Running Clean

Glenn Cummings MPA 1996

Glenn Cummings MPA 1996 is running for elected office in the state of Maine but has yet to hold a fundraiser — and he never will.

"I hold friendraisers, not fundraisers," he says. "Over tea and coffee, I tell the people in my district that I’m not going to ask them for one dime. I want their thoughts, not their money."

Cummings isn’t being naïve or foolish — he’s being "clean," one of a new breed of candidates forgoing private money under Maine’s Clean Election Act, which was passed in 1996, and implemented for the first time during this year’s election. The act, the first and only in the nation, provides candidates, who choose to participate, with full public financing in exchange for limitations on their spending.

In Cummings’s case, that means he’ll be given a whopping $4,400 to run his entire campaign for the Maine house of representatives — about 75 percent of what was spent in similar races during the past two years. If his coffers run dry, he isn’t allowed to turn to outside donations or use his own money. The only way he’ll be eligible for additional funds from the Clean Election Act is if his opponent, a Republican who has chosen to campaign traditionally, outspends him.

Cummings acknowledges that the limitations make it hard to run a campaign. Every stamp is precious, and every penny needs to be watched. Still, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

"Would I have run had public financing not been an option?" he said from his office at Portland Partnership, a nonprofit that helps schools in Portland write grants, coordinate volunteers, and partner with business. "I may not have."

A seventh-generation Mainer who has dreamed of running for office since he was a 16-year-old page working at the Maine statehouse, Cummings said the thought of asking people for money was not appealing.

"When I was 16, I was fascinated with the process of legislating and of ‘making history,’" he said. "But, the influence of money in politics has always been unsettling for me. The passage of the Clean Election Act made the idea of running attractive again."

By choosing to not take private funding, Cummings initially had to collect a minimum of 50, $5 contributions from voters in his district (the money was sent to the clean election general fund). Although he was the first person to qualify (getting 60 voters to commit just 10 days after the process began on January 1), he wasn’t the last. Of the nearly 400 candidates running for the state legislature in Maine this year, approximately one-third have been "rescued from the money chase plaguing other politicians," as columnist David Broder wrote in The Washington Post. In addition, since the act went into effect this year, there has been more than a 40 percent increase in contested primaries, compared with 1998, and an increase overall of candidates on the ballot (372 this year compared with 360 in the previous election year).

Cummings, a former high school teacher, who spends most of his free time with his wife, Leslie Appelbaum, and their two children, Kiernan, 4, and Skyler, 1, hopes the Maine model for campaign finance reform will influence other states to "go clean." To date, Missouri and Oregon have initiatives on the fall ballot; Arizona and Vermont have similar laws in place, although both are facing legal challenges; and Massachusetts will implement a clean election law beginning in 2002.

When the option to limit spending is available in other states, Cummings says, he hopes other Kennedy School alumni running for office will take the challenge.

"This option allows us to be the best that the Kennedy School would want us to be," he said. "The spirit of the school is about true public service, and we don’t want to taint that with the idea that we’re only serving a small population."