Oregon is on the verge of reshaping how political campaigns are financed. HB 4024 would limit contributions for individuals and for organizations. If passed, limits would not begin until January 2027. Jason Kafoury is the co-chair of Honest Elections Oregon. He joins us to share more details of the bill.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Yesterday, the Oregon House of Representatives did something they had never done before. They approved a broad bill to limit campaign contributions. The bill is being considered right now in the State Senate. A spokesperson for Oregon Governor Tina Kotek says that she will sign it. The bigger story here is that a coalition of groups that have been planning on introducing their own version of campaign finance limits, a fall ballot measure, has signed on as well. That’s because lawmakers agreed to tighten some of the limits in their bill. Jason Kafoury is one of the people who is a part of that coalition. He is the co-chair of Honest Elections Oregon and he joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Jason Kafoury: Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: You’ve been working on changes to the way that political campaigns are financed in Oregon for a long time…
Kafoury: Decades.
Miller: Decades. I was trying to be generous here [Laughter]. Can you put what’s happening right now in context?
Kafoury: Yeah. It has been the wild west for way too long here in Oregon This is a pretty amazing statistic, Dave. The Oregon Legislature has never passed a cap on political contributions in their 150 year plus history. We spent, in the 2018 race, $37 million on the governor’s race. The 2022 governor’s race got up to $70 million. We have been on an exponential curve upward and the Center for Public Integrity, back in 2016, ranked Oregon 49th of 50 states of how we finance our elections. 49th, just ahead of Mississippi. And I think we got up to 44th worst in 2022. Washington State, meanwhile, has been number one in terms of how they finance their elections.
This is a historic moment. It required the good government advocates. This has been a long historic battle. The voters in 1994 enacted contribution limits. The Oregon Supreme Court threw that out as unconstitutional. The voters again, in 2006, passed contribution limits. Those never went into place. We have been advocating, we passed limits in Multnomah County and the city of Portland, and in 2020 we were part of a big coalition to amend the Oregon constitution to allow contribution limits. And I’m a little bit shocked that in the last couple of weeks, there’s been this enormous effort at the Oregon Legislature to finally bring what looks like contribution limits and transparency to the state of Oregon. It’s pretty shocking.
Miller: Is it fair to say that both sides - and there are more than two sides here - but broadly, lawmakers and their allies, whether it’s public employee unions or business groups, that side and yours, both of you were motivated out of fear of what the other would do. That lawmakers put forward a bill because they were concerned about your fall ballot measure, and you in turn were afraid that the deep pockets of labor unions or business groups or their allies would win out in November if there were competing measures on the November ballot. Is that a fair way to see it?
Kafoury: Yeah, I think when we’re looking at the history books, we filed a year and a half ago, what we felt was a very good reform which became IP9. We worked with national experts on this policy for months and months and months, it takes a long time. You file it, eight months later, you can finally collect signatures. So we started collecting on it last June. We reached 100,000 signatures and as word spread that we had 100,000 signatures over the last month or so, I think that the big spenders, labor, business folks, came together and said, ‘Wow, we got to do something here’, and they came to the legislature. There was a competing ballot measure put forth by labor and some of the C-4 organizations, IP42. I thought we were going to be competing with IP42 and IP9 as of a few weeks ago, at the end of the November ballot, and then suddenly the legislature got serious.
I don’t think any of this would have happened, Dave, but for the good government advocates getting 100,000 signatures and actually being a real threat to put real campaign finance reform on this November’s ballot. And it has been a herculean effort by good government advocates to take what the legislative leadership and the business and the labor folks initially started with, to get us through about 20 different amendments on it, and changes, to get us to a place that we thought it was worth an acceptable enough deal. I still think there’s a lot of work to be done on it in the future, but we got to a place where we thought, let’s pass this now and let’s work to fix it in future sessions and if need be, go back to the ballot later. But for the moment, this avoids a really ugly, costly battle on the November ballot.
Miller: The bill passed 52 to 5 in the House yesterday. Huge bipartisan support. From your perspective, is this a done deal?
Kafoury: It looks to be a done deal. Yeah. The Senate is actually, as we’re speaking, having a rules committee hearing and they are likely to put it through the rules on the Senate side today, through the working group and then off to the floor. It may even be voted on today at the Senate or for sure it’s going to be voted on by tomorrow is what I hear.
