Kansas: Who is Buying Our Elections?

Every year we talk about political action committees (PAC) and special interest groups spending on elections. The 2024 cycle in Kansas is no different. After looking through every PAC, party committee, and special interest finance report, I found ~$4.7 million spent on behalf of candidates. While this may already seem like a large amount, this does not even factor in contributions. This also only considers the general election cycle, and not money spent on primary campaigns. I intend on collecting that information in the future to create a more comprehensive database of Kansas’ campaign money, but I wanted to get this article out before the election began.

$2.2 million was spent on Democrats and $2.5 million was spent on Republicans. Let’s take a look at who is getting the money.

Where is the PAC money going?

This chart, for the sake of readability, only shows the candidates receiving over $10k in outside spending on their behalf. That only leaves out ~$150k in PAC money, so the graph is pretty accurate.

We can see Democrats and Republicans are receiving outside spending pretty equally, though Democrats seem to benefit from a more consolidated approach. Senate Democrats tend to be better off than their Republican counterparts, but House Republicans do much better than House Democrats.

Why not consider contributions?

Before looking into the data, let me answer why I’m not factoring in PAC donations to candidates. I think it is important to consider contributions, especially when it comes to evaluating a legislator's voting record, but when it comes to campaigning, PAC contributions are much less impactful.

First, PACs are limited in how much they can give to a candidate, but there are no limits to how much a PAC can spend on a candidate. In Kansas, PACs are limited to donating $500 to State House candidates and $1,000 to State Senate candidates. However, there are no limits on how much a PAC can spend on its own, and very few laws regulating what a PAC can spend its money on. Therefore, the amount a PAC can give to a candidate is rather inconsequential (although in the grand scheme of things, all added up, is probably around the same amount PACs are spending on behalf of candidates).

Also, since PAC contributions have to be reported by the campaigns themselves, those numbers are already accounted for in candidate contribution reports. Including those donations here would effectively be double-counting that money.

Lastly, and what I think is most important, who is spending the money dictates how the money is spent. Generally speaking, when a PAC spends on behalf of a candidate, they do so in a hands-off manner. The most common example of outside spending is sending mailers to voters, texting campaigns, digital advertising, and maybe even phone calls. Rarely, when it comes to legislative races, do PACs spend money on volunteers to go knock on doors. When a PAC spends $25k on 10,000 postcards, those have a diminishing effect and don’t win votes. But when a candidate takes $5k in PAC money, they can spend that money knocking 5,000 doors, each door an actual chance to change a vote. PAC contributions are fundamentally different from PAC spending.

Where is the PAC money coming from?

Explore where the money is coming from using this interactive chart. Click the dropdown to select the PAC or Party Committee you want to explore data from.

I don’t think there are any expenditures here that are particularly surprising, but it is nice to conveniently search through and see who is spending the most money. There are also a few other PACs I tracked that may not have reported expenditures specifically or in support of a specific candidate.

For example, Kansans for Life reported spending $50k on mailers, but did not specify what candidates they were in support of. This is likely their normal mailer they send out every year with a list of endorsements on them. This is worthy to note, although we don’t know who exactly receives these mailers. $50k also isn’t that much for mailers statewide, so they likely target them to swing districts, but alas, we don’t know.

The Democratic Party is, by far, the single largest PAC/Party Committee spending money on candidates with over $1.1 million spent. To be fair, this is because Democratic candidates tend to raise money on their own, donate it to the party, and allow the party to spend it on their behalf. Republican candidates generally don’t raise a lot of money, and allow the PACs and party to raise the money and spend it on their own. The centralized nature of Kansas Democratic campaigns means their expenditures tend to be slightly inflated as much of their expenditures go to PACs who immediately spend it right back at them.

Republican PACs also tend to get their money from out of state. Americans for Prosperity, for example, reports all of their contributions in bulk… from themselves. We can’t actually track the money from AFP because they don’t report individual contributions to the state, but rather report them as contributions to themselves from themselves. Kansas Chamber PAC reports contributions from other corporations, which we can only sometimes trace the money to (in this instance, we cannot).

How meaningful is this money?

I tend to believe that PAC and special interest funding doesn’t have that large of an impact on election results. The money that PACs have, at least the ones that invest in Kansas, aren’t being spent on very useful programs. Digital advertising, texting, and mailers have a negligible impact on elections. At best they slightly increase turnout, at worse they waste money on increasing name recognition when name recognition shouldn’t be the priority. I completely made this number up, but I work under the broad assumption that, in these local elections, PAC money is worth 25 cents compared to a dollar spent by campaigns.

Don’t get me wrong, on a national level, I believe PAC, corporate, and special interest money portrays a larger threat to democracy. Spending millions of dollars allows for larger operations where money is spent on meaningful campaign activities like door knocking, something local campaigns must do on their own.

Also in legislative elections, I don’t really think PACs “buy votes.” We’ve gotten to a point in partisanship and ideological purity tests that PACs spend money to win elections for the party, not for the candidate. Very rarely will you see a PAC spending money on behalf of a candidate from both parties. They certainly donate to both parties to maintain better relations for lobbying efforts, but they don’t spend their own money on multiple parties’ behest. And that isn’t necessarily buying votes either. Most of us do remember the purge of moderate Republicans from elected positions in primaries during the 2010s, and those were so successful that there’s no longer a need for PACs to spend money driving a party in a certain direction. When they donate money, they know what they are getting no matter what.

The biggest thing that worries me about PAC money in Kansas is the reporting requirements, specifically surrounding contributions. It is too easy in Kansas for PACs and special interest groups to hide where their money is coming from. The point of this article and the database I am building is to promote transparency and hopefully be able to start tracking money so voters can know exactly who is sending them so many mailers.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and got some good information on PAC money. Please feel free to reach out to me on X (@LilStapler1861) or email me (kianwilliams1861@gmail.com) if you have any questions or would like me to dive deeper into some data for you!

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