New group helping Iowans make connection between campaign money and policy

CEDAR RAPIDS - The explosion of campaign spending in Iowa by outside groups isn't academic for Brad Anderson.

'I felt it. All Iowa voters who were paying attention felt it,” the 2014 Democratic candidate for Iowa secretary of state said Monday about the $80 million increase in campaign spending in Iowa between 2012 and 2014.

For the first time, added Anderson, a co-chairman of Iowa Pays the Price, campaign spending by outside groups exceeded money spent by Iowa candidates. The outside groups accounted for 67 percent of the $112 million spent in Iowa on the 2014 midterm campaign.

Despite that spending and the fact that Iowans had an open-seat U.S. Senate race for the first time in 40 years, Anderson pointed out that voter turnout was stagnant and 55,000 Iowans choose not to return their absentee ballots.

Anderson is touring Iowa this week with Pamela Behrsin of MapLight, a national, non-partisan research organization studying money in politics, promoting a new MapLight research book titled: 'Iowa Pays the Price: The Power of Money in Politics.”

Behrsin looked at how outside interests such as Big Oil, Wall Street and for-profit colleges, inject hundreds of millions of dollars pushing an agenda that runs counter to Iowans'' priorities.

For example, the Iowa wind industry has created 6,000 jobs and attracted $10 billion in investments, but outside groups opposed to the wind production tax credit have spent $144 million on campaigns and lobbying since 2007, Behrsin said at a round-table discussion in Cedar Rapids.

'It's really difficult with all of the money coming in against it to be able to get a consistent, long-term production tax credit necessary to encourage strategic growth,” she said.

It's a similar story for ethanol, which is responsible for 47,000 jobs and $5 billion in economic activity in Iowa. Opponents of the Renewable Fuel Standard have spent $144 million to influence federal policy in the past eight years.

Her numbers demonstrate the impact of outside money working against Iowans' interests, said Steve Sovern of Cedar Rapids, a longtime Democratic activist.

'We knew it was bad, but we couldn't show it until now,” Sovern said. 'It's clear that if you want to do something about wind energy, you've got to do something about money in politics.”

That's one goal of Iowa Pays the Price, which receives funding from Issue One, a national bipartisan group trying to reduce the influence of 'big money” on campaigns and policy. Anderson said the group is trying to help Iowans make that connection between outside spending and the policies that affect them.

Iowa Pays the Price has been directly engaging the presidential candidates at the Iowa State Fair and on the campaign trail.

Iowa Pays the Price will be in Davenport and Clinton Tuesday. See its schedule at www.IowaPaysthePrice.org.