Voters do worry that billionaires buy elections

Call me hooked, but I can't stop dissecting Donald Trump's victory just yet. Not when there's one factor that has been insufficiently credited for his Electoral College triumph and his near-miss in Minnesota — and that matters to the health of this republic in years to come.

It's Trump's professed independence from the big-money operators to whom other politicians in both parties are beholden.

Politicians often opine that voters don't much care about money in politics. I'm here to tell them otherwise. In meetings with Minnesota audiences, I've heard one question over and over since the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010: "What can be done to keep billionaires from buying elections?"

Trump the candidate understood that concern — even if it's less clear that Trump the president-elect does. (So did Bernie Sanders, who turned his campaign's $27 average donation into a call-and-response line at campaign rallies.) Trump crowed about his capacity to finance his campaign himself — even after reporters found that campaign-finance reports did not jibe with his boasts. He went so far as to goad Hillary Clinton about not donating to her own campaign.

"I'm not taking all of this big money from all of these different corporations like she's doing," he said in their second debate. He helpfully suggested a personal donation of $30 million. "It's $30 million less for special interests that will tell you exactly what to do and it would really, I think, be a nice sign to the American public. Why aren't you putting some money in?"

Clinton didn't bother to respond that night. I'd score that as an error. It wasn't the only time she left Americans wondering about her independence from the donor class.

My hunch is that some Trump voters believe his victory heralds a lessening of that class's clout.

About that, they'd be wrong, Jane Mayer says. Mayer is a New Yorker magazine journalist and the author of one of the year's political must-reads, "Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right." With an assist from former Vice President Walter Mondale and Prof. Larry Jacobs, Mayer disabused a Nov. 22 Humphrey School audience of any notion that the GOP billionaires' club lost influence this year.

"By dint of just being rich, they are overwhelming American politics," she said.

Yes, the donors' group led by oil tycoon brothers Charles and David Koch declined to provide direct help to Trump, she said — dropping plans to spend $889 million on the presidential race.

But the group spent an extraordinary $750 million on down-ballot races, helping Republicans win U.S. Senate and House seats and governorships. In so doing, its machine turned out the voters who turned formerly blue states red in the presidential election. That put Trump in the political debt of those players as surely as if he had been on their payroll, Mayer said.

That would be bad enough, were it not that Republican elected officials in Congress and statehouses around the country are similarly indebted to right-wing moguls. And were it not that much of the $750 million was spent in a way that is not traceable to the Kochs' donor group, which does much of its political spending in ways that elude disclosure laws.

It isn't alone in that regard. Paying for politics without leaving a trace is fairly easily done by midsize as well as big-money players, Jeff Sigurdson of the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board explained recently. One common ploy: Give to a nonprofit or a foundation, which in turn spends on political messages that carefully avoid calling expressly for the election or defeat of a candidate, and your donation need not be disclosed. (Hence the fliers that ask voters to tell Rep. Spineless to "Stop being soft on terrorism.") Or send a corporate check to a trade association, which in turn sends money to a political action committee, which need only report that the contribution was "derived from business revenue."

All that secrecy is the most galling aspect of a democracy-damaging situation. So says Mayer — and so says a Minnesotan who's trying to do something about it, George Beck. Beck is a retired administrative law judge and former member and chair of the Campaign Finance Board, known to this editorial writer for his helpful suggestions that more ink be devoted to the need for tougher disclosure laws.

Our most recent exchange produced a small but — I hope — durable news peg: Beck and a few dozen like-minded democracy defenders have formed Minnesota Citizens for Clean Elections, with Beck as its chair. The group is too new for its own website, but can be reached by e-mail at mncce1@gmail.com.

In Beck's view, Trump's win did not strike a lasting blow against billionaire influence in politics. In fact, "I think our prospects just got dimmer," he said last week. A Republican-controlled 2017 Legislature is not likely to close disclosure loopholes that Republican donors use to their advantage. Neither is it likely to pass a resolution calling for the reversal of the high court's Citizens United decision, since that decision has opened the floodgates for pro-GOP corporate spending.

But if voters' concern about a few rich voices being allowed to drown out all others is genuine — as I claim it is — little pockets of resistance like the one Beck is founding will grow.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.