One of the important findings from yesterday’s major CFI Report on campaign finance that has gone unnoticed so far is that Citizens United did not lead to a significant increase in election spending by publicly-traded corporations. As the introduction to … Continue reading
Category Archives: campaigns
WaPo: Trump’s vaunted political money machine is helping drive record sums to the Republican National Committee, and not just from the same donors who supported him in 2016. Enticed by exclusive gatherings and ecstatic about the president’s tax cuts, an eclectic … Continue reading
Marketplace reports. … Continue reading
Here is the order list showing the grant in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants. The question presented in the cert petition (minus citations): The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), Pub. L. No. 102-243, 105 Stat. 2394, … Continue reading
Two stories today about campaign funds active longer than their campaigners. One focuses on FEC requests for explanation from retired officeholders still spending from campaign accounts. The other describes the plans that Rep. Cummings had for his unspent campaign money … Continue reading
Ibram Kendi with a thoughtful piece on the terminology of “swing voters”: some “swing” from candidate to candidate or party to party, and some swing between voting and not voting. … Continue reading
Bertrall Ross and Doug Spencer have a new paper out in the Northwestern Law Review: “Passive Voter Suppression: Campaign Mobilization and the Effective Disfranchisement of the Poor.” The abstract: A recent spate of election laws tightened registration rules, reduced convenient voting … Continue reading
Speaking of mobilization, the Washington Times has questions: The National Rifle Association, after shedding its president and top lobbyist this year amid a string of internal disputes and legal battles, finds itself at a crossroads with Republican politicos wondering whether … Continue reading
Former WWE star Rhino was a 2016 candidate for Congress … and seems to think that the rigors of campaign finance compliance may have impacted his last run in the WWE. … Continue reading
From The Guardian: An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million … Continue reading
Algernon D’Ammassa offers an intriguing critique of the “running a race” frame of American elections, tied to both news coverage and the “Campaigns, Inc.” influence of consultants. … Continue reading
Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz reflect in NiemanLab on the impact of the structure of the news media market, and innovations in the delivery of news, on coverage of the 2020 elections. The lede: Coverage of the 2020 U.S. presidential … Continue reading
The WaPo summarizes the reported candidate and party committee hauls for 2019 ($463 million for Trump and the RNC, for example). It seems fair to compare RNC solo fundraising to DNC solo fundraising, and Trump’s re-elect to Obama’s 2012 re-elect. … Continue reading
A study by Sebastian Jäckle et al. finds an advantage up to 11% for congressional candidates based on appearance alone. The study itself – titled “A Catwalk to Congress” – is here. … Continue reading
SCOTUSblog has a running decade-in-review series, and Citizens United occupies 14% of the space so far. … Continue reading
News and Observer: Members of the State Board of Elections admonished county election board members to “get off Facebook” and “delete your Twitter account,” as they reviewed the latest complaints of improper social media posts by local election officials.The state … Continue reading
WaPo: The story that appeared on The Hill website on March 20 was startling.Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, according to a … Continue reading
NYT: In 2018, Lisa Kaplan assembled a small team inside the re-election campaign for Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine. Wary of how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, it set out to find and respond to political disinformation online.The team … Continue reading
Eric Segall: f you are worried about the state of our political system in the age of Facebook advertising, Russian interference in our elections, dark money in politics, and President Trump’s Twitter account, among many other disturbing trends, Professor Ciara … Continue reading
NYT: For the past 20 months, President Trump has received free personal legal services from one of America’s highest-paid lawyers, who has traveled around the country and across the ocean to defend him in the special counsel’s inquiry and press … Continue reading
Brennan Center release. … Continue reading
NYT: House Democrats announced on Tuesday that they would move ahead this week with two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, as they accused him of violating the Constitution by pressuring Ukraine … Continue reading
WaPo: An alleged Russian influence campaign to undermine this week’s British elections shows how tough it will be to keep foreign influence out of the 2020 U.S. contest.Russian-backed accounts on Reddit actively worked to boost the trove of documents appearing … Continue reading
Cleveland.com: Prominent supporters of President Donald Trump say they’re planning an event in Downtown Cleveland next weekend, attended by Trump administration officials, that will include a $25,000 cash giveaway for the general public…. Lanier said the event will be held … Continue reading
