The recent city council election was the first time since 1996 that every candidate running for a four-year term was a non-incumbent. Without incumbents to distort the picture, the election was a wonderful natural experiment about the power of money in politics.
The correlation between the amount candidates spent before Nov. 1 and the votes they got on Election Day was 0.92. As the graph below shows, there’s almost a perfect straight line from John Webster, who spent $1,959 and got 2,920 votes, to Margaret Abe-Koga, who spent $15,763 and got 9,715 votes. (Vote counts are still incomplete. My figures are the ones available as of Nov. 17.)
With only one exception, candidates finished in exactly the same order as the amount of money they spent. Kal Sandhu was the exception. He was fourth in spending but finished seventh at the polls.
First-place finisher (and top spender) Margaret Abe-Koga spent 25 percent more than runner-up Ronit Bryant, but got 37 percent more votes. A likely reason why Margaret did so well is that she started her campaign earlier. She had raised $10,708 by June 30, and no other candidate had gotten more than $1,000 in contributions by then.
Fourth-place finisher John Inks (currently 294 votes behind Jac Siegel) still had $4,492 of unspent funds on Nov. 1. Had he put that money to good use in October, in my opinion he would have come in second, not fourth. If he runs again, I predict he’ll make sure to spend everything he’s got before Halloween.
Of course, the candidate with the fattest wallet doesn’t always win. Laura Brown in 2002 and D.K. Lu in 1998 are examples of big spenders who didn’t prevail, and Greg Perry won in 2002 on a shoestring budget. But these cases are exceptions, not the norm.
So, my perspective is that the winners didn’t win because they were anti-growth or pro-growth, anti-squirrel or pro-squirrel. They won because they raised and spent the most money. It didn’t matter whether they spent money they raised from others, like Abe-Koga, or if they spent mostly their own money, like Bryant and Siegel. Almost all of the variation in votes is explained by money and money alone.
If this makes you mad — and I think it should — and you wish things could be different, then the next time a campaign finance reform initiative like Proposition 89 comes up, vote for it!
Bruce Karney was a city council candidate in 2002 and is an advocate of campaign finance reform. He lives on Bush Street.
