Opinion
Opinion: Either all campaign contributions impact official decision-making or none do
Matt Hemmert | Lehi Free Press
The heavily discussed Lehi municipal election topic over the past few days doesn’t surprise me. It’s not unique to Lehi and comes up in every type of election across the nation.
Here is the narrative: “Elected officials or incumbent candidates are corrupt if they’ve ever accepted campaign donations from corporations and must have therefore made, or will make, official decisions that favor those donors. And all that’s needed to ‘prove’ that this quid pro quo exists is a name and dollar amount on a financial disclosure.”
I understand why some want to promote this assertion. It’s because it dovetails neatly with Elite Theory, which maintains that governing power is in the hands of elites, other elites always influence that decision-making process through money (campaign contributions in this case), and that the working class is institutionally and intentionally excluded from governing and the decision-making process.
I’d be naïve to say unfair preference to campaign donors has never happened anywhere. However, the “donation-equals-influence” assertion some assert in Lehi’s municipal elections is intellectually disingenuous.
In the absence of facts, data, and evidence, this is nothing but predictable noise that comes with every election cycle. Nothing more and nothing less. “They’re corrupt and I’m not” is the most banal campaign strategy. We’ve all seen it before. And we’ll see it again.
This tactic creates an impossible paradigm requiring incumbent candidates and elected officials to disprove a negative. These assertions of improper influence are disconnected from any shade of reason and logic. They are a calculated attempt to manipulate an electorate through outrage politics.
I’ve yet to see any evidence offered to support the assertions or inferences of such influence peddling. I’ve looked for it and can’t find anything that could reasonably and rationally be construed as proof.
Absent evidence, a $25 individual donor and a $750 corporate donor to Lehi candidates both seek influence, or neither do. That’s the only reasonable, pragmatic, objective, and logical way to look at a donor’s intent broadly. Each type of donor could bring an application, or potentially oppose an application, that would be in the hands of the city council. Likewise, each could bring an issue or oppose an issue that the city council would address.
Absent evidence, all successful candidates who received any campaign donations, regardless of the size or the source, will provide preferential treatment to donors. Or none will give preferential treatment to donors. That’s the only reasonable, pragmatic, objective, and logical way to look at a candidate’s actions related to donors broadly.
A significant aspect of the current corruption/influence theory relies on distinguishing individual donors from corporate donors. However, an individual donor could own an applicant corporation, have a financial interest in an applicant corporation, or otherwise have some economic or personal interest in the outcome of an application or issue addressed by the city council.
Those aren’t just tangential edge cases. A review of a current council member’s donors mapped against an application appearing as Item 9 on the April 9, 2024, city council agenda demonstrates this. Are two individual donors with vested interests in the outcome of the corporate applicant’s ask enough to claim or infer that the recipient of those donations inappropriately advocated for and subsequently voted in a way to ensure a benefit to the donors? No. I won’t draw a connection between the dots of donations and a donor-benefitting outcome with the thick line of improper influence or preferential treatment. I won’t make that connection without clear and convincing evidence to support it.
To address the evidentiary issue with the topic de jour, one could map all candidates’ and current officials’ donors against all applicant names, looking back X years. A data scrape and correlation are the first steps. The next step would be mapping donor applicant results against a successful candidate’s vote and cross-referencing such against like-kind applications from non-donors.
Anything less merely qualifies assumptions and inferences of impropriety as reckless, baseless, unsupported factually, and smacking of an unprincipled attempt for a cheap and easy political win.
A good conspiracy theory will always thrive. Because of a lack of evidence proving it true, the presence of any evidence proving it false, and any attempt to counter it only strengthens the belief that it must be true.
