This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Like the headline on this blog, political campaign finance itself is a muddy topic.  Not understood fully by most people, including me.

Therefore, what follows below, until the last paragraph, is how Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) described the current state of affairs in Oregon.  I feel free to use this material, with attribution of course, because OPB was one of my best clients when I worked as a lobbyist. 

Plus, the OPB professionals with whom and for whom I worked were routinely upbeat and positive, perhaps reflecting OPB’s top-level standing as a reliable news and public affairs source in the Northwest.  They would not mind be cribbing from their solid work.

So, here, from OPB:

After talks between left-leaning organizations broke down, three groups have filed proposals for reining in political spending in Oregon.

Weeks after they came to an impasse over how the state should crack down on money in politics, left-leaning organizations are signaling they might just fight it out at the ballot box.

Two groups that are often aligned filed dueling ballot measure proposals for how to place limits on the state’s permissive campaign finance laws.  Those proposals — one affiliated with public-sector labor and advocacy groups, the other from a private-sector union — join a series of three proposals filed earlier this month by good government groups.

The upshot is that six separate ideas for cracking down on political giving in the state have now been floated for the November 2022 ballot.  Many, if not most, will die before they reach voters, but even two competing campaign finance measures next year could create confusion that advocates have been hoping to avoid.

Oregon is one of a handful of states that places no limits on how much an individual or entity can give to candidates, a fact that has helped campaign spending explode in recent elections.

Meanwhile, voters have signaled they are eager to tamp down on money’s role in politics.  A ballot measure that altered the state Constitution to formally allow limits on campaign giving passed in a landslide last year.

Left-leaning groups that pushed the Constitutional change met frequently in private this year, attempting to come up with a consensus framework for new regulations.  Those talks broke down in early December.  Now different factions are coming out with their own ideas, which they say need to be filed right away to have a chance to collect enough signatures in time for a July deadline.

Those proposals include many similarities to campaign finance regulations that good government groups floated in their own ballot measure filings in early December.  They create a complex system of caps on how much various entities and political committees can donate to candidates and causes.  They would also require campaigns to disclose top donors in political ads, and force so-called “dark money” groups to reveal their financial backers if they are politically active.  And the proposed measures would create a system of public financing that would use tax dollars to bolster the campaigns of candidates who agreed to only accept donations of $250 or less per person.

But the new proposals also contain key differences from the framework good government groups have floated.  They are less strict when it comes to penalties for breaking campaign finance limits.

They also contain exemptions to the kinds of financial backers advocacy groups must disclose.  Some of those groups had worried they would lose out on crucial funding from charitable foundations if they were forced to name those foundations in connection with their political activities.

Whether any proposal lands before voters next year is hard to predict.  To qualify for the November 2022 ballot, a ballot measure campaign needs to collect 112,020 by July 8.  But even to get to the point of collecting signatures, advocates of campaign finance limits are likely to face challenges from opponents about what ballot language should look like, a process that can take months.

Once that’s done, collecting signatures amid the pandemic has proven costly and difficult.

So, based on OPB’s reporting above, my advice is not to hold your breath waiting for campaign finance limits to be legal in Oregon.  First, some voters could consider political giving to be a form of “free speech” (and even the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that way in the past); second, getting to the ballot will be a major challenge, given signature collection challenges, especially amidst the pandemic; and, winning at the ballot could prove to be an expensive challenge.