Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 6, 1993                   TAG: 9309010264
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IF CANDIDATES HAD LESS MONEY

Few would dispute that the campaign-finance system is deeply flawed. But would currently proposed reforms make any difference?

Yes, according to two recent studies using similar techniques of analysis - one by Common Cause of recent U.S. Senate races, and the other, by a graduate student at the University of Virginia, of the 1989 Virginia governor's race.

The federal campaign-reform bill passed the other day by the Senate includes limits on overall spending in congressional races and restrictions on the role of political-action committees. If the bill had been in effect in 1992, Common Cause found, it would have significantly reduced the flow of special-interest money into Senate campaign coffers - particularly those of incumbents running for re-election.

Incumbent senators outspent their challengers last year by $117 million to $47 million, Common Cause reports. If the '93 reform bill had been in effect in the '92 Senate elections, the lobbying group concluded, the incumbents' money would have been cut by $37 million, the challengers' money by just $1 million.

Moreover, the disparity is evident in close races, where the money flow could have been the decisive factor, as well as in one-sided contests where the incumbent stood little chance of losing in any event.

In 1990 and 1992, there were a total of eight U.S. Senate races where an incumbent won with 52 percent or less of the vote. In each contest, according to Common Cause, at least $1 million of the spending by the incumbent winners would have been disallowed if the reform bill had been in effect.

Only two of the eight challengers, however, would have lost any campaign-spending ability at all. The biggest exception to the general rule: Democrat Harvey Gantt of North Carolina, whose money for his 1990 challenge to Republican Sen. Jesse Helms would have been cut by more than half, from $7.7 million to $3.4 million. At the same time, though, incumbent Helms was spending $17.3 million - only $3.5 million of which would have been allowable under the reform bill.

Finance rules for state elections in Virginia are even more relaxed than for federal elections: There is, for example, no ceiling on how much an individual donor can give to a single candidate.

A subcommittee of the Governor's Ethics Commission has proposed a $10,000 lid on individual contributions in state races. If that had been in effect in the '89 governor's race, according to an article by Douglas Gray in the monthly newsletter of UVa's Center for Public Service, 20 percent of Democrat Douglas Wilder's $7 million in direct contributions and 60 percent of Republican Marshall Coleman's would have been disallowed.

Since the amount of a donor's political contributions to a state election is unlimited anyway, state reformers have not had to deal with the federal-level issues of political-action committees and loopholes for evading contribution ceilings.

This suggests one drawback to the analytic technique used by Common Cause and by Gray: The current reform proposals weren't in effect. If they had been, perhaps new ways already would have been found to violate their spirit.

But improvement doesn't require perfection. A $10,000 limit on contributions in a Virginia state election, for example, might not hold down the cost of campaigning as much as reformers hope. But even if the effect were only to force candidates to look beyond a handful of big givers for their campaign financing, it would be an improvement.

Keywords:
POLITICS