John Aldrich, Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke, observed a high school auditorium in Iowa City. He was impressed by how engaged caucus-goers were in electing non-binding delegates to a convention that would not be held until after the candidates had been virtually selected by primaries in the remaining 49 states.

Aldrich made the trip to observe the caucus process and to present his ideas on campaign reform at a conference at the University of Iowa the following day. Since 1972, the Iowa Caucus has been a predictor of which candidates will ultimately represent their party in the presidential election in November.

Caucus-goers can support their second-choice candidate if their favorite candidate doesn’t make it among the top three. Candidates who receive negligible support in Iowa often drop out of the race, reducing the choices in the primaries to come.

But this year, the Iowa Caucus fell victim to the rush of states to be first. The first few states to hold electoral events benefit from increased exposure and tourist dollars from candidates, their entourages and the media.

Traditionally held toward the end of January, the Iowans rescheduled to Jan. 3 to stay ahead of New Hampshire’s primary, which moved itself up to Jan. 8, from its end-of-January date in 2004.

In the paper he presented at the campaign reform conference, Aldrich argued against such front-loading. He proposed that the window for selecting delegates be open only in April and May to avoid a six-month dearth of political activity until the national conventions in August. In 1992, Ross Perot took advantage of that hole to launch his campaign as an independent. By the time the national conventions rolled around, he was in a three-way tie with Bill Clinton and George Bush.

Aldrich also proposed augmenting the amount that candidates could receive in federal matching funds. The heft of candidates’ campaign coffers has been used as a bellwether for success. Candidates who accept federal matching funds of up to about $21 million must agree to a campaign spending limit of $50 million. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama passed up matching funds. Each raised more than $100 million in 2007.

“I proposed matching grants be raised up to 110 percent of what was spent in the last presidential campaign,” Aldrich says. “This would make it possible for lesser candidates to raise enough money to be competitive.”

He also urged that those funds be spent only during the two-month window for delegate selection, plus one month before the window opened. That would effectively limit spending to the campaign itself, rather than allow potential candidates to spend money raising their profile during the year leading up to the primaries.

“That invisible primary is of equal value to winning Iowa and New Hampshire together,” he says.

Donor Influence

Presidential campaigns consider small donors to be different from big donors. They have less money and a few more years on them, according to a comparison of data collected in 2000 and 2004 by a trio of researchers through the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), but are as disproportionately white, male, old, educated and wealthy as the big donors.

In between the two surveys, in 2002, the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act passed, doubling the limit individuals could give to $2,000, leading to concerns that even more of the money presidential candidates raise comes from an unrepresentative sample. Researchers noticed that small donors, contributing less than $200, seemed to matter more in the 2004 election, said Mike Munger, chairman of Duke’s political science department.

“It’s as if there’s this whole continent where there are these creatures that no one has ever seen before,” said Mike Munger, chairman of Duke’s political science department.

Munger, along with John Aldrich, and SSRI’s associate director for education and training, Alexandra Cooper, created the campaign donor survey sent out to a random sample of 6,000 donors in 2000 and again in 2004.

The researchers are preparing to send the survey out again after the 2008 election, the first presidential election since 1952 that is truly contested for both political parties. The survey asks donors about their political views, whom they gave to, who asked them for money, and how they decided who to give money to, and the many factors involved in the decision, such as whether the candidate is friendly to the donor’s profession or industry. 

“We’re all concerned whether money has an impact on elections and political decisions, but it is a distasteful topic,” Cooper says. “But it’s an important topic that matters to us if we care about how our democracy works.”

Individual donors contribute to the success of presidential campaigns more than organized interest groups do. Understanding which individuals give money and how they choose candidates to support could shed light on the choices the public will have when elections roll around, Cooper says.

By collecting the data, the researchers are building a body of information that could be useful to policymakers thinking about regulation, activists thinking about how money skews political results, and fundraisers thinking about effective strategies, Cooper said.

The researchers aren’t looking for any particular trends or implications, Munger says. The survey simply documents behavior.

“Data collection is more important than you think,” he says. “More people are interested in it than you can ever imagine.” 

Ballot Access

For Mike Munger, in his role as Libertarian candidate for governor of North Carolina, victory would be 2 percent of the popular vote. But first, he has to get on the ballot. A law passed by the state in 1982 aims to keep him, and all other independent candidates, off the ballot.

North Carolina is second only to Oklahoma in restricting ballot access to third-party candidates. The 1982 law requires candidates to collect about 100,000 signatures, which will be winnowed down to the 67,000 verified valid signatures needed to get on the ballot, and receive 10 percent of the popular vote for their party to stay on the ballot in subsequent elections. House Bill 88, passed in August 2006, reduced the latter component to 2 percent.

“I can get 2 percent,” Munger says. “I can get the Libertarians on the ballot. “It’s still wrong that ballot access is so restrictive.”

An expert on ballot access law, Munger testified in the U.S. Senate in 2000 against the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and in November was an expert witness in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the state claiming the ballot access restrictions violated North Carolina’s constitution.

The attorney general contended that the restrictions were necessary to reduce “clutter” on the ballot that might impair voter’s ability to choose.

Munger rebuts the clutter argument by citing the 2003 gubernatorial election in California, won by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“He was one of 153 candidates,” Munger says. “People were worried that it would be an illegitimate election because the winner could win with 15 or 20 percent of the vote, because the other votes would be scattered among so many people. Schwarzenegger got 48 percent of the vote; the guy who came in second got 30 percent.”

Research, some of it conducted at Duke, shows that in states with easy ballot access, Democrats and Republicans are much more responsive to voters and there is less corruption. But the majority parties don’t want that competition.

Munger compares it to Coke and Pepsi being asked if other soft drinks should be allowed to compete with them. Not surprisingly, Coke and Pepsi would say no, he says. Continuing the analogy, he posits asking people if they’d sign a petition to get more choice in soft drinks. But they couldn’t taste the new drink first, because he can’t sell it until he gets 100,000 signatures. “It’s very hard to get people to sign these petitions, if they have no idea what it’s about,” he says.

The Libertarian Party, which has appeared on the ballot in eight previous elections, will get its 100,000 signatures. “We will have spent all our money and arrive breathless at the starting line, having no real chance to run an election, because we will have dissipated all our resources getting the signatures,” Munger says. “That’s what the law is designed for.”

Third parties might well draw votes from the Democrats and Republicans. That would indicate voters were expressing their political dissatisfaction, a right the First Amendment grants.

“The people, not the government, ought to decide what positions are represented in the political spectrum of parties,” Munger says. “That’s democracy.”