Three frustrating reminders from the 2014 election's last days

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, October 27, 2014.

As one of the most hotly contested mid-term elections in North Carolina history comes to a close, it’s worth noting some of the lessons that we have already learned regardless of who wins and who loses when the votes are counted Tuesday night.

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity finds that State House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senator Kay Hagan had raised $30 million between them by the end of September, a staggering amount of money and a total that is surely to grow much larger when the October contributions are reported.

But that’s less than the $50 million the Center finds that outside political groups had reported spending on ads in the race by September 30, groups with no ties to the candidates or political parties, most of them from out of state.

Overall, the Hagan/Tillis raise is on pace to cost more than $100 million with as much of two-thirds of it coming from special interests, not the two people asking for our votes.

Many of those millions come from groups that don’t report their donors thanks to the refusal of Congress to require them to, so they operate as special interest money laundering operations buying the election that we are supposed to decide.

Lamenting the explosion of outside money is nothing new, but the sheer size of the bids to buy our election this year is staggering and it’s hard to understand how anybody can defend $70 million from out of state anonymous sources determining who the next Senator representing North Carolinians will be.

Surely this is not what the often cited founders of this country intended for their democratic experiment to become, taking power way from people to pick their leaders and let mysterious big money cabals in Washington decide.

And the second revelation in recent days strains their original vision even further. An outside group just bought $400,000 of political ads in a N.C. Supreme Court race. Not only are shadowy outside unaccountable groups trying to determine who will represent us in Washington, they are increasingly playing a major in determining who will sit on the state’s highest court that interprets and evaluates the constitutionality of our laws.

That’s not new either. Big outside money has been flowing into court races for the last couple of elections and the decision by the General Assembly to end public financing of appellate court races only exacerbated the problem.

This year’s crass bid for the courts likely won’t raise as many eyebrows as it should, as the absurdity of special interests funding the campaigns of justices they will then appear before is sadly becoming part of the status quo in North Carolina, something many pundits now take for granted.

And finally there are the elections for Congress and the General Assembly. A political scientist recently interviewed about the congressional races understandably predicted that only one of the 13 races was worth discussing and that in that one, Republican incumbent Rep. Renee Ellmers was likely to defeat Democratic challenger Clay Aiken.

None of the other races are close and if as expected Ellmers does win, Republicans will control 10 of the state’s 13 seats in the U.S. House, remarkable in a state that even Republicans agree is almost evenly split when it comes to political beliefs.

The big question in the General Assembly races is not which party will control the House or Senate, but whether or not Democrats can gain a handful of seats to end the Republican supermajorities in both chambers, again in a state that is roughly evenly divided.

Something is terribly wrong here. The current system of electing people to serve in Raleigh and Washington is broken.  The 2014 election has made that clearer than ever, regardless of how the high profile races turnout.

The Tea Party likes to talk about taking our government back, but it’s never clear what they mean. Take it back from whom exactly?

It’s our elections we need to reclaim from the secret special interests and crafty gerrymandered map drawers who currently control them.

Your vote matters next Tuesday of course, so show up at the polls and use it. But it would matter a lot more if the deck wasn’t already stacked against us by the wealthy special interests hiding in the shadows buying our democracy.

As one of the most hotly contested mid-term elections in North Carolina history comes to a close, it’s worth noting some of the lessons that we have already learned regardless of who wins and who loses when the votes are counted Tuesday night.

A new report from the Center for Public Integrity finds that State House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senator Kay Hagan had raised $30 million between them by the end of September, a staggering amount of money and a total that is surely to grow much larger when the October contributions are reported.

But that’s less than the $50 million the Center finds that outside political groups had reported spending on ads in the race by September 30, groups with no ties to the candidates or political parties, most of them from out of state.

Overall, the Hagan/Tillis raise is on pace to cost more than $100 million with as much of two-thirds of it coming from special interests, not the two people asking for our votes.

Many of those millions come from groups that don’t report their donors thanks to the refusal of Congress to require them to, so they operate as special interest money laundering operations buying the election that we are supposed to decide.

Lamenting the explosion of outside money is nothing new, but the sheer size of the bids to buy our election this year is staggering and it’s hard to understand how anybody can defend $70 million from out of state anonymous sources determining who the next Senator representing North Carolinians will be.

Surely this is not what the often cited founders of this country intended for their democratic experiment to become, taking power way from people to pick their leaders and let mysterious big money cabals in Washington decide.

And the second revelation in recent days strains their original vision even further. An outside group just bought $400,000 of political ads in a N.C. Supreme Court race. Not only are shadowy outside unaccountable groups trying to determine who will represent us in Washington, they are increasingly playing a major in determining who will sit on the state’s highest court that interprets and evaluates the constitutionality of our laws.

That’s not new either. Big outside money has been flowing into court races for the last couple of elections and the decision by the General Assembly to end public financing of appellate court races only exacerbated the problem.

This year’s crass bid for the courts likely won’t raise as many eyebrows as it should, as the absurdity of special interests funding the campaigns of justices they will then appear before is sadly becoming part of the status quo in North Carolina, something many pundits now take for granted.

And finally there are the elections for Congress and the General Assembly. A political scientist recently interviewed about the congressional races understandably predicted that only one of the 13 races was worth discussing and that in that one, Republican incumbent Rep. Renee Ellmers was likely to defeat Democratic challenger Clay Aiken.

None of the other races are close and if as expected Ellmers does win, Republicans will control 10 of the state’s 13 seats in the U.S. House, remarkable in a state that even Republicans agree is almost evenly split when it comes to political beliefs.

The big question in the General Assembly races is not which party will control the House or Senate, but whether or not Democrats can gain a handful of seats to end the Republican supermajorities in both chambers, again in a state that is roughly evenly divided.

Something is terribly wrong here. The current system of electing people to serve in Raleigh and Washington is broken.  The 2014 election has made that clearer than ever, regardless of how the high profile races turnout.

The Tea Party likes to talk about taking our government back, but it’s never clear what they mean. Take it back from whom exactly?

It’s our elections we need to reclaim from the secret special interests and crafty gerrymandered map drawers who currently control them.

Your vote matters next Tuesday of course, so show up at the polls and use it. But it would matter a lot more if the deck wasn’t already stacked against us by the wealthy special interests hiding in the shadows buying our democracy.

- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2014/10/28/three-frustrating-reminders-from-the-2014-elections-last-days/#sthash.0N9aLjsA.dpuf