07/27/11: Investing in incumbents

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

AN ANALYSIS by the Virginia Public Access Project reveals that businesses that lobby the General Assembly donated $7.43 million over the past 18 months, with nearly all of it — 99.61 percent, or $7.4 million — going to incumbents in the legislature.

That works out to nearly $53,000 for each of the 140 members of our legislature.

Candidates vying for open seats received 0.34 percent, or about $25,000 total. A paltry 0.04 percent — about $3,000 — went to challengers.

In Virginia, there are no limits on contributions to state and local candidates. That allows the big players in the game to donate significant sums.

Dominion, the largest business contributor, has donated more than $430,000 since January 2010. All but $250 of those donations have gone to incumbents.

The second largest business contributor, Virginia Bankers Association, has donated in excess of $370,000, all to incumbents.

The donations do not appear to be ideological, unless you consider power an ideology.

Dominion’s donations were almost evenly split between Republican and Democratic candidates. Other top business donors gave slightly more to Republicans than Democrats, or vice versa, depending on whether the donors focused their contributions on the House, where the Republicans are in the majority, or on the Senate, where the Democrats are in the majority.

None of the top 10 business donors contributed only to members of one party or the other. Even small-business donors tend to split their contributions.

Because Dominion can write a big check, it may appear that it leaves voters out in the cold. But that’s not completely the case.

Nearly $21 million has been donated to legislative candidates since January 2010, so only a little over a third comes from those businesses that lobby the legislature.

A lot of the rest, including those contributions made by one political candidate to another, came from individuals like you and me. There are 281 pages — with 50 donors per page — on VPAP, and around page 20, the individual donors start to outnumber the business ones.

Collectively, there are more of us than there are of them.

More importantly, we have something that the businesses don’t: the ability to cast our votes for the candidate of our choice.

The problem is, of course, that we don’t always get the opportunity to do so.

Safe seats, the result of redistricting, reduce the number of candidates. And safe seats, combined with the huge amount of money necessary to run for office, reduces the number of candidates even further.

It is why there are so few contested legislative races in Hampton Roads. Only four of our senators and four of our delegates have challengers.

Worse is that of the eight races, only four will likely be competitive; that is, where the challenger has a chance to defeat the incumbent.

I am not a fan of term limits — I think we have the power to limit the term of any incumbent via our right to vote — nor am I a fan of contribution limits. Both of those would be easy solutions to the current problem. But easy isn’t always best.

At some point, we are going to have to figure out how to get more choices on the ballot. Our democracy depends on it. Nonpartisan redistricting would be a start. So, too, would increasing the number of House and Senate seats.

In the meantime, get ready for the onslaught of mail, radio and TV ads, a lot of it paid for by lobbyists who aim to protect the status quo.