Governor's race may set a record
Gabrieli, others likely to spur spending pace
Christopher F. Gabrieli, a wealthy venture capitalist who is self-financing most of his campaign for governor, set a $15.36 million spending cap for his Democratic primary campaign yesterday, rejecting a plea from the party chairman to agree to a much lower spending level for the three-way race.
While Gabrieli insisted that he has no intention of spending up to his declared limit, campaign finance specialists say election spending for the entire gubernatorial campaign probably will surpass the record total of $30.6 million set by six campaigns in 2002.
Gabrieli was required by state election laws to declare the limit of his expenditures yesterday, but he downplayed the importance of the figure, saying he chose the number because he received 15.36 percent of the delegates' vote at last week's Democratic Party convention. He faces Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly and corporate lawyer Deval L. Patrick in the Sept. 19 Democratic primary.
``It's an arbitrary procedure in our view," Gabrieli said after filing the statement with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance. ``We decided to pick a number that has been pretty lucky in my life lately."
It is unlikely that Reilly or Patrick will keep pace with Gabrieli's spending in the primary. Nonetheless, a proliferation of self-funded campaigns by wealthy candidates, including Gabrieli, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, Patrick, and independent Christy Mihos, has set the stage for a political arms race.
The gubernatorial candidates have spent more than $8.8 million to date, and the November election is five months away. By contrast, in 1994, spending by four candidates was $5.9 million for the entire campaign.
``There's no question this is going to be a record-breaking year," said Pamela H. Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause of Massachusetts, an advocate of overhauling campaign financing. ``Four of the five major candidates are millionaires, and they have a lot of money to burn. When you've got the money, there's literally no campaign reason not to spend it."
Gabrieli campaign aides and other strategists said that Gabrieli rebuffed Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston's suggestion that the three Democratic candidates adopt a spending limit of less than $5 million. In private conversations this week with officials at all three campaigns, Johnston offered no specific number, other than saying it should be less than $5 million, according to people familiar with the talks.
Even $5 million is relatively high. No candidate has spent more than $4.7 million in a primary campaign in Massachusetts. In only 11 weeks this year, Gabrieli has spent $2.825 million of his own money, according to state campaign finance records.
Gabrieli's campaign manager, Joe Ganley, said that Gabrieli needs to be free to compete with Reilly and Patrick, who have been raising funds and campaigning for over a year.
``Deval made $3 million last year at Coke, and Reilly's raised a massive campaign war chest as an incumbent; we're not going to unilaterally disarm," Ganley said.
Patrick's financial disclosure statement showed he was paid $3.1 million in 2005 by
Reilly and Patrick agreed this week to join the public financing system, under which they were required to agree to a $1.5 million spending cap in exchange for splitting $750,000 in public funds. Under the system, all candidates must agree to the public financing cap; any candidate opting out sets the spending cap for all the candidates.
Yesterday, Gabrieli tried to make light of the $15.36 million limit. ``I hope you thought it was at least slightly humorous that I picked 15.36," he joked to reporters.
Reilly's spokesman Corey Welford scoffed at Gabrieli's light-hearted attempt to explain the high cap. ``Clearly Chris Gabrieli thinks spending limits are a joke," Welford said. ``But the joke is really on the voters, our party, and our democracy. Spending $15 million in a primary, in addition to the $3 million he's already spent, is an obscene amount of money, and this campaign is going to be about much more than who can write the biggest check for glossy TV ads."
Patrick aides said they had no comment on Johnston's overtures. His director of communications, Richard Chacon, said Gabrieli's stated spending limit would not change Patrick's strategy.
``We're in this to compete vote by vote, not dollar for dollar," Chacon said. ``This won't change our emphasis on a quickly growing grass-roots movement. We opted in for public financing to honor taxpayers' wishes to keep campaign spending at a reasonable limit."
Johnston also talked to the three campaigns about accepting a deal to refrain from negative or so-called attack ads. The basis of the policy would be that a candidate could not name an opponent in an ad. The candidates did not agree to the cease-fire.
For wealthy candidates, using their own money is tempting because the state's limits on donations, $500 per person, make it difficult to raise the necessary sums.
By comparison with his rivals, Reilly is a pauper in net worth, but he will hold his own on spending. With more than $4 million in cash on hand, he has by far the most money in his campaign account. He raised it by collecting thousands of donations of $500 or less, the maximum allowed by law.
Gabrieli has used his own money in his other two campaigns. When he ran for Congress in 1998, Gabrieli was a political novice and poured $5.1 million of his own money into the race, finishing sixth in a 10-way Democratic primary. Four years ago, when he won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, Gabrieli used more than $4.9 million of his own cash.
The record for self-financers is Republican Mitt Romney, who spent $6.3 million of his own money in an eight-month period, helping himself win the governorship four years ago. His campaign was the most expensive ever, with total spending of almost $9.4 million.
That year, Romney's running mate, Healey, spent nearly $1.8 million of her own cash. Her husband, Sean Healey, is a businessman with a net worth of at least $100 million who has cashed in at least $18 million worth of stock options in the past year.
Healey told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette last month that she estimates her campaign would cost ``about $15 million" to run. She said it had not been determined how much of the family fortune she would commit.
Rounding out the millionaires' field in this year's race is Mihos. Through May 31, the convenience store chain owner had pumped $469,000 of his own cash into his campaign and had received contributions from others totaling about $94,000.
Wilmot thinks voters will find the trend distressing.
``They're not prejudiced against millionaires, but they're concerned that politics is increasingly being cornered by a small segment of society," she said. ``People with a lot to give and a lot of talent are being priced out of politics."
Massachusetts voters have shown an ambivalence about publicly financed campaigns. In 1998, voters approved an ambitious, complicated ``clean elections" law by a 2-to-1 margin. Designed to limit the influence of interested money and overall spending, the law established public funding and voluntary spending limits for public offices all the way down the ballot to the Legislature. Lawmakers, however, refused to fund it, and four years later, opponents all but killed the law with a nonbinding referendum. By nearly 3-to-1, voters turned thumbs down on public funding.
Today, all that remains is the voluntary $1 income tax return checkoff that creates the small pool of public funds for statewide candidates that Reilly and Patrick will receive. 