High Spending Not Enough to Shake Sanders From Top of Polls
Congressional Quarterly
Sep. 05, 2006
Vermont ranks 49th of the 50 states in population, with just more than 600,000 residents.And yet the three major candidates for the state's open Senate seat ?- Democratic-allied Independent Rep. Bernard Sanders and Republicans Rich Tarrant and Greg Parke ?- have so far spent a combined total of more than $9.5 million dollars in the run-up to the Sept. 12 primary.
That's about $15 per resident, and it will be a much higher ratio to actual voters in the contest to succeed retiring Independent Sen. James M. Jeffords. And there's still more than two months to go until the Nov. 7 general election.
As a point of comparison, President Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry combined to spend about $2.40 per resident nationwide in the 2004 presidential race.
Tarrant, a multimillionaire businessman and political centrist favored to win the Republican nomination, is the source for much of this campaign spending inflation.
Stating early on that he would not accept any money from political action committees, Tarrant has almost completely self-financed his campaign ?- to a tune of $5.25 million through Aug. 23, the close of the Federal Election Commission's pre-primary reporting period for Vermont. By comparison, he received just less than $100,000 in contributions from other individuals.
But Tarrant also had spent most of that money, leaving him with only $490,000 cash on hand as of Aug. 23. He had little choice but to do so: Sanders, a staunch liberal whose knack for constituent service over eight House terms has given him broad appeal, has held dominant leads in polls throughout the Senate campaign.
Tarrant has used his treasury to produce at least 19 television commercials. The first of his ads had the feel of a Ken Burns documentary, chronicling Tarrant's rise to success as the co-founder of IDX Systems, a medical software company that was sold last year to GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of General Electric.
Lately, his ads have taken on a much harsher tone, featuring attacks on Sanders' voting record. The ads seek to portray Sanders as soft on crime, specifically raising questions about his votes dealing with child pornography and the "Amber Alert" program to locate abducted children.
Yet there is some evidence that the tenor of the campaign, in a state where voters have generally shown an aversion to negative ads, may be having an unexpected effect on Vermont voters ?- and not the one that Tarrant intended.
Tarrant's commercials are sometimes shown back to back with an ad for Republican House candidate Martha Rainville, the front-runner for the GOP nomination to succeed Sanders, which shows her signing a "Clean Campaign Pledge." According to Eric Davis, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, "Her ads may be making Tarrant look bad."
Sanders, during his first successful House campaign in 1990, was similarly targeted by attack ads run by Republican incumbent Peter Smith that criticized Sanders' record as mayor of Burlington. But Sanders defended himself, declined to run negative ads in retaliation, and unseated Smith by a comfortable margin.
It appears Sanders is pursuing the same strategy in response to Tarrant's ad onslaught.Sanders has run a single ad asking voters to visit his Web site to check his record.
On his site, Sanders explains that he voted against the full funding of Amber Alerts and another piece of legislation dealing with child pornography because the bills contained what he viewed as "unconstitutional provisions," and said he was vindicated on that stand by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. The statement also says, "Bernie Sanders has always fought against child predators and will continue his fight for children in the United States Senate."
Although he lacks the kind of deep pockets that Tarrant has, Sanders has nearly kept pace in fundraising, As of Aug. 23, Sanders had $5 million in receipts, much of which came from individual contributions. He was also the most frugal of the candidates, leaving him with about $1.7 million cash on hand.
This fundraising effort was a quantum jump for Sanders, whose previous high was just more than $1 million for his 1996 House campaign.
Part of the reason for his past modest fundraising is his popularity, which has spared him from threatening opposition for years.
Sanders, since his arrival in the House has caucused with the Democrats, and state Democrats in turn have tacitly endorsed Sanders in his campaigns for Vermont's at-large House seat. (State Democratic officials this year obtained his consent to place him on the Sept. 12 Democratic Senate primary ballot, even though he has said he will renounce the nomination to retain his independent status even in the likely event that he wins.)
Republicans have offered little more resistance, putting up a series of little-known House challengers who Sanders leveled with well more than 60 percent of the vote.
The latest of these was Parke, who this year is Tarrant's underdog rival for the Republican Senate nomination.
Parke, a professional pilot and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, lost to Sanders in 2004 by a whopping 43 percentage-point margin. He has cleared the $1 million mark in campaign receipts by a wide margin ?- in part through an intensive e-mail national fundraising campaign aimed at Republicans who share his strongly conservative agenda ?- and is banking on his rightward leanings to appeal more to Vermont's small Republican primary electorate than Tarrant's moderation.
Yet Parke's campaign spending does not appear to have made him a serious threat to Tarrant, and he has not given up his job to campaign full-time. [..]
is becoming more and more of a ... phenomenon. Yeah, lets call it that.
