A report released today by the Wisconsin Advertising Project announced that national political entities spent $1 billion on television advertising in this year's election, making this the most expensive midterm election in American history.
Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, said the McCain-Feingold bill, enacted the day after elections, pushed parties to spend over $500 million of soft-money contributions.
\All the soft money--unlimited, unregulated money from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals--was banned after the elections,"" Heck said. ""All these entities loaded up as much as they could to spend as much as they could for the 2002 elections knowing that it would be their last hurrah.""
Heck added that in Wisconsin labor-specific interest groups, like the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the largest teachers' union in Wisconsin, contributed the most money to the Democratic Party campaign, while the Republican Party received its soft-money contributions from business groups.
The interest groups funded much of the competitive, and thus expensive, campaigns, Heck said.
The report also indicated that gubernatorial elections used up $420 million of the total for television, as over 600,000 ads for governor aired.
Ken Goldstein, UW-Madison associate professor of political science and director of its Wisconsin Advertising Project, said gubernatorial races were the most expensive elections this year.
""The biggest thing that drove spending this year was competitive gubernatorial races,"" Goldstein said. ""We had competitive primaries and competitive general elections in big states in expensive markets.""
The report also traced the tone of political advertising. It said that, although 70 percent of the ads aired around the anniversary of Sept. 11 were positive, the numbers dropped to 50 percent by November. Although seven out of 10 noncompetitive races featured positive ads, roughly half of competitive elections used negative advertisements.
""[The Wisconsin gubernatorial election] was extremely negative because it was the first competitive election since 1986,"" Heck said.
He said the negative advertising only contributed to the shady image of the Wisconsin elections, already tainted by political scandal that indicted law-makers on both sides of the aisle with felonies regarding several campaign finance violations.
Thus, Heck stressed the need for campaign finance reform to avoid more political scandal.
""If we change leaders but don't change the way we do business in Wisconsin in terms of running our elections, than we'll likely see a repeat of the scandal Wisconsin has just been through,"" Heck said.
Nevertheless, David Canon, professor of political science at UW-Madison, said he doubts campaign spending and funding will decrease.
""[Interest groups] have different ways of getting money into the system,"" he said, for instance, ""they doubled the limits that can be raised in hard money,"" money spent and raised according to requirements set by federal law.
