Politics & Polls #174: The Power of Money in Politics Featuring Brandice Canes-Wrone

Mar 05 2020
By Brillian Bao
Source Woodrow Wilson School

Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer’s self-funded presidential campaigns have revived questions about campaign finance reform. Before dropping out of the race, Bloomberg spent more than $500 million and Steyer more than $250 million dollars on their respective campaigns. Under current regulations, there is no limit on how much of their personal funds candidates can use for campaign purposes. Should there be? And how much does money actually influence an election?

Brandice Canes-Wrone joins Julian Zelizer in this episode to discuss the state of campaign finance, looking at the history and current impact of super PACs, dark money, small donors, and public financing on our elections.

Canes-Wrone is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and professor of politics at Princeton University. She also serves as the director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, based at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and is a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Her research focuses on issues related to American politics, political economy, and elections. Some of her current projects include the impact of campaign donors on representation, the economic effects of policy uncertainty, and the effects of judicial elections on legal outcomes. Canes-Wrone was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

ABOUT THE HOST

Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton published his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.