Washington Wednesday: Fundraising and campaigning

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 16th of October.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Today, we’ll talk to women who regret their abortions and respond to campaign promises of “reproductive freedom.”

But first, an update on campaign fundraising.

EICHER: While the presidential race draws the most attention and money, there are hundreds of races that will determine the balance of power in Congress. One way many in the media gauge the strength of a campaign is how much money it’s brought in.

But what do these numbers really tell?

WORLD’s Leo Briceno has the story.

MONTAGE: [FUNDRAISING APPEALS / POLITICAL ADS]

LEO BRICENO: When it comes to congressional races, there’s really no way around it: money talks. The more donations a candidate brings in, the more staff, ads, and buses they can use to make their case to voters. That’s why fundraising is now U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s number one priority.

JOHNSON: I’ve so far been in over 220 cities and 40 states sharing this message of our vision for unified government…

Johnson heard there in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania…urging voters to support Rep. Scott Perry. Perry is one of the nineteen Republican incumbents in tight races to keep their seats this year.

Political commentators frequently use fundraising as a proxy to gauge how much support a candidate has.

DEMOCRATS FUNDING CLIP: The fundraising for down-ballot candidates continues to set new records. NBC news reports that House and Senate Democrats are pulling in record campaign cash…

Right now, Democrats have the edge. In donations made directly to candidates, Democrats have outraised Republicans by 35 percent in this year’s 70 most competitive districts.

But those figures can also be deceptive: In Congressional elections, an impressive war chest isn’t always an indicator of just how competitive that race is. What candidates can raise often says more about the givers than the race.

JACLYN KETTLER: Wouldn’t we expect all the top, you know, fundraising races to be the competitive ones? Actually no.

Jaclyn Kettler is a political science professor at Boise State University. She’s writing a book on the relationship between congressional candidates and fundraising.

KETTLER: In it we have a table where we look at, for the 2022 House races, the top fundraising races and then the most competitive races—and they don’t match up that great!

There are some notable examples from recent elections.

AMY McGRATH: I’m Amy McGrath and I approve this message. Everything that’s wrong in Washington had to start someplace…

Amy McGrath is a former Democratic Senate candidate in Kentucky. In 2020, she campaigned to unseat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and amassed more than 96 million dollars to do that. That stunning warchest was funded mostly by grassroots donors rather than party contributions. But despite relentless ad campaigns, McGrath lost that race by nearly 20 percent.

KETTLER: Sometimes a candidate can fundraise a lot of money from grassroots and not end up being very competitive.

While money may not be the best indicator of a candidate’s likelihood of success, it is still a way new candidates can prove their viability to leadership. If they can start fundraising operations on their own, it can signal that they’re worth further investment.

GREEN: Any candidate, for example, who hasn’t raised $100,000 in a close district isn’t really taking the charge seriously.

That’s Donald Green, professor of political science at Columbia University. He studies voting behavior and campaign finance. He says party leaders often look at fundraising to see if new candidates have staying power.

If party leaders start funneling dollars towards a certain race, that’s often a signal that they really believe in that candidate.

GREEN: What’s interesting about the leadership-type donations is that they would not be giving anything if they did not think that the candidates were credible enough to be a part of an elite set of recipients.

That scenario is playing out right now in Colorado’s eighth congressional district.

GABE EVANS: It's a national top 10 battleground seat.

Gabe Evans is a former police officer and state representative. He’s running as a Republican to unseat freshman Democratic incumbent Yadira Caravello. Speaker Johnson’s fundraising committee, known as The House Leadership Fund, has put $25,000 in advertising behind Evans’ race. So far, his opponent has out fundraised him 3 to 1. But where the money race is no contest, polling by Emerson College shows the campaigns are neck and neck…tied at 44 percent each, with the remaining 12 percent of voters undecided.

Ultimately, what ends up in a candidate’s coffers often says more about the donors than it does about the competition. Here’s Kettler again, the professor from Boise State University.

KETTLER: One of our arguments that we make is that some individual donors may be so driven by this idea of negative-partisanship or the dislike of the opposing party that you’re investing or sending money to candidates that—first of all might not even be your district. And also may not be competitive at all.

That’s particularly true of the loudest voices in both parties.

MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: The Democrats ripped open our borders, and allowed millions of illegal immigrants to pour in, driving up the cost of housing and health care while slashing American wages and eliminating jobs…

That’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican out of Georgia at this year’s Republican National Convention. She’s a firebrand conservative who isn’t shy about setting the party’s tone on a national level. And though Greene represents a deep red House district that Democrats were unlikely to flip, she accumulated $12 million dollars from conservatives all across the country…and went on to win reelection in 2022 by a 30% landslide.

The same thing happened with New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. She raised more than 12 million dollars from grassroots donors and won her midterm race by a 43% margin.

Donald Green, the professor from Columbia University, says examples like these make it tempting to see money as a direct indicator of support. But Green warns that when voters hear stories about big-dollar races and candidate momentum, they should be taken with a pinch of skepticism.

GREEN: It shouldn’t be conflated with direct measures of public opinion.

The best measure of public opinion will be at the ballot box.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno.

REICHARD: Meanwhile, back at the top of the ticket Vice President Kamala Harris continues her fundraising and campaigning. In Arizona over the weekend, she returned to her signature issue, so-called reproductive freedom.

HARRIS: Freedom from the government making decisions about a person’s body, a woman’s body. Freedom to just be.

But what do women who have had abortions have to say about it?

BROWNING: Abortion hurts women. Abortion hurt me, and it hurt the others of us you’ll hear from today.

EICHER: In Washington on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for a prayer and fasting event dubbed the Esther Call on the Mall.

On the sidelines, WORLD’s Harrison Watters met with some women who shared their abortion stories.

STEPHANIE JACOBSON: I had two abortions when I was still in my teens.

Stephanie Jacobson is from Florida. She finds it ironic that many Democrats say decisions about abortion ought to be between a woman and her doctor.

JACOBSON: I never saw or discussed my pregnancy benefits, risks or alternatives of either abortion with any doctor.

She’s not the only one. Here’s Mayella Banks from Texas.

MAYELLA BANKS: I did not meet the doctor or get to ask any questions before my abortion. I don't even know who performed my abortion.

Banks and others experienced another broken promise as well.

BANKS: I was told that if I paid $200 I wouldn't feel any pain. The truth is that pain never left.

REICHARD: Jacobson and Banks are among thousands of women who have submitted their stories in friend of the court briefs with the help of an organization called The Justice Foundation.

ALLAN PARKER: Twenty-four years ago in the year 2000, the Lord called me to collect the testimonies of women and take them back to the Supreme Court.

REICHARD: Allan Parker is an attorney and former law professor in Texas. He previously represented the plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in their attempts to overturn the cases that legalized abortion nationwide. Later, Parker filed a friend of the court brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health…the case that returned the issue of abortion to the states.

PARKER: And there were millions of people praying for the end of Roe v. Wade. That's why I often said, Yes, I think it can really happen. Millions of people have stopped praying for the end of abortion.

EICHER: As for Vice President Kamala Harris’s abortion theme “freedom,” many women in D.C. last week said their experiences were hardly liberating.

MARY BROWNING: There's no freedom from the grief, there's no freedom from the regret… There's no freedom from serial relationship troubles. There's really no freedom.

Mary Browning is a family law attorney in Missouri and legal adviser for the Justice Foundation.

BROWNING: I think reproductive freedom…would look like a woman being supported, a woman being told all of her options and choices, and many of the women, myself included, no one discussed with us what all the options were, what it would look like to carry the baby to term, which is what our bodies were designed for.

Right now, Browning is concerned about abortion measures on the ballots in 10 states…including Missouri.

BROWNING: Missouri's is a full page long. And most of them are one paragraph.

REICHARD: The amendment would enshrine a right to abortion into the state’s constitution and remove restrictions on state funds going to so-called reproductive freedom options. And legal scholars say the way it’s written it’s likely to wipe away parental involvement laws and empower the transgender movement.

BROWNING: We have elected officials that we believe have enacted laws that coincide with our values, but what the public is not aware of, is that all the protections that we've had in place for years stand to be eroded in one vote.

EICHER: Election Day is less than three weeks away, and Browning is hoping to turn the pro-abortion tide.

BROWNING: You'd be doing women a favor, women and girls a favor, if you vote in a way that protects them from the abuses of the abortion industry.

REICHARD: That’s it for Washington Wednesday.

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