Clean-Money Crew Debriefs, Looks Ahead

New Haven’s public-financing system emerged from this year’s heated mayoral campaign season with a great story to tell — and more need than ever to tell it.

That was the conclusion of board members of the New Haven Democracy Fund, the state’s first municipal public-financing system. The board engaged in an election post-mortem at its most recent monthly meeting, this past Thursday evening in City Hall.

This past election was seen by many as the first real test of the fund, as a flood of candidates sought the city’s top elected spot after Mayor John DeStefano decided not run for re-election after 20 years in office. Candidates who choose to participate in the fund receive matching government campaign dollars if they agree to limit individual contributions to $370 (rather than $1,000) and to swear off donations from political committees. (The Democracy Fund currently covers only mayoral races, not aldermanic races.)

The whole concept of public-financing emerged as a major issue in the Democratic mayoral primary, in which four candidates signed up to participate in the voluntary system, and three did not. It remained a central theme in the general election, in which independent Justin Elicker (who had run in the primary with public financing) called the system a tool for clean (and potentially lower-cost) government, while Democrat Toni Harp (who did not participate) called it a waste of public money in tough times.

In total, the Democracy Fund distributed a total of $111,250 to participating primary candidates: $54,470 to Elicker, $30,610 to Kermit Carolina, and $26,170 to Gary Holder-Winfield. The Fund also paid $4,000 to the Long Wharf Theatre to sponsor a televised debate.

With the election now over, the board began at its meeting to analyze data about the fund’s impact on the race and answer questions on what changes it needs to make in the future. Members heard about how the fund enabled candidates to run credible campaigns for office without special-interest dollars or outsized individual contributions. They also heard about a backlash against the fund in some quarters.

Elicker’s Lessons

Democracy Fund administrator Ken Krayeske summarized for the board a conversation he had with mayoral candidate Justin Elicker earlier on Thursday. They spoke for over an hour, during which Elicker explained the difficulties he had with the fund along with what he felt worked well.

“[Elicker] is the best advertisement of the efficacy of our program in reaching our goals,” Krayeske said. ​“To hear out of a candidate’s mouth who got [9,417] votes that this helped him talk to candidates is great.”

Elicker told Krayeske that the system drove people to participate in campaigns once they understood that the fund doubled their money, and that it enabled a candidate to get people to donate who traditionally were not involved in politics. The two-to-one match (the fund matches qualifying contributions at a 2:1 rate up to $25, so $25 turns into $75, for example) worked well for him, he said. Elicker also said the $19,000 lump sum grant that he received from the fund helped get his campaign off the ground.

Additionally, Elicker told Krayeske that he did not think small changes in the system would have significantly changed the outcome of the election. A slightly higher match or slightly higher grant would not have changed the election results, Elicker said; an extra $5,000 to spend on media or literature would not have impacted the outcome. He raised enough money to compete fairly with a well-funded opponent.

Krayeske said Elicker promised to give him phone polling data collected by his campaign during the primary. Specifically, Elicker’s campaign polled voters on whether they thought public financing is important, among questions on other issues.

Krayeske said Elicker told him he found that when his campaign polled primary voters about the Democracy Fund, white voters cared and knew more about the issue than African-American and Latino voters did.

Reached after the meeting, Elicker confirmed the comments and said he was stressing the need for more outreach.

“I believe most people care about money not influencing politics, no matter what background they come from: Most people care about these issues, but they don’t understand that public financing is a way to address it,” Elicker said. ​“It’s just difficult because there are a lot of specific rules to public financing. Unfortunately in politics, you don’t often have a great way to explain things to people because you don’t have a lot of time.”

Elicker said it was clear that many who voted for Toni Harp did not consider public financing the most important issue in the election.

Elicker told the Independent that his poll asked primary voters how important is for the next mayor to use public financing. Some 64 percent of white voters responded ​“very important” or ​“somewhat important.” Only 46 percent of African-American voters gave the same response, while 43 percent of Latino voters did the same. Only 17 percent of white voters said they ​“don’t know enough about the issue.” For African-Americans it was 28 percent, 38 percent for Latinos.

