Democrats, relax: Supreme Court’s decision won’t change political landscape

Oh, Citizens United v. FEC. I haven’t heard so many people bitch about a Supreme Court decision since Bush v. Gore. Bush v. Gore had explicit partisan implications and the kvetching was as polarized as you would expect. Citizens United, on the other hand, wasn’t a partisan decision. So why, generally, is the left so upset about it, while the right is pleased?
The answer has nothing to do with First Amendment rights and everything to do with politics. And why wouldn’t it? Large corporations, the rights of which were expanded by this decision, tend to donate to Republicans. Republicans are excited because they have a lot to gain from this decision. Democrats are upset because they have nothing to gain, or a lot to lose, depending on how you look it. Right?

Actually, wrong. Although popular wisdom holds that “big business” favors Republicans, popular wisdom also used to say that masturbation made you go blind. (It doesn’t. Your eyes are safe.) If you really stop and think about it, there’s no reason why corporations would tend to favor Republicans. Their primary goal is to buy as much influence as they can, and so it seems more logical to assume that corporations try to back winners, regardless of political affiliation. To test this, I took the top one hundred United States-based corporations from the most recent Fortune 500 list — the biggest of “big business” — and tracked the partisan breakdown of their political donations in every election cycle from 2000 to 2010.

In 2004, the biggest corporations tended to donate to Republicans — on average, 68% of the donations went to the GOP. (This is not weighted by amount donated; it’s just an average of the partisan divides.) This isn’t unexpected. The partisan divide of seats in Congress was the most heavily Republican of any of the five years I looked at. Running a regression with this data shows that 2008 and 2010 weren’t quite as kind to Republicans as 2004 had been. A donation made in 2008 indicates a loss of 17.45 percent of the donation share for the Republicans (from the 2000 constant of 65.62) on average and in 2010 an even more extreme loss of 22.70 percent of the share, and both are statistically significant.

In other words, all else equal, the Democrats command the bulk percent of the corporate donations in those two years, which would fit the general theory. 2008, after all, saw Obama’s election, as well as Al Franken and the Supermajority (which would be an excellent band name) and clearly signals that the uptick in donation share to Democrats is related to the increase in their share of the government and general popularity.

The red-headed stepchildren in the data are the corporations in the petroleum and oil industries, and perhaps this is where the perception originates. Three of the top ten largest corporations in the United States are in oil or petroleum, and they do tend to donate overwhelmingly to Republicans. Still, although they may make up thirty percent of the top ten, they only comprise six of the top hundred. Not all big business is oil—most of it isn’t— and if you ignore the petroleum and oil companies, there’s fairly strong evidence that the partisan divide of corporate political donations isn’t at all static, tending to favor one party or the other. The divide varies based on year, which indicates that corporations prefer to back winners and buy wide influence.

So, fine, big business doesn’t primarily donate to Republicans, but this decision is still bad, right? At least before there were limits on how much corporations could spend.

Well, yes and no. In order to participate politically, corporations are required by law to form political action committees (PACs). And, yes, there are caps on how much PACs can raise and donate. There are not, however, limits on how many PACs a corporation can operate. Dow Chemical, for instance, has eleven PACs, according to opensecrets.org.  Yes, eleven.  Some limit.

It also seems that corporations must eventually reach a point of diminishing returns with political donations. What point is that? I couldn’t tell you, and perhaps time will. It seems illogical, however, to assume that corporations will suddenly flood the market with all of their money to buy as many politicians as possible.

There are certainly valid reasons to question the decision—primarily, whether corporate personhood entails the right to free speech. Some take issue with the idea of corporate personhood in general. I don’t intend to in any way undermine the importance of these issues, but I don’t think these are the primary issues for most people. If those are the real issues, and not politics, why is this so polarizing? If Citizens United is actually eroding the very foundation of our democracy and will inevitably lead to the collapse of our entire civilization, then this is not a political issue. But this very obviously is a political issue, which seems to indicate that the doctrinal issues are not on the forefront of people’s minds. If the partisan divide of the donations remains the same, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t continue to fluctuate with the political cycles as it has in the past ten years, no party stands to benefit from this decision any more than any other party.