With three open seats on the Michigan Supreme Court drawing eight candidates and just over $9.5 million in spending in 2014, Michigan ranked highest in the nation for Supreme Court election spending, says a newly-released report, Bankrolling the Bench: The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2013-14.
Written by the nonpartisan organizations Justice at Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the study also ranked Michigan first for both judicial candidate fundraising at $4.98 million, and outside spending, at $4.53 million. It also saw the biggest self-funder of the 2013-14 cycle in any state, Democratic candidate Richard Bernstein, who won a Supreme Court seat after contributing $1.8 million of his own money to his campaign. That sum accounted for 37% of total judicial election contributions in Michigan.
Finally, Michigan was one of only two states where average spending per seat topped $3 million, and one of five states where an average of at least $1 million was spent per seat.
“The hard numbers make it clear: when judges have to run for election, there is a risk that the concerns of ordinary people will take a back seat to the special interests and politicians who are trying to reshape courts to fit their agendas,” said Scott Greytak, Justice at Stake Policy Counsel and Research Analyst and lead author of the report. "This turns how we choose our judges into a political circus that is bad for our courts and bad for democracy. The good news is that we can fix this... work toward real reforms like merit selection... so judges can focus on their real work instead of raising money and fending off political attacks.”
“As special interest groups continue to pump money into judicial races, Americans will rightfully question whether courtroom decisions are being influenced by campaign cash,” said Alicia Bannon, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and co-author of Bankrolling the Bench. “Fifteen years of data makes clear that high-cost and politicized judicial elections are not going away. States are long overdue in rethinking how they select judges and in adopting common sense reforms such as public financing and stronger rules regulating when judges must step aside from cases. Without real policy change, fair and impartial justice is at risk.”
“Like clockwork, every two years the state of Michigan has the most expensive, least transparent judicial elections in America, “ said Rich Robinson, Executive Director, Michigan Campaign Finance Network. “It may well be... that most of the money supporting two of the winning Supreme Court candidates came from a litigant with a high-stakes case in the appeals pipeline who wanted to assure a friendly sort of predictable jurisprudence. The dark money in [the] campaigns is a national disgrace and a grave threat to impartial justice.”
Nationally, Bankrolling the Bench shows that, while overall election spending was slightly lower than other recent cycles due to a high number of uncontested races, outside spending by interest groups in judicial races rose to a record-setting 29% of total spending, or 10.1 million dollars, in 2013-14, topping the previous record of 27% in 2011-12. When outside spending by political parties was also included, total outside dollars accounted for 40% of total judicial election spending, a record for a non-presidential election cycle.
This was spurred in part by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which loosened restrictions on independent political expenditures.
Other key findings about the Michigan Supreme Court election:
—The Virginia-based Center for Individual Freedom, spent over $468,000 on TV ads that applauded two justices for having “thrown the book at violent child predators.”
—Michigan had four of the nation’s top spenders in the 2013-14 cycle: the Michigan Republican Party, ranked first, at $3.88 million; candidate Richard Bernstein, ranked third, at $1.85 million (individually); the Center for Individual Freedom, ranked ninth; and Michigan Realtors Super PAC/Michigan Associa-
tion of Realtors, ranked 10th.
Michigan had three of the nation’s top ten candidate fundraisers. They were Bernstein, ranked first with total contributions raised at $2.2 million; Zahra, fifth, at close to $954,000; and Viviano, seventh, at $887,000.
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