Slinging Mud and Money

In big-buck campaigns, the price of victory could be scruples

Money and meanness. Those are the factors for which this year's election is likely to be remembered, long after calculations about shifts in party power and legislative policy are forgotten. Well, anyway, until 1984, when, it is altogether too possible, candidates' spending will spin still further into the stratosphere and their ads will become yet more venomous.

But even if that happens, 1982 is assured a place in the annals of American political campaigning. It was the year of two $10 million candidates, for Governor in New York and Texas. It was the year in which at least five House candidates broke or came close to the million-dollar mark, and even more incredibly, spending totaled more than $1 million in two state legislative races, both for seats in the California legislature that pay $28,000 annually. It was the year in which the Democratic and Republican parties backed up their local mudslingers with national negative advertising: the Democrats with a spot in which former Senator Edmund Muskie implied that Republican victories would cause older Americans to "live each day in fear for the future of their Social Security"; the Republicans with an ad in which Ronald Reagan charged that "big spenders" had "driven prayer out of the nation's classrooms."

The two trends interlock—the most expensive campaigns not infrequently are also the most scurrilous—and there is little in sight to stop either trend. Laments William Brodhead, a Michigan Democrat who decided to retire from the House rather than try to finance a re-election race: "It's sort of like the arms race. Every time one side ups the bid, the other side counterbids. It's out of control."

So it is. Common Cause, a public interest lobby, estimates that Senate and House candidates spent roughly $300 million this year, up more than 25% from 1980. When races for Governor and state legislative posts are added in, the grand total may hit half a billion dollars. The ten Republican Senators re-elected this year spent an average of almost $1.7 million to hold their seats, more than five times the amount they spent when they campaigned in 1976. The 18 Democrats re-elected to the Senate spent an average of $1.4 million each, roughly triple their 1976 outlays.

Optimists among political experts suggest that the spending may be reaching a natural limit, at which point it becomes useless or even backfires on the candidates. Unhappily, the evidence does not quite bear out their theory. It is true that several of the very biggest spenders lost. Among them: Republicans William Clements and Lewis Lehrman, who shelled out around $12.5 million each on the Texas and New York gubernatorial races; Democrat Mark Dayton, a department-store heir who laid out $6.9 million in an attempt to become a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, and Democrat Adam Levin, 33, a lawyer who poured as much as $1.5 million into his effort to win a House seat in New Jersey.