Krayeske transmitted to the board a suggestion from Elicker: Find a way to raise the bar for qualifying candidates. Elicker was able to collect 200 qualifying donations in just five days. While the purpose of the fund is to make it easier for average people to run, having a low bar for qualification does leaves some voters the impression that the fund hands out money too easily, Elicker argued to Krayeske.

Board member Patricia Kane called that an ​“elitist” point of view. Candidates like Sundiata Keitazulu influenced the conversation of the race, and the fund should be a viable option for candidates similar to him, she said. (Keitazulu tried to qualify for the fund, but failed to raise enough money.)

Perception

During the general election campaign, Elicker was repeatedly criticized by Harp supporters for having ​“wasted” taxpayer money in the primary.

Kane explained during last week’s board meeting that she felt Democracy Fund supporters failed to respond enough to that criticism. She said the real question is whether it costs less than the cost of corruption and buying politics that can occur without the fund. (During the campaign, for instance, Elicker pointed to bundled contributions Harp received from suburban principals of a medical firm that had lost a city contract for allegedly enabling costly worker compensation fraud.)

Fund board member Tyrone McClain said that he even heard discussion about the Democracy Fund at Mayor John DeStefano’s retirement tribute dinner on Wednesday. DeStefano, along with Aldermen Carl Goldfield and Jorge Perez, originally pushed to create the Democracy Fund.

“I heard people saying things about the fund taking away from social programs they might care about and things like sidewalks,” McClain said. ​“It’s not a sense that Elicker was necessarily doing anything unfair. But the question is what is the cost and the benefit – if you really want to run, you should be able to raise the money, some people think.”

Fellow fund board member Andrew Knott said that he heard similar sentiments from Morris Cove Alderman Sal DeCola when he ran into him one day.

“We the taxpayers have to fund this, and I don’t think a lot of people understand that – it’s funded through the city budget,” DeCola confirmed saying, when reached after the meeting. ​“The fund is a good thing, but it’s just that money is tight; $200,000 doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can fix a lot of blocks and sidewalks. … When you choose to run, part of your decision is how you’re going to raise capital. When I run, I hold fundraisers to raise capital to spend on what I need.”

Going Forward

The fund board has about 13 months to make changes to the system before the next mayoral election cycle kicks in, Krayeske told the board at the meeting.

Beyond auditing campaigns’ records, the fund has to answer larger substantive questions about the role it will play in future elections. One of the fund’s big questions is how to combat the ​“conception that the Democracy Fund is training wheels for politicians,” Krayeske said. Elicker’s answer, as mentioned before, was that it might be helpful for the fund to make it more difficult for candidates to qualify.

Another goal the board agreed on was outreach. Krayeske has been addressing high school and college audiences to explain the fund and its importance.

Finally, the board must answer the question of how to deal with a candidate like Elicker in the future: if candidates participate in a party primary election and lose, should they be allowed to receive or use more Democracy Fund money if they run as an independent in the general election, as Elicker did? Elicker was ineligible to do this because of the rules set out in the fund’s ordinance. (Elicker agreed to continue abiding by the system’s fundraising limits anyway). An open question is whether they want to change the rules; not all fund board members have decided .

“I’m not about supporting political parties. I’m about supporting candidates with public funds,” said Kane (pictured). ​“I don’t care if you’re in a party and you lose the primary. If you want to continue to run, it is damn hard work and money should be the least of your issues.”

Elicker also said that he felt the Democracy Fund should allow candidates to use public funds in both the primary and the general. He said sees the current system as containing a loophole: although he personally chose to limit his contributions to $370 during the general election though he was technically no longer subject to that restriction, he theoretically could have received contributions of up to $1,000 from special interest groups, defeating the purpose of the fund. The fact that a candidate can use public money from the fund in the primary and then go against the spirit of the Fund in general election is a loophole that needs to be fixed, he said.

During the campaign Harp criticized Elicker for getting his name out with the help of public financing in the primary campaign, but then continuing to benefit from that work in the general election. She argued that in effect, he got two bites of the apple from a system designed to support one bite.

The fund board plans to invite Harp and the other mayoral candidates to offer their post-election assessments in person.