Miller: So let’s turn to some of the specifics here. Under the current version of the bill that passed the House yesterday, small donor committees and membership organizations would both be limited in what they could give to candidates, more limited than what the original bill called for. What are examples of these groups?
Kafoury: Well, I’m glad you asked, Dave, because they don’t exist in any of the 49 states. We have created something from scratch here in Oregon. I think Colorado has a small donor committee, but it has very low limits and very low multipliers on what you can get. But in a nutshell, the concept is you get a bunch of people together such as a labor union, that everybody pays a due. In in the model that we have here, you can put $250 per person, and the reason that the good government advocates finally got to a place where they would be on board with this was we got the outflow limits of what those small donor committees could actually give to a candidate, down to a level that we thought was not astronomical.
So, for example, if you are a small donor committee, in the current version, you can only give $5 per person. OEA, one of the larger unions, told me they have about 5,000 dues paying members. So that means they can contribute $25,000 to a legislative race and then it goes up to $10 per person for a statewide race. So that would be about $50,000 in donations. That pales in comparison to SEIU giving $1.7 million to the Kotek campaign, right? So it took a lot of lobbying and negotiating and deal making to get the labor unions down to that level of $5 and $10 outflow. But that was kind of the moment where I said, all right, maybe there’s a chance that we could cut a deal here. because then we’re in a position where nobody, as Senator Jeff Golden loves to say, nobody should be able to give a distractingly large check to any one politician. And that was a moment where I said, I think we might be able to actually reach an agreement when we got those small donor committees outflow numbers to numbers that weren’t astronomical.
Miller: How do you, though, prevent the proliferation of these groups? So that instead of one group giving a lot of money, you’ve got a higher number of groups giving a smaller amount of money that adds up to the same amount in the end?
Kafoury: Well, on the small donor committee side, I don’t think a lot of people are gonna take the effort to put together… All right, I can only get $5 per person, I’m gonna have to go gather all these people. I can only take $250 per person and I can only give $5. I think really only very large organizations will bother to set up small donor committees because of the paperwork and the hassle on them.
My bigger concern is the second tier you mentioned, the membership organizations. So membership organization could be a C4, it could be a right to life or pro life group. It could be an environmental group, a gun rights group. Those organizations are still allowed to give, in this current bill, four times what the average individual can give. So we cap the individual at the federal limit, $3,300. But we’re allowing the C4 organizations to give $13,200 per organization. And for statewide, double that, $26,400. I fought like heck to try to get those numbers lower, because of the exact concern you just outlined right there. My concern is that somebody could set up multiple C4 organizations and then write a bunch of $13,000 checks.
What we did is we put some antiproliferation language in the bill. It says you can’t have a bunch of these different organizations if they’re all run and managed by the same people. That was the goal. We fought a lot about what that language should look like. And we worked with national experts that have been looking at the same type of policy in other states to prevent these kinds of shenanigans. Do I think we got it perfect? No. This doesn’t go into effect until January 1st, 2027. So we have some more work we can do next session to try to improve on that. But I thought we got it to a place that was, I would call acceptable for good government advocates to say that this isn’t quite the reform that we want, but it’s much better than the current system where we have no rules and no limits.
Miller: What do you think this is going to mean for a public employee union, say, or a large business lobbying organization? I mean, let’s say that there are no other changes, that this were to pass and it is post January of 2027. What do you think would be different in Oregon politics?
Kafoury: That’s a great question. We have to see how this actually plays out, because as I said, no other state has this membership organization carve out. This is only for Oregon and no other state has these small donor committees with these limits. I personally think that it’s gonna lead to a lot more effort at raising small donations by a lot of politicians. I think that Oregon politicians have just been used to being able to get huge checks, especially for our statewide races. So my hope is that this will lead to more grassroots organizing, more small donors. But truth be told, I think what we need long term, Dave, is a public funding system like we have for the city of Portland, where you can take small donations and then you can get them matched by taxpayer dollars. I think that’s really the only way that we’re going to be able to allow ordinary, average folks that don’t have a rolodex to call for, for their big money friends, to allow those folks to run for office.
The city of Seattle has a really interesting model that I’ve always liked. Every voter gets $100 of democracy vouchers and they can spend that $100 on a candidate if they so choose, but if they don’t decide to spend it, then it goes away, it doesn’t go into play. I kind of like that model. The state of Washington tried that statewide. This is actually really hilarious; the funding mechanism for it was to cut off Oregonians from being able to not pay sales tax when they went to Washington. That’s so no Washington taxpayer was actually gonna suffer and they would have public funding statewide with this $100 a voter thing, but that failed by a couple of points in one of the recent elections. So I think that’s the long term solution. We need a public funding system to really even the playing field.
