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The Need for Federal Regulation of State Party Activity Donald Green Donald Green is a professor of political science at Yale University and director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. His expertise lies in the areas of political parties, campaign finance, elections, and public opinion. He served as an expert witness for the defense. In addition to his report, Green prepared a rebuttal that responded to the arguments made by witnesses for the plaintiffs. The excerpt presented here includes material from each of these documents. One of the central issues raised in the McConnell case concerns the extent of the reform act’s regulatory reach and the question of whether the law goes too far in regulating state and local party spending. In this selection, Green defends the reform act’s regulation of certain components of state and local party activity by analyzing the overlapping structures and scope of interaction between national, state, and local parties. He explores the effects of state party activity, particularly the effects of voter turnout programs, to demonstrate that state efforts have a significant impact on federal elections. His empirical analyses of the relative importance of various means of voter mobilization—advertising , mail, telephone, and face-to-face contact—suggest that parties have not been spending their funds in ways that are likely to have a significant effect on voter turnout. Green contends that regulation of state and local party activity would help reduce the corruptive influence of soft money, and that parties will adapt to the reform act’s prohibitions by raising more federally regulated money. Without such regulation, he argues, the reform act’s ban on soft money could easily be circumvented by simply channeling funds through state and local committees. This report’s recurrent theme is that parties are highly adaptable strategic actors. Notwithstanding their resistance to laws that restrict their ability to solicit and transfer large donations, parties will quickly adjust to the new incentive system created by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), for example, by broadening their base of contributors. But it is the parties’ very adaptability that poses a serious danger should the Court strike down the provisions that limit how state parties may finance federal election activity. Political parties are flexible, multitiered organizations that are structured in ways that are designed to win power. Regulations 97 02 1583-8 part1a 3/25/03 12:00 PM Page 97 directed at them must take into account the many institutional, social, and ideological interconnections among local, state, and national party organizations, because a narrow regulatory strategy that focuses solely on the national parties would encourage political parties to reorganize their financial activities in ways that circumvent the new restrictions. The BCRA creates a comprehensive regulatory system covering activity that bears directly on the election of federal candidates; if the BCRA is undercut in ways that permit back-door financing of federal campaigns, one can be certain that these loopholes will be exploited. Although state and national parties are distinct institutions, rarely in American history have state and national political parties been in serious conflict, and even more rarely have state parties seen it in their interests to withdraw their support from the national presidential nominee. This pattern should hardly be surprising, since one of the strands that links local, state, and national partisans is a deep sense of attachment to the political party to which they belong. Although there is often speculation that activists and voters feel a sense of attachment to their state parties that they do not feel toward the national party, survey evidence from the 1950s to the present demonstrates that split party attachments are unusual.1 Local and state partisans want to see their team win federal office, and with good reason. National and subnational partisans generally share similar ideological and programmatic visions. Even when they disagree, subnational partisans recognize that federal officeholders and the resources they command can be enormously beneficial to state and local parties and candidates. The links between state and federal parties run deeper than an overlap in personnel and “we-feeling,” important though these may be. Indeed, the links run deeper than the informal social ties that state and federal party members often share with their constituents and donors or the string of political connections that former state party leaders accumulate when they ascend to leadership positions in national political parties.2 The American political system ties the fortunes of state legislators and U.S. House members...

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