Campaigns open their war chests in the final stretch of the election season, and the battle of 2020 has not been cheap.

In the last few weeks of the election, how well a candidate has fundraised could make or break a tight race. Mack Shelley, chairman of the political science department, said if candidates have more money voters may see them as the stronger candidates.

“The main point of having oceans money is to message your campaign, so you hang onto your voters and also in the same process try to demotivate other party supporters,” Shelley said.

The Biden campaign currently has $162 million cash on hand, while the Trump campaign has $42 million cash on hand as of Oct. 14, according to Open Secrets. There are many different uses for campaign funds, such as ads and campaign rallies.

“From a generic, good government perspective, you think it would be the right thing to make it not too easy to buy an election, which is pretty much what campaign spending is for,” Shelley said.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) enforces federal campaign laws. It sets quarterly deadlines for presidential, House and Senate candidate committees to disclose the money they raise and spend, reported as receipts and disbursements.

A receipt is anything of value received by a political committee. This includes money, goods, services or property, according to the FEC. Disbursements are any purchase or payment made by a political committee or any person subjected to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. But tracking these dollars is easier said than done.

“In terms of transparency, it allows us to know where candidates lie and who they might be beholden to,” said political science lecturer Zack Bonner. “So if certain interest groups support them during the campaign, you might see that in terms of policy if they are elected to office.” 

Shelley said the FEC is not effectively overseeing contributions because it is grossly underfunded and is not supported politically by the Republican Party. 

“They don’t really have the capacity in terms of personnel, funding or time to go into the weeds to figure out exactly how money is spent and if it was done appropriately,” Shelley said.

Laws such as the Federal Election Campaign Act were created to limit the amount of money candidates could contribute to their campaign and limit the amount federal campaigns could spend on paid advertising while expanding disclosure requirements.

In 2010, the Supreme Court removed restrictions on corporate spending related to the Citizens United v. FEC case. The court allowed political groups to increase their independent expenditures. In SpeechNow v. FEC, an appeals court voted to allow individuals unlimited contribution to political action committees (PACs), which were organized for the exclusive purpose of making independent expenditures. 

Independent expenditures are expenditures from PACs, unions, corporations or individuals dealing with communication that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate but isn’t made in coordination with any candidate or his or her authorized committees or agents, or a political party committee or its agents, according to Bonner. These can essentially be unlimited contributions, but they can sometimes be subject to reporting requirements depending on how they are used. 

“In terms of fundraising over time, it has gotten to be an excessive amount larger than it used to be, and that kind of came around with the birth of super PACs,” Bonner said. “Because the super PACs can take in unlimited donations, and because of that, we have really moved away from publicly funded elections.”

Democratic nominee for Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, J.D. Scholten, has utilized online donations to make up for the lack of in-person events. Scholten said the majority of his contributions have been online and are all from individual donors. 

In 2020, campaigning has had to shift from the ground war to an air war. The ground war hindered the election due to the pandemic. Tactics like door knocking and in-person rallies have transformed into virtual events. 

“The air war is stuff through the electromagnetic waves, and now it is in your hand, your smartphone, probably even more so than what you see on TV,” Shelley said. “So the actual medium has switched but it’s the same basic idea. You want to try to get your message out as often and high volume as possible.”

Scholten hopes to achieve this, whether it is through a virtual event or him going from county to county talking to voters.

“The crappy part of politics right now is you have to raise a ton of money to get your message out there, and that is a huge part of the advertising on radio and television,” Scholten said. “It is not like a decade or two ago, where everybody watched the same nightly news. There are so many different networks and people are getting their information from a lot of different places so you got to make sure we are trying to reach anywhere and everywhere.”

This carpet-bombing tactic can be seen on cable TV as campaign ads flood air time. Since strategies have changed, Shelley said there is only so much air time to be bought out. Campaigns with extra cash in their pockets could shift those funds to other races, which could be a possibility for the Biden campaign.

“One investment the Biden campaign would probably want to make is to shift some of that surplus cash into U.S. Senate campaigns and maybe some of the U.S. House,” Shelley said. 

In Iowa, the U.S. Senate race has grown to be one of the most expensive Senate races in the country in an already expensive election season.

“The system right now disproportionately allows wealthy people to have success in a campaign,” Scholten said. “So then you have policies out in D.C. that favor huge corporations as a result. I want to clean up special interest, I feel special interest is dictating our democracy, and that is why campaign finance reform is so important to me.”

The Daily contacted the Randy Feenstra campaign for a response on campaign reform and has yet to receive a response.

Shelley said any federal campaign finance reform is long gone now due to the decision of Citizens United.

“The equation the Supreme Court made between money and free speech makes it pretty much impossible to do much now about the massive amounts of campaign cash that is sloshing around,” Shelley said.