The day I entered the race, I was at 2 percent in the polls… and the margin of error was 3 percent. Those were real numbers from the first poll we did. I was pretty excited not to be starting at zero, until Heidi wryly observed, “Technically, couldn’t you be at negative 1 percent?”
When I was elected to the Senate in 2012, I had never before been elected to any other office. Indeed, as I have joked, albeit accurately, the last thing I had been elected to before that was student council.
Nonetheless, we managed to raise some $14 million from a whopping 43,160 unique donors. That was enough to overcome the 3-to-1 spending differential we faced. And we ended up winning what the Washington Post later characterized as the single biggest upset of 2012 and “a true grassroots victory against very long odds.”
That also included $1.2 million that I personally put into the campaign, which represented all of our liquid net worth. That’s a lot of money, most of which we had saved from my few years in private practice at the law firm before running. Some people assume that, because I went to Princeton and Harvard, I must have family money and come from privilege. That’s not the case. I was a scholarship kid. My dad was a Cuban immigrant; my mom was the first in her family to go to college. Nobody in my family had ever gone to an Ivy League school, and when I went to college my parents had just lost their small business and declared bankruptcy. We lost our home, and I worked two jobs and took out about $100,000 in loans (which I finally paid off twelve years ago) to make it through college and law school.
It was an interesting conversation—to say the least—going to Heidi, in the last week of the primary, and asking her to agree to liquidate all of our savings to put into the campaign. Not many candidates or candidates’ spouses are willing to consider that. (That’s one of the reasons so many candidates are massively wealthy.) And it’s a testament to what an amazing person Heidi is—my best friend and partner in every aspect of life—that she said yes immediately, without hesitation.
To put that money into the campaign, we sold all the stocks and bonds we had that didn’t have significant appreciation. And, rather than sell the remaining investments (which would have taken us to zero but would have unnecessarily incurred a big capital gains tax bill), I took out two loans for the equivalent amount. One was a line of credit through Citibank, which all the partners at my law firm had access to on identical terms. The other was a margin loan from Goldman Sachs, where we kept our investments. The margin loan was available on identical terms to everyone who held investments at Goldman—just like the margin loans offered by most other brokerages—and it was directly secured by those investments (you could automatically borrow up to 50 percent of their market value). Both loans were fully paid off after the primary, when the campaign paid me back much of my loan to it. (Under a particularly burdensome—and unconstitutional—federal election rule, we were prohibited from paying ourselves back all of our loan; so we had to make, in effect, a $550,000 forced “gift” from our life savings to the campaign.)
In the 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times breathlessly broke the news of these 2012 bank loans as front-page news and treated it as somehow scandalous because I had not filed the correct paperwork with the FEC. The whole thing was quite silly, because I had publicly disclosed both loans at the time on my Senate Ethics financial disclosure—which was contemporaneous and fully available to the public. But, our campaign’s lawyer hadn’t filed the correct form (with the identical information) also with the FEC, so it was technically a violation.
In addition to all the money we raised and spent on the campaign, we also had outside help. Spending significant money in support of my Senate race was the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative political-advocacy organization that spent several million dollars speaking out in favor of my conservative record. If the Democrats had had their way, the Club for Growth—and any other citizen-advocacy organization—would have been silenced. And it would likely have proven impossible to defeat an incumbent statewide official with a massive personal fortune and statewide name recognition.
Pause to think about how many elected officials today are multi-millionaires with personal fortunes in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the ability simply to swamp anyone on the other side. If citizens were silenced, we’d get even more billionaires trying to buy elections.
Pause also to consider just how much more the proverbial deck would be stacked in favor of incumbents if we tried to silence all of America’s great civic organizations—society’s intermediating institutions about which Alexis de Tocqueville famously waxed poetic—and prevented them from donating to or advocating on behalf of challengers to incumbent politicians. Such a vision of our politics would have been anathema to the Framers of our Constitution.
Our current campaign system is, frankly, stupid. It makes no sense. Because, in the wake of Citizens United, when Congress lacked the authority to prohibit citizen groups from speaking, the Federal Election Commission nonetheless enforced regulations that prohibited candidates from conferring with those citizen groups. And so today, in a significant number of federal elections, the biggest speakers, in terms of dollars spent, are outside groups—or “super PACs”—with whom the ostensible candidate is legally prohibited from communicating on strategy, messaging, or substance.
That makes no sense from anybody’s perspective. These super PACs are now typically run by political consultants who profit obscenely and make millions of dollars precisely because no
