RALEIGH – Thanks to the efforts of Ferrel Guillory, Andrew Holton, and the other folks at the UNC-Chapel Hill Program on Public Life, both sides of the debate over taxpayer-financed campaigns have some new information to study and cite.
The latest edition of North Carolina Data-Net, one of the program’s regular publications, examines trends in state judicial races. I’d recommend the newsletter on other grounds even if it didn’t contain useful data on judicial-campaign finance. For example, there’s a handy table showing the varying ways that the 50 states select their appellate-court judges. (North Carolina is one of 21 states that elect all appellate judges, though in practice many of the incumbents originally got on the court through gubernatorial appointment to full vacancies.)
But perhaps the timeliest findings have to do with campaign funding. On the one hand – call it the Right hand – the newsletter’s authors conclude unambiguously that 1) “public financing does not provide sufficient resources to run ‘effective’ statewide campaigns,” and 2) stripping the party labels off of appellate-court races, as the General Assembly chose to do when creating the taxpayer-financed system five years ago, means that “voters know even less about judgeship candidates” than they did before, which wasn’t much.
What happens when judicial candidates lack sufficient resources to communicate with millions of North Carolina voters, and those voters are further deprived of useful information (party labels) by legislative mandate? You get less-informed voters and, it seems, fewer voters overall. During the 1990s, about 100,000 fewer North Carolinians voted in appellate-court elections than in other statewide races. That’s a large drop-off as voters move their eyes and markers down the ballot. But in 2004, after the instigation of the new “nonpartisan,” taxpayer-funded system, the drop-off was staggering: nearly 500,000 voters. Data-Net compared the 2006 vote for judges with the vote for Congress, and found a 300,000-voter drop-off.
So much for “voter-owned elections.” Judicial races are increasingly becoming voter-disowned elections.
Not all the evidence on taxpayer-funded campaigns supports the skeptical side of the debate. On the other hand, the Left hand as it were, the authors point out that while the 2004 and 2006 judicial races may have attracted insufficient funds to run truly statewide campaigns, candidates in those years actually spent more money, in inflation-adjusted terms, than candidates did before the 2002 “reforms.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that taxpayer financing caused campaign spending to rise. It may well be true that campaign spending would have risen even more without taxpayer financing. Furthermore, I’d like to see the numbers further adjusted for the voting-aged population (not just the voters who ended up casting ballots in the race) and compared against trend lines for campaign spending by other statewide candidates.
Still, it’s fair game to point out that judicial campaigns in North Carolina have always been inadequately financed. There is probably no good solution to the problem – and it is a problem, because holding a statewide election without adequately informing voters who the candidates are is worse than useless – other than eliminating the state’s elective system in favor of an alternative such as gubernatorial appointment, perhaps subject to legislative confirmation and a subsequent retention election.
Unfortunately, I fear that to most policymakers in Raleigh, these issues are all pretty much beside the point. For them, the “problem” that needed to be fixed was that in the decade preceding 2002, Republicans won an increasing share of judicial races and ended up predominating on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Democrats in the state capitol felt the need to rectify the situation, and so far seemed pleased with the outcome (accomplished mostly through the elimination of party labels, which decreased voter participation and thus increased the relative voting strength of special-interest groups).
Fair-minded policy analysts of all stripes may continue to study and propose the best possible rules for the electoral game. But don’t be shocked if politicians continue to care only about whether their team is likely to end up the winner.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.