schlesinger.r

We've reached the stage in the Russia scandal in which Vladimir Putin and Republicans are reading from the same script. That's more than just embarrassing.

Republicans are increasingly looking at 2014 as a golden opportunity for the party to retake the Senate. Donors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into races across the country, the Republican National Committee is doubling down on investments in campaign technology, and outside groups are investing heavily in an all-out bid to regain the majority for the first time since 2007.

But there’s a dirty little secret: not every Republican is rooting for the party to succeed.

Behind closed doors and in private conversations with reporters and donors, Republicans eyeing the White House in 2016 are privately signaling they wouldn’t mind seeing the party fall short in this year’s midterm elections. For all the benefits of a strong showing in 2014 after resounding defeat in 2012, senior political advisers to some of the top Republican presidential aspirants believe winning the Senate might be the worst thing that could happen.

The opinion is most strongly held by Republican governors, who are hoping to rise above the Washington political fray. Already the central theme adopted by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin is their ability to cut through partisan gridlock to lead their states. A dysfunctional Washington hamstrung by ideological division accentuates their core argument.

“They’re going to run against Washington,” says Ray Scheppach, the former longtime executive director of the National Governors Association. “Their argument is, ‘Nothing happens in Washington, people don’t do anything there. But I’ve created jobs, I’ve balanced budgets for X number of years, I’ve worked across the aisle bringing people together.’ They’re better off painting that picture with a divided Congress.”

But even for Senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, winning the majority brings the expectation of performance in a climate where President Barack Obama’s veto pen will certainly get a workout, not to mention the fact that they lack the seniority to guide legislation through committees.

For candidates from either category, a GOP-controlled Senate and House would mean having to answer for their party’s legislative agenda in both a primary and a general election. Whether it be new fiscal deals struck with Obama or continued votes to repeal Obamacare, aides to potential candidates fear that congressional action may put a damper on their boss’s future campaigns by forcing them to either embrace or break with specific legislative proposals as opposed to general policy ideals.

“It’s a lot easier to explain your principles to the American people than it is to explain your position on a piece of legislation that will always have some flaws,” said one 2016 hopeful’s top political aide. “And let’s not forget that Congress’s approval rating is at 9%. I think all of those looking at 2016 would rather the two parties share the blame than Republicans alone.”

The White House aspirants are careful to avoid sharing their views publicly, wary of insulting a party energized by a tantalizingly close chance at the majority thanks to the still sluggish economy and the initially botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act. But by and large, their priorities are apparent in how and for whom they fundraise. Republican governors uniformly talk up their colleagues but avoid mention of the Senate. Senators eyeing the White House have focused on building their own war chests and political organizations.

Several Republican governors are up for re-election this year, and Christie and Jindal are the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Republican Governors Association. But Christie drew the ire of many Republicans last year when he called a special election to fill the seat of Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died in office, just two weeks before his own re-election. The move kept popular Democrat and now Senator Cory Booker off the ballot when Christie was seeking to run up the score at the polls, but it also made it virtually impossible for his own party to contest the seat. Even more Republicans blame Cruz’s shutdown strategy with making their case more difficult this fall, even as it boosted his position among the Tea Party grassroots.

The GOP establishment, though, is worried about anyone in the party taking their eye off the ball. The 2016 map is as unfavorable to the GOP as it is favorable in 2014, with a presidential-year turnout raising the likelihood that even if Republicans manage to take the Senate this year, they will lose it two years later.

Former Mitt Romney adviser Kevin Madden said it would be misguided for potential candidates to ignore the opportunity in 2014 in order to boost their own fortunes, but he acknowledged there may well be some awkwardness.

“After the midterms, we could very well be at a point where the candidate that forces a moment of reckoning within our party eventually becomes its 2016 nominee,” Madden tells TIME. “That may require a showdown between the nominee and their party in the Senate, but it could eventually help both the party and the country.”

