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When a candidate invests his personal fortune to run for public office, does that represent a rich man trying to buy himself a seat, or does it give him independence from powerful special interests? Voters will decide Tuesday in an election in which candidates are spending more of their own money than in any previous election.
Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer has committed $213 million to fund his gubernatorial campaign. In all, more than 200 candidates contributed about a quarter of a billion dollars of their own money this year. That’s an eightfold increase since the last time Californians voted for governor in 2022, and the most since California began keeping digital campaign finance records in 1999.
The last time a candidate spent anything close to Steyer was in 2010, when Meg Whitman gave more than $140 million to her own failed gubernatorial campaign, setting a record at the time.
Previous statewide races have also seen big spending: Steve Poisner gave $14 million to his 2006 campaign, running for insurance commissioner; Eleni Kounalakis raised over $8 million when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2018; Yvonne Yiu dropped nearly $6 million on her campaign for comptroller four years ago.
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Candidates running for state Senate this cycle have given nearly $4 million to their campaigns — the highest amount on record for the chamber and more than double the $1.7 million candidates gave 20 years ago. Similarly, current congressional candidates have contributed more than $29 million to their campaigns, the most of any cycle in the past two decades.
And this year, some congressional candidates set campaign self-funding records.
Two of the five congressional candidates who have contributed the most money to their campaigns over the past 20 years will be running in this election. In the competitive race to succeed Nancy Pelosi in her San Francisco-based congressional district, Democrat Saikat Chakrabati has given nearly $9 million to his campaign, the most of any congressional primary candidate in state history. Eric Jones, who is seeking to oust fellow Democrat Mike Thompson from his North Bay district, has transferred more than $5 million from his personal fortune.
Chakrabarti said the money he's putting in is to counter the millions spent against him by opponents, and that self-funding his campaign is his best bet in a bad system.
"To counter that kind of money, I have two options," he said. "I can either spend my time calling big donors for money, and then I can go to D.C. and owe a million favors to a million people ... so I chose to put in my own resources."
The increase in self-financing may reflect the need for more money to compete after the Supreme Court, in a 2010 decision known as Citizens United, lifted limits on campaign spending by wealthy individuals and corporations, said Jeremy Mack, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Phoenix Project.
In other words: more money in politics begets more money in politics.
"In California," he said, "often corporations, real estate syndicates and police have often worked together to (fund) such candidates."
Maria Colon, a Sacramento voter who attended Steyer's rally last week, said she views corporate donations as implicit corruption, and while self-funding may be a reason for further consideration of a candidate, she understands why some like Steyer pour money into their own campaigns.
"Frankly, I think there should be limits on how much money should be raised," Colon said. "(Corporations) don't give you their money for free bro."
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Money is critical to political campaigns, so candidates who can contribute their own money can have an advantage, said Dr. Wesley Hussey, a political science professor at Sacramento State University. "A candidate who is able to put up enough of their own money to get started is a great way to be a viable candidate."
Andrew Coolidge, a Republican running for the upstate Assembly District 3 who is his campaign's biggest donor, said voters should be skeptical of candidates who can finance their own campaigns but have chosen not to.
"I think a candidate who doesn't have some skin in the game is a candidate to worry about," he said. "I can feel very comfortable making every decision based on my conscience and not based on someone else's opinion."
Chris Anderson, a Lodi City Council candidate who has contributed to his own campaign and attended Steyer's rally, said he likes candidates who can self-fund while raising some questions.
"There's a part of me that likes the fact that a person finances their own campaign because it's less likely to be tied to a special interest," he said. "But on the other hand, what special interests have brought them to where they are?"
Money doesn't buy everything. Hussey said voters will look at other factors when deciding how to view candidates who spend their own fortunes on their campaigns.
Take Steyer and Whitman. Both had varying degrees of involvement in politics before running for office. Whitman campaigned for both Mitt Romney and John McCain in 2008, while Steyer has been active in environmental causes for more than a decade.
Voters may become more suspicious when a wealthy candidate with no political record emerges, Hussey said. "Tom Steyer gave a lot of money to politicians for a long time and tried to get into the political world for a while."
Asked whether voters should view his hundreds of millions of dollars as a rich man trying to buy political office, Steyer said at a rally last week that he believes voters should judge him by the amount of money spent against him, not so much by the hundreds of millions of dollars he has poured into his campaign.
"There is only one person in this race who is not conflicted with taking money from corporations," he said. "It's me."
At a recent public event at Stanford University, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter said she doesn't think being rich means you're immune to lobbying.
"It's the same argument that Donald Trump made," she said. 'You can trust me not to take money at special interest because I'm so rich' - I find that disturbing in a democracy.'
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.
