Michael points out the same problem with Keyes position on polling, but takes a shot at McCain-Feingold for outlawing issue ads and wonders why I don’t address that….
First, issue ads aren’t illegal in the most basic sense. What are illegal are issue ads run by organizations that are incorporated and mention a federal candidate on TV or radio (print is not included in the regulations) within 30/60 days of the election. That doesn’t make it illegal to run such ads, it requires that if you want to run such ads, you have to form a Political Action Committee or run it as a unincorporated non-profit that can demonstrate the cash is raised from individuals.
Political Action Committees are formed with the express intent to electioneer and may make as many ads as they wish as long as they do not coordinate with a federal candidate’s campaign. The coordination is one limitation, the only other limitation is that of how much one can donate to a PAC which is limited per election cycle. That is considered by some to be a limitation on free speech by some, others, including the Supreme Court argue it is only a limitation on a monetary transaction. In fact, individuals who wish to buy media time or otherwise support candidates can do so alone so one can spend as much money as they wish on electioneering, but when they band together there are donation limits.
Much of the confusion on the matter is shown when people blast the MoveOn ads as somehow being the work of 527s that don’t report donations and have no limits. That isn’t true–MoveOn Pac runs the commercials and that is also why they mention the President specifically and say to vote against him. I believe Sierra Club also has a PAC as well as a 527.
So you can run issue ads as an individuals or you can have them run as a PAC with donation limits to the PAC.
I don’t see the donation limits in this context as a serious challenge to free speech. A long history of banning corporate and union money from being used directly for electioneering has existed in this country and while the corporate bodies can’t donate money in such a way, the individual members of such organizations may and do contribute to electioneering. Individually, it’s a wide open world as long as you don’t coordinate.
McCain-Feingold’s biggest improvement in the system (if it wasn’t eviscerated) would have been to force full disclosure of electioneering dollars for mass media. Those dollars are directly tied to the idea of influence over office seekers and the limits are far more modest than most people think.
Second, regulating the broadcast media is far different from regulating campaigns. We do regulate the public airwaves quite a bit already, but we stay away from content and even require less than we used to. In the case of 527 expenditures naming federal candidates close to an election, we aren’t regulating what they can say at all, we are regulating how they raise the money and how they disclose that.
Third, I’m not buying that polling matters as much as many claim it does. In fact, I think most people are quite good at tuning them out. While I’ll discuss that more later, I think the basic issue with polling is that people tend to dismiss anything they don’t understand as being wrong because they want it to be and in fact, much of the political psychology literature indicates people discount information that doesn’t support what they already believe and seek out information that confirms their positions.
We should all recognize that tendency since most of us (and me included) are guilty of such.