‘It’s Going to Change Everything’: A Supreme Court Case Could Rock Campaigns This Year

The Supreme Court is expected to deliver a major ruling as soon as this spring on a campaign finance case that would fundamentally change how federal campaigns are funded.

Party leaders aren’t waiting for the justices’ decision before figuring out how to take advantage of the potential new rules.

Even before the year began, Democrats and Republican strategists began sketching out how the SCOTUS ruling — which could allow for nearly unlimited coordination between party committees and individual candidates and give big donors more influence — would affect their operations. It’s causing them to rethink on-the-ground strategies, staffing decisions and how TV and digital ads are funded.

In interviews, they described what they said could be the biggest set of changes to how elections operate since 2010’s Citizens United decision, which paved the way for the advent of big-spending super PACs.

“No matter what side you’re on, it’s going to change everything,” said a national Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the implications of a yet-to-be-decided court case.

Court observers say it’s likely that justices will effectively remove restrictions on coordination between the party committee and campaigns. If they do, strategists and campaign finance experts said it would likely lessen the influence of small-dollar donors — whose contributions rarely exceed a few hundred dollars — and instead empower larger donors able to give tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That shift could influence the core of how campaigns operate, even causing some to reduce usually robust operations aimed at enticing smaller donors.

“If the parties can suddenly make unlimited coordinated expenditures, it will greatly enhance the ability of rich individuals to circumvent the contribution limits to what they can give to candidates,” said David Kolker, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.

The case before the Supreme Court, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, rests on a challenge to coordinated spending limits between federal campaigns and party committees.

The court is expected to issue its ruling sometime this spring, and some campaign finance advocates remain hopeful that it will keep the coordinated limits in place, as the Supreme Court previously did in a 2001 case. But even some Democrats privately acknowledge that the court’s conservative makeup means that the coordinated spending limits are likely doomed.

Republicans are pushing for the party committees to face fewer legal restrictions, which would allow them to wield far greater power over individual campaigns after steadily losing influence since the advent of super PACs 15 years ago.

“Ever since Citizens United, super PACs have become more powerful, which is directly related to the parties getting less powerful,” said Ryan Dollar, general counsel of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is funding the Supreme Court case. “And I think this would be a pivotal step to restoring power to the party committees.”

Federal political committees like the NRCC or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee currently face a looser set of campaign finance restrictions than do candidates, because they are able to raise much larger contributions from individual donors. But until this year, the amount of money they could spend to benefit candidates was capped at $127,000 for House races and a couple of million dollars for Senate races in the largest states.

And even if committees did spend tens of millions of dollars on TV ads, they were forced to do so through a separate entity (known as an independent expenditure committee) that had to pay a much higher rate for airtime than candidates. The committee’s independent expenditure operations were also legally barred from coordinating with candidates even as they spent vast sums of money running ads on their behalf.

If the court rules in the Republican committees’ favor, campaign committees would be able to fund millions of dollars in TV ads not through their independent expenditure operations (which strategists suggested would likely all be shuttered or dramatically scaled back) but through the campaigns themselves, meaning they would receive a cheaper rate for airtime.

Strategists say the gap in ad rates can be significant, sometimes as high as a 12-to-1 difference between what committees have to pay compared to candidates. And because committees are able to raise money in much greater sums — they can accept contributions from individual donors for a sum up to $44,300, compared to a $3,500 cap for campaigns — that means wealthier donors will have a great influence on races across the country.

“There could be, frankly, be a shit-ton more TV ads, because coordinated buys will likely end up so much cheaper than” what committees had to previously pay with independent expenditure committees, said the national Democratic strategist.

But the changes would extend beyond how campaigns fund TV ads. Committees would be able to fund every facet of an individual campaign, from senior staff salaries and office space to ground game operations and digital outreach. Those efforts, in fact, would legally be allowed to run directly by the party committees, circumventing the campaigns entirely and centralizing operations in Washington.

Strategists said they doubted committees would take the changes quite that far. But their ability to fund everything is already causing a massive rethink of how campaigns operate, with the reverberations lasting beyond the next election cycle.

“One way you could look at the committee is they would essentially become a cash machine for campaigns,” said the Democratic strategist. “And low-dollar donors could see their influence diluted.”