Why Do Political Campaigns Cost So Much

I live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Washington is a city that sits on the border of Maryland and Virginia so the local TV stations serve areas in both states. Virginia has the annoying tradition of holding gubernatorial elections every two years, and I get to hear all of the commercials for characters I don’t care about.

I think we can agree that a large portion of the American voting public have only one source of information about the candidates running and that source is television and, for the most part, the campaign commercials. This year the democrat is running an exceedingly bad TV campaign. Maybe the democrats thought it was a slam dunk because of the Obama victory, or maybe these characters just don’t know people aren’t as stupid as they appear. In any case the democrat has two basic commercials. The first just hammers away at a paper written by the republican twenty years ago. It claims to prove that the republican is fiercely pro-life and will do anything to limit a woman’s right to choose. It also claims that the republican believes that women-in-the-workforce is a bad thing. He mentions nothing at all about himself. I have no idea from the commercials what he plans to do or what he has been doing. The republican easily counters the attack ads and throws out some attack ads of his own that were far better planned. He also has ads that talk about himself and some of his plans. If I were in Virginia and the TV was my only source of information; I’d be voting for the republican.

OK, what does that all have to do with the subject of why political campaigns cost so much? You will see stories on the news during a national election about how much each candidate is collecting in their war chest. The reporters will tell you how important that it is because spending the money is the only way to get the word out. They’ll have stories about how the campaign is spending the money, more in one state than in another. There will also be stories about one interest group or another putting big money on a candidate. All of the stories boil down to one message. In order to run for office you need to raise a huge amount of money. The only way to raise that money is to take money from special interests and hope they don’t press you too hard for favors. That is the reality of it and no amount of posturing about ethics is going to change that.

The story you won’t hear is why do candidates have to raise up to a billion dollars to run for President of the United States? The reason the media isn’t big on talking about why is because they are the ones controlling how much these TV ads cost. In this day and age a vast majority of campaign money is spent on TV ads. Network television is a business. Their purpose is to make money by selling commercial time during the viewing of their shows. Each minute of commercial time has a value. Everyone talks about the value of a minute of commercial time during the Super Bowl, but there is no mention of the cost of a minute during a campaign. Just like the Super Bowl the price goes up every year and the candidates have no choice but to pay it. Political campaigns are a huge financial win for network television. Think about it. The stations dump their prime time sponsors to run political ads; they aren’t about to do that sort of thing if it wasn’t profitable.

The news is quick to report when other industries are raking in a big profit and showing no responsibility to the public good, but they never report on themselves. They never seem too aggressive in reporting campaign regulation issues; especially when they may hint at FCC (Federal Communication Commission) regulation of political commercials.

Is there a better way? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I know that we are not getting the best person for every political job; we’re getting the best salesperson. Not a salesperson that can sell the public on their ability but one that can sell the fat cats on his or her potential usefulness.