I got to go to Seattle once to write about the way they monitor and regulate campaign financing for their municipal elections. It brought tears to my eyes and will to all you poli nerds out there. Here’s a link to their elections site, where you can click on any of their ward-type races, the mayoral race, or any ballot measure and see who contributed what. It looks to me like contributions are reported on a more than once-a-week basis, to judge from the reports just from the last week.
So Seattle voters going into an election know exactly who contributed to a candidate’s campaign, and especially who contributed right up to the last few days. The city also has a $700 donation limit and no party system.
One surprising thing. It doesn’t seem to make elections any cheaper. I looked at last year, when citizens elected a mayor and a group of councillors, and at 2011, when the other set of council candidates ran for election.
Between the two years, and subtracting the money spent by people campaign for district attorney and a ballot measure, the various campaigns spent $5.1 million among them. That’s about the same as the two major parties spent here (Vision, $2.2 million in the centralized fundraising system they have; NPA, $2.8 million, counting both the party and candidates).
I remember people writing about how Vancouver spent X times as much per vote as Barack Obama did to get elected. But, seems to me, Barack got to work with economies of scale and the advantage of clearly identified parties that voters have figured out by election day.
Cities are like boutique operations, where campaigners have to spend a lot more to win their elections where only 150,000 to 200,000 people vote, at most. (Seattle, with almost the same population as Vancouver, gets out about 200,000 for its elections, around 50 per cent turnout. Vancouver gets around 150,000, 34 per cent.)
And funny how the $700 cap on donations doesn’t seem to reduce the amount of raising and spending. I await the explanations from my worthy audience here.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Lewis_N_Villegas // Nov 3, 2014 at 6:17 pm
I got to go to Seattle… too Frances, but I was thinking more like on Black Friday ;-)))))
I always peg Seattle as about 3x larger than Vancouver, but that was calculated before the dot-com boom when Microsoft joined the likes of Starbucks, Costco and Boeing. There are between 22 and 26 suburbs to Seattle that are more or less part of the same urban conurbation. Seattle is more like L.A. in that way; Vancouver more like San Francisco (both San Francisco and LA dwarf Seattle in size any way we care to count it). And that is the other significant difference with Seattle. It is wired into that west coast umbilical cord the I-5. The money (and power) that moves on that corridor puts Seattle in a place altogether different from ours.
I find Vancouver is closer to Portland and we’ve been losing ground as of late.
2 Frances // Nov 3, 2014 at 6:42 pm
I’m not following your argument at all. Vancouver also has about 20 suburbs that are part of the urban conurbation. And how is Vancouver somehow less like Seattle, because Seattle is bigger and richer, and more like San Francisco, an even bigger, richer city. I’m missing something here.
3 Dougdo // Nov 3, 2014 at 11:48 pm
I’m surprised that turnout rates in Seattle are higher than Vancouver, or maybe I’m just surprised Vancouver’s are so low. But of course Seattle has two advantages there:
1. Vote by mail. Most people fill out their ballots at home and just pop them in the mail. Well it’s over 50% for Washington state as a whole, not sure what the numbers would be for Seattle.
2. Combined voting dates. It isn’t just a municipal election date when they vote. It’s combined with federal, state, primaries and initiatives. So turnout will vary dramatically depending on what else is on the ballot. Although the mayoral election was not on the same timeline as presidential, senate or congress which would’ve boosted turnout further.
Of course on a negative the ballot is huge so voting requires a lot more research, at least if you’re going to fill in all the boxes. The ballot for the current general election is double sided legal size paper jammed with choices, some federal, some state, some country, some city.
4 boohoo // Nov 4, 2014 at 8:41 am
I saw the ballot when I was down there last weekend. What a cluster of misinformation and horribly written questions. One of the questions was multi-paragraphs long and a two step answering process. Over the top complicated. The pamphlet that came with it too–what a gong show of useless information.
Read this, if you dare. https://wei.sos.wa.gov/agency/osos/en/press_and_research/PreviousElections/2014/General-Election/Documents/ED05.pdf
5 Lewis_N_Villegas // Nov 4, 2014 at 9:37 am
Its an obscure point about cities: the statistics sometimes don’t tell the whole story. Economic numbers might get us there faster, but that’s for somebody else to contribute. Look at the numbers for urban & regional population and footprint (land area) for the three cities:
Vancovuer
City Pop 603,502
Metro 2.3 M
Metro area: 11,000 sq mi
Seattle
City Pop 608,680
Metro 3.6 M (14th in US)
Metro area: 8,000 sq mi
Portland
City Pop 583,776
Metro 2.3 M
Metro area: 6,684 sq mi
The first thing we may point to is that all the local carping about “running out of land” is just that—uniformed opinion. We have tons of land, the ALR notwithstanding, but we have the wrong idea about how we should be accessing that land.
Then, let’s look at population… How important is that 1.3 million advantage Seattle has over Portland and Vancouver [metro]? 50% more jam and we are not looking at the corporations. It’s big.
Then there is the development model. I wrote here http://wp.me/p1yj4U-k1 about the GM Pavilion at the 1939 NYC World’s Fair that introduced the planning model followed in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA, and the rest of them including Huston, after the war. Portland opted out in 1972 following a line of politics very similar to what we saw here in that 1970-1980 decade.
The development model is highways and towers as the piece cited clearly shows. The Seattle Expo 1962 brought with it the missing piece in the GM pavilion, the monorail. We actually built it for our 1986 Class-B World Fair (the Expo Line).
I would like to argue that the difference is cultural—its in the water—and that may be the cipher eluding our analysis.
I wrote here http://wp.me/p1yj4U-nr about GM—the same corporate giant—destroying its entire electric fleet of cars (Mel Gibson had one) in 2005 once it had secured a dominant position in the politics of fuel in California. Thus, we have to be clear that there is a strong lobby behind the towers & highways [suburban sprawl, regional malls, strip commercial and skytrain] model of urban development.
Portland—and for a little while Vancouver—were leading edge finding a west coast alternative trading of human scale, public transit, renewable energy and walkability. That’s the difference I see.