News item: Michael Bloomberg temporarily had a tiny but extremely questionable advantage in the 2020 presidential race: if you typed “Mike” into one of his company’s roughly 325,000 news terminals around the globe, you were redirected to his campaign site, reported … Continue reading
NYT: The indictment accused Mr. Nader of funneling more than $3.5 million in illicit campaign donations through Mr. Khawaja to buy access and influence in Washington — initially with Mrs. Clinton and her Democratic allies during the 2016 campaign, and then … Continue reading
The indictment includes George Nader, who appears to have been seeking influence in both the Trump and Clinton campaigns (and is now being held on child pornography charges): Earlier today, an indictment was unsealed against the CEO of an online … Continue reading
60 Minutes reports. … Continue reading
Dallas Morning News: In a bizarre political blunder, a document laying out the Republican Party of Texas’s election strategy for the 2020 elections has ended up in the hands of Texas Democrats. Attacking Democratic candidates through websites and mitigating “the … Continue reading
CNN: "I was wrong," says GOP Sen. John Kennedy, backtracking after he repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 US election. "It was Russia who tried to hack the DNC computer. I’ve seen no indication that … Continue reading
NYT: Republicans have sought for weeks amid the impeachment inquiry to shift attention to President Trump’s demands that Ukraine investigate any 2016 election meddling, defending it as a legitimate concern while Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of pursuing fringe theories for … Continue reading
LAT: President Trump may appear on California’s primary ballot without having to disclose his tax returns, the state’s highest court decided Thursday. In a unanimous ruling, the California Supreme Court said the requirement that presidential candidates must disclose their tax … Continue reading
Filing tomorrow (h/t At the Lectern). … Continue reading
Nick Nyhart and Adam Eichen at TAP. … Continue reading
NYT: A top Democratic official said the witnesses — William B. Taylor Jr., the top diplomat in Ukraine, and George P. Kent, a senior State Department official — would lay out a timeline of serious misconduct by Mr. Trump and … Continue reading
Marietje Schaake oped in FT. … Continue reading
NYT: A few hours after polls closed in Kentucky last Tuesday, a Twitter user writing under the handle @Overlordkraken1 posted a message to his 19 followers saying he had “just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.”It was clear that … Continue reading
Yahoo News reports. … Continue reading
The Economist reports. … Continue reading
Courier-Journal: Republicans in Kentucky’s legislature have expressed skepticism about Gov. Matt Bevin’s dispute with Tuesday night’s election results, saying the governor should back up his claims of “irregularities” and not drag the outcome beyond next week’s recanvass.“If there is evidence of fraud or illegalities, as was alluded … Continue reading
AP: A top aide to Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer in Iowa privately offered campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for endorsing his White House bid, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the conversations.The overtures from Pat … Continue reading
SacBee report. … Continue reading
Issue One: Issue One’s latest report, “Digital Disaster: The failures of Facebook, Google, and Twitter’s political ad transparency policies,” reveals how piecemeal, voluntary approaches by the largest social media platforms to stop disinformation campaigns fail to protect our political system from foreign … Continue reading
LAT: Election officials and social media firms already flummoxed by hackers, trolls and bots are bracing for a potentially more potent weapon of disinformation as the 2020 election approaches — doctored videos, known as “deep fakes,” that can be nearly impossible to … Continue reading
Kate Ackley for Roll Call. … Continue reading
Star-Ledger editorial. … Continue reading
NYT: A progressive organization is plunging itself into the presidential campaign, unveiling plans to spend $75 million on digital advertising to counter President Trump’s early spending advantage in key 2020 battleground states.The effort, by a nonprofit group called Acronym and … Continue reading
I’m honored to be included among those announced today as receiving support from the Knight Foundation. for work on internet governance and policy. I’ll be working on turning my cheap speech work into a book. My terrific UCI colleague David … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: President Donald Trump’s team was “very happy” that Wikileaks released emails hacked from the Democratic party during the 2016 race, a former campaign official told investigators from the special counsel’s office.Rick Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chair, … Continue reading
NYT oped: If Facebook’s leaders were willing to level with us, they would stop defending themselves by appealing to lofty values like free speech. They would focus instead on more practical realities: Facebook is incapable of vetting political ads effectively … Continue reading