Political scientists have, for the first time, found concrete evidence that donating money to politicians makes them more likely to listen to what you have to say. This may sound like an obvious , but it’s actually a huge deal. If the research turns out to be true, it could have a huge impact on the way we think about elections and the law that governs them.

Previously, political scientists have struggled to find hard statistical evidence that campaign donations actually affected the way elected officials behave, resorting to increasingly esoteric theories to explain large individual donations and corporate lobbying budgets. The new study’s authors, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, tried a different tack: they actually ran an experiment, with U.S. Congresspeople and their staff as the subjects.

Kalla and Broockman worked with CREDO Action, a progressive organizing group you may be aware of, to develop a pitch for a meeting with Congressional staff that they sent out to a 191 Congressional offices. The meeting asked for a meeting about a bill CREDO was organizing on, but varied whether the people asking were identified as “local constituents” or “local campaign donors.” There was no lying; the people in question were actually local donors, and agreed to participate. CREDO just switched up whether their pitch for a meeting identified them as a donor.

The professors then compared who got to meet with important people (the member, senior staff), less important people (junior staff, outreach staffer), or no one at all. The evidence was very clear — people who identified themselves as donors in the pitch letter were significantly more likely to get a plum meeting. As you can see from this chart, people who didn’t identify themselves as donors were more likely to get no meeting or meet with the less important staffers in the left columns, whereas donors were much more likely to meet the members themselves or almost-as-important staff on the right:

To make sure this didn’t happen by pure chance, Broockman and Kalla calculated the odds that this discrepancy could have popped up by sheer chance. According to several highly rigorous statistical tests, the probability of members of Congress being randomly more likely to meet with donors than non-donors was almost nil. The evidence is very strong, in short, that donations buy access.

What’s not clear from the study is why. As Broockman and Kalla explain in a Q&A with The Monkey Cage, “It could be that congressional officials want to keep individuals happy from whom they can raise money, but it could also be that they expect donors to be more informed, more likely to vote, or something else.” So their research isn’t enough to conclude that Congress is full of Frank Underwood types who care about nothing but their own political survival.

It does, however, raise some very hard questions about campaign finance reform. Citizens United depended in part on the idea that Congresspeople wouldn’t be influenced by indirect (i.e., SuperPAC) corporate donations. But, the authors note, “the meeting request in the Revealed Donor condition that allowed
attendees to secure access to more senior staffers did not state that the attendees had given to the legislator considering the request, merely that the attendees were ‘campaign donors’ in general.” They could have been SuperPAC donors, for example, rather than direct campaign donors. Therefore, indirect donations may very well buy access as well as direct ones.

More fundamentally, Broockman and Kalla’s study calls the role of money in a democracy into question altogether. The basic argument for private campaign donations is that they’re a way that people express their opinions about politics, both to their elected officials and to the nation at large. One political scientist, John Patty, actually took this argument so far as to see Broockman and Kalla’s findings as a good thing for democracy:

We know that people give money to campaigns. We also know or at least strongly believe that people expect something for their money. Putting these together, I will simply say that the conjunction of these makes me feel better, not worse, about our democratic system.

But there’s a power problem here. When you’ve got a country with nigh-unprecedented levels of income inequality, it’s a hell of a lot easier for the wealthy to be lavish campaign donors than the poor. If Broockman and Kalla’s finding is actually evidence that money buys access, then it’s evidence that the concerns of the rich will be far more deeply heard than the concerns of the poor. Historically, as Princeton economist Angus Deaton warns in his recent book The Great Escape, societies that politically privilege the interests of the wealthy historically have experienced some seriously bad consequences, including anemic economic growth and stifled social innovation.

Kalla and Broockman’s study is by no means the last word on the question. As George Mason’s Jennifer Victor notes, the study’s methods aren’t perfect, and its conclusions are at odds with previous, similar experiments. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg: there’s a lot more research to be done on just how our campaign system may be twisting our democracy.

The post Campaign Donations Buy Politicians, According To Science appeared first on ThinkProgress.