A college acquaintance of mine posed a question on Facebook several weeks ago which, since I read it, has been gnawing stubbornly at me. It was about Bloomberg and the morals of campaign finance, and hinged on a comparison between Bloomberg and the rest of the Democratic field that I was ready to dismiss out of hand. As I thought about it, though, I ran up against some underlying assumptions that warrant a deeper dive.
This acquaintance and I - I won't name him; he probably doesn't remember who I am - had profoundly different politics in college, and by all accounts, we still do. But I knew him to be smart, thoughtful, and intellectually honest, and his question plucked at a distinction that felt real to me, but whose line I couldn’t clearly draw. It was this:
Why is it reprehensible for Bloomberg to spend millions in his own money to get his message out, but noble for [Sanders] to spend the money of millions of strangers for the same goal?
Had this question come from someone else, it might have been easy to write it off as disingenuous. Of course there’s a difference between an established politician (any candidate in the Democratic primary, really) spending campaign funds and a comparatively inexperienced billionaire buying his way into the conversation. But a position that feels true is the one that most deserves examination before you go spouting it off on someone’s Facebook page, right? And given the depth of feeling that exists among Democrats regarding Bloomberg, it’s smart to trace those threads back to their source and understand what values (or presumptions) motivate them.
The phrase that most often cropped up in my own conversations and social-media reading about Bloomberg was “buying an election.” My friend seemed stuck on this idea, too. He thought that it gave the voters too little credit; that most people won’t just vote for the thing they saw last, or most frequently. While that’s a noble view of human nature and I admire his faith in Americans’ levels of civic engagement - yikes - it’s important to recall the illusory truth effect: the quirk of information processing by which we attribute greater truth to statements that we’ve heard more often. The illusory truth effect (also called the reiteration effect, which is maybe a less loaded term) is a key strategy in advertising, propaganda, news media, and yes, political campaigning. By spending vast sums of money to present his message to more eyeballs more times, Bloomberg literally buys himself credibility.
But this is exactly what every candidate does, isn’t it? All that campaign funding doesn’t only go toward “getting the message out” and trusting in the intellectual sensibilities of the voting public. The other Democratic candidates are leveraging the illusory truth effect too, if not as prolifically as Bloomberg’s funds allow him to. What makes this a difference of kind, rather than degree?
The truth is that it’s impossible to be angry at Bloomberg for subverting the existing system without believing that the system is, in some capacity, doing its job. For all the general cynicism about politics, it seems that we’re still hanging on to the idea that at least part of the process is meritocratic. And the only way to square that belief with the illusory truth effect up above is if the repetitions of a candidate’s message are earned. Biden, Sanders, Warren, and other primary candidates fund that messaging with money donated from multiple sources; Bloomberg funds it from one. There’s a reason that progressive candidates go out of their way to highlight the percentage of their donations that come in small totals. A donation is a signal boost - a way for a voter to say that a candidate’s message resonates and should be spread. We view a candidate’s visibility as a function of their war chest, and their war chest as a proxy for their actual popularity.
Which brings us to Bloomberg’s sin. It was neither the audacity to have money, nor the temerity to spend it: instead, it was the arrogance to swoop into the middle of a primary under his own power, and without even the appearance of a mandate from the public, become the loudest voice in the room. Bloomberg forced us to confront just how imperfect money is as a proxy for voter support. It was a mercenary, ends-justify-the-means move, and that alone angered a lot of Democrats, but in truth, it was unremarkable in that respect. No one is surprised that money holds heavy sway in politics - until suddenly we find ourselves surprised, unexpectedly and bitterly, and both the cognitive dissonance and the frustration of facing our general political impotence need an outlet. And so I think my answer to my college friend would have to be that, by the reckoning of many Democrats, Bloomberg took bald-faced advantage of a broken system. The fact that we care so much about the distinction between his and his fellow candidates’ funding just shows how tightly we are holding on to the pockets of political agency that we still think we have.
Finally: all of this feels true, at least to my own reasoning, but what do the numbers say about the actual relationship of campaign spending to political success? In the course of writing this, I came across this article by Maggie Koerth at FiveThirtyEight which delves into research on exactly this topic. I strongly encourage you to read it, but the gist is this: it’s complicated, and spending is often far less effective than most people assume. The effects of advertising, it turns out, seem to wear off pretty quickly, and other factors - like incumbency and partisanship - play much stronger roles.
But Koerth does highlight a couple of key scenarios in which spending matters: specifically, in the early days of getting the word out when “the candidate buying the ads is not already well-known and if the election at hand is less predetermined along partisan lines.” Spending is also increasingly becoming a ticket to play: “[A]s it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy.” So while calling Bloomberg an unknown might be a stretch, it seems he played his hand rationally. But the data suggest that wounded Dems have a point: it comes at a cost.