Miller: As you know, there are plenty of folks who say that people or groups of money and a desire to spend that money to potentially sway an election, they’ll just find other ways to do that. Are you expecting a large increase in independent expenditures? Say, ad spending that’s in support of a candidate or against a candidate’s opponent, but it’s not directed by that candidate?
Kafoury: Yeah, that has been the interesting dynamic in this whole debate, is the folks that are the bigger spenders say, ‘Well, if you make the limits too low, then everything will just move over and we’ll have dark money and then we won’t even know who’s contributing to it’.
As part of this bill, we worked with a lot of national experts on this. Arizona recently passed something similar to what we have in our provision here and also Alaska did. We can’t put a cap on any independent expenditures, unfortunately, because of the Citizens United ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court. But what we can do is say we’re gonna drill down and try to figure out who is the real funder behind those independent expenditures. The example I like to give is you shouldn’t be able to run an ad which says, ‘Hey, this is paid for by Oregonians for good puppies,’ when it’s really Chevron or some other big corporation that’s doing it.
So we put into this bill a drill down. I still think it needs a lot of work. Our national experts came up with a lot of things that would improve the bill, but we didn’t really have time to work through this because it all happened in the last few weeks. So I’m hoping there is appetite at the legislature in the 2025 session to try to work to improve this. But in an ideal world voters would see, here’s who actually paid for this independent expenditure.
Miller: Let me just make sure I understand. So the best we’d hope for, because of the Supreme Court ruling, is transparency. We can’t say, you can’t spend this money. But your hope is that we could at least know who is spending that money?
Kafoury: Exactly. And my long term hope, we have to see this play out over a couple of cycles, but my long term hope is that the billionaire Nevada rancher who wants to run some sort of a campaign in Oregon on something, gets smoked out by that, right? They can’t just set up a phony baloney group and have a name that doesn’t mean anything and then say ‘paid for by this’ in the advertising. We have to drill down, and this is where it gets incredibly complex, but you have to drill down to the original true source funders. Sometimes somebody will set up a PAC that gives money to another PAC that gives money to another PAC. So you actually have to drill down three or four layers to get to the original true source funder on this stuff.
This is complex stuff, Dave, and this is where the Oregon Legislature did this in a matter of weeks. We didn’t really have time to fully vet all the transparency stuff. Representative Fahey and her staff have been amazing to work with on this. They’ve committed to trying to improve this next session. And I hope that we view this as a giant step forward for Oregon but not the end of the battle. I hope it’s just the beginning of improving our democracy.
Miller: I want to go back to your theory of change here. Are you assuming that, let’s say that the transparency provision that you’re talking about, that it is in place. Are you assuming that there would be no decrease in the amount of money that dark money spenders want to spend? Or that they would actually spend less because they would, say, be ashamed to have the public know what they’re spending their money on?
Kafoury: We’re gonna have to see this play out. I believe pretty deeply that a lot of people that give dark money don’t want to be smoked out. They don’t really want a Willamette Week reporter or an Oregonian reporter calling and saying, ‘Hey, why are you putting all this money into the Oregon race? What’s your agenda? Who are you?’ Right? I think that if we get good transparency rules, that a lot of the people that are putting in dark money for nefarious purposes, when they have to disclose where it’s really coming from, will stop spending that money. That’s my hope, Dave. I don’t have a magic crystal ball to predict how all this is gonna work. We’re gonna have to see it play out, as I said, in other states too.
[From] all the good government advocates I’ve talked to over the years, that’s the only thing we can come up with on how to try to prevent the real dark money from influencing our elections. And, let’s be clear, what has Phil Knight done? Phil Knight, one individual, has given over $5 million in that last governor’s race. We were tracking it. I think it might be the largest per capita donation ever in the history, what Phil Knight just did, in the whole country. And what we’ve done in this bill is we’ve stopped that. If Phil Knight wants to go set up a dark money group and spend a bunch of money outside, he can do that. But if he wants to write a check from Phil Knight, he’ll be limited like everybody else to $3,300.
Miller: Jason Kafoury, thanks so much for joining us.
Kafoury: Thank you.
Miller: Jason Kafoury is co-chair at Honest Elections Oregon.
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