funds matching programs unconstitutional, the Supreme Court severely weakened one of our best tools to counter the pernicious impact of money in politics.
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