Women elected to the House of Representatives last fall raised bigger campaign war chests, on average, than their male counterparts.
What’s more, they outdid the men in fundraising while relying less heavily for their money on political action committees (PACs) or contributions from people who did not live in their congressional districts.
Successful minority candidates, by contrast, raised far less money in the average House race than the white men and women who won.
But, with the exception of African-American women, they received a far larger proportion of their campaign funds from individuals who lived outside their districts. And in most cases they got a somewhat larger share from PACs as well.
Those are among the highlights of a computer analysis of the official 1994 campaign finance records as filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The analysis was done for the New America New Service by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The breakdowns by race and gender are among the most detailed ever calculated, and the analysis of individual contributions of $200 or more according to the residence of the contributors — inside or outside of the congressional district involved — is believed to be the first of its kind.
The average winning white candidate raised well over half a million dollars during the 1993-94 fundraising season–$562,000 for the men and $680,000 for the women. Successful African-American and Hispanic candidates raised, on average, less than two-thirds that much.
The differences in fundraising abilities between men and women from the same racial or ethnic group varied.
African-American men attracted more money than their female colleagues; Hispanic women slightly outdid their male colleagues in fundraising.
The three Asian-American men who won their House elections last year far surpassed the one Asian-American woman in the House as fundraisers, but that is considered a special case.
One reason is that there are too few Asian-Americans to justify a generalization.
Another is that two of the three men serve on committees that traditionally attract among the largest campaign contributions. Robert Matsui serves on Ways and Means, which handles tax legislation, and Norman Mineta is on what used to be called Public Works, now known as Transportation and Infrastructure,
The third Asian-American, Jay Kim, a wealthy businessman, put a large chunk of his own money into the campaign.
The success of the women candidates, especially the white women, in raising money for last year’s campaign does not mean women have it easy now when it comes to fundraising, according to several analysts.
Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic and feminist activist, now with Planned Parenthood, explained the issue this way:
“The women who won are people who have learned how to make the system work for them. The woman candidate who is just starting out still has a harder time raising money.
“It’s very much easier for her male counterpart to tap into money early in the campaign, which is how you establish yourself as a credible candidate.”
For the white women elected last year, the most striking thing is their ability to collect large individual contributions (defined as those of $200 or more) from among the people they were seeking to represent.
Though the average amount of money they raised for the 1994 election was the largest for any racial or gender group — $680,000 — 55 percent of their large campaign checks came from inside their districts.
That proportion, and the dollar total, is the largest among all the racial and gender groups.
Black men and Hispanic men and women all received more than 60 percent of their large individual contributions from out-of-district sources.
Andy Hernandez, director of Latino outreach for the Democratic National Committee, sees nothing surprising in this.
“Hispanics in Congress represent a national constituency,” he says. “There are so few of them, compared with the number of Hispanics in the country, that they do double duty, representing a national, as well as a local, interest.
“It doesn’t surprise me that they have name recognition and attract contributions from beyond their districts.”
Both black men and black women, taken as a whole, received more than half their contributions from PACs — 53 percent of their total for the men and 54 percent for the women.
PAC contributions to the campaigns of other winning candidates ranged between 37 percent and 42 percent for white and Hispanic men and women.
The heavy reliance of African-American candidates on PAC money has been recognized for some time.
Ellen Miller, who heads the Center for Responsive Politics, says simply, “For the most part, the people who live in the African-Americans’ districts can’t afford to pay to play.”
There has been considerable talk — in recent years, and currently, in the Senate — of doing away with PACs on the ground that their money is given with the intention of pressuring the recipients to vote in the donors’ interests rather than their constituents’.
John Bonifaz, who heads the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, wants to end all interest-group funding of political campaigns but says there’s nothing wrong with minorities’ reliance on PACs until reform of campaign financing actually comes about.
Elimination of PACs “essentially knocks out the one place where labor and minority candidates have an ability to compete,” he says.
“It’s a classic false reform,” he says, put out by people who want to retain the status quo and pretend they’ve taken a step toward reform when they’ve only exacerbated the present system.”
David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think-tank, adds this point:
“If you changed the law, I have no doubt that those who represent money and business would find a way to legally get around the law, and do it faster than anybody else.”
Business PACs contributed $130 million to congressional campaigns in 1993-94; labor union PACs, $42 million; and ideological PACs, $16 million.
Ideological PACs generally focus on a single issue, such as opposition to or defense of gun control or abortion.
