Washington is a state of about 7.8 million people. Spokane is home to just over 230,000.
The city hosts less than 3% of the state population, but has been subject to over 43% of independent expenditures (IEs) made in races for elected offices in all of Washington this election cycle.
Independent expenditures — campaign spending not tied to an official candidate campaign — has fueled the rise of big money in campaigns nationally since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010. It took a while for the tactic to reach broad use in Spokane, with liberal groups doing small amounts of IE spending in the middle of the decade. Since the contentious 2019 race, though, private money has flowed freely, and mostly to the benefit of conservatives.
This election, big money funders found a new gear: IE spending in Spokane is not only fueling record-setting campaigns, it dwarfs the spending anywhere else in the state. (Check out our explainer for how to tell the difference between a campaign ad and an ad paid for by independent expenditures.)
As of October 30, $1.78 million has been spent in Spokane — 30% more than in Seattle races over the same period. IEs for all other candidate races in all other jurisdictions combined (including large urban areas like Tacoma, Vancouver and the Tri Cities) account for less than a million.
The overwhelming majority of that money, 89%, has been spent to either praise conservative candidates broadly aligned with Mayor Nadine Woodward, or to attack their opponents, broadly aligned with mayoral challenger Lisa Brown. The remaining 11% supports more liberal candidates or opposes conservatives.
The fundraising is so lopsided that the advantage for conservative candidates in Spokane over their liberal counterparts ($1.38 million) is greater than all independent expenditures in City of Seattle races combined ($1.33 million) this election.
Progressive groups are spending money too, but they are focusing the majority of their IE efforts opposing two ballot measures: County Measure 1, which would build a larger jail, among other things, and City Proposition 1, which would ban camping in much of Spokane. (Read our explainer on the two.)
IEs have a specific allure: there are legal limitations on how much individuals and organizations can donate directly to candidates. There are no such restrictions on independent expenditures. As long as there is no active collaboration between campaigns, IEs allow people, companies and special interest groups to pour theoretically infinite money into any race they choose.
This year, compared with the rest of the state, special interests chose Spokane.
Spending is up. IEs are way, way up
There is markedly more money in Spokane politics than there was 15 years ago, or even 8. In the final mayoral race before the Citizens United decision, Mary Verner was able to defeat incumbent Dennis Hession with just over $120,000 in total spending — an amount that would make her a fundraising underdog against two of this year’s city council contenders, Katey Treloar and Earl Moore. Less than $6,000 of Verner’s money came from independent expenditures. Campaign spending rose slightly in 2011 and 2015, but IEs didn’t. (Shar Lichty’s grassroots 2015 campaign is an outlier, raising less money than some school board candidates.)
As IEs rose to prominence in 2019, campaign donations for mayor actually dipped a bit, but independent expenditures more than made up for it. IEs benefitting Ben Stuckart made up about 43% of the total $547,000 spent supporting him. IEs accounted for 59% of the $720,000 supporting Woodward.
As of November 1, independent expenditures supporting Woodward have topped $725,000 — more than her entire 2021 campaign. In all, Woodward and her allies have committed an eye-watering $1.28 million.
While there is less money in the council president race overall, independent expenditures make up an even bigger piece of the pie. In 2019, the $148,000 Breean Beggs raised was more than any council president candidate since 2007 (as far back as the PDC has data), and would have been a record, if not for Cindy Wendle, his opponent that year.
Wendle, the more conservative candidate, raised more than $260,000 on the campaign side, beating Beggs by more than $112,000. That was significant enough, but the real difference came in independent expenditures, where business interests supporting Wendle spent nearly $350,000, almost 35 times the roughly $10,000 Beggs got from a mishmash of progressive organizations.
This year, Kim Plese has essentially matched Wendle’s campaign funding, and her opponent, the more liberal Betsy Wilkerson, has closed the campaign gap as well, and even mustered what would have historically been respectable IEs.
The nearly $600,000 dollars business interests have spent supporting Plese and attacking Wilkerson, though, is more than both candidates’ campaign spending combined, giving Plese an almost 3x spending advantage over Wilkerson.
These patterns mostly hold at the city council level as well: there is relative fundraising parity between conservatives and liberals at the campaign level. Lindsey Shaw is within $10,000 of the incumbent Michael Cathcart and Kitty Klitzke is within $3,000 of Moore. (The one exception to the campaign parity stat is in District 2, where Paul Dillon has raised respectably well — in line with Klitzke and Moore and better than Cathcart or Shaw — but his opponent Katey Treloar is on a whole other level. Her $160,000 campaign haul obliterates the old record of $109,000 set by Zach Zappone in 2021.)
With the exception of Treloar/Dillon, independent spending accounts for most, if not all of the fundraising gap between liberal and conservative candidates. Even Cathcart — who, despite a background as both Government Affairs Director for the Spokane Home Builders Association and Executive Director of the pro-business Better Spokane PAC, has gotten surprisingly little support from the realtors and developers bankrolling Spokane’s largest IE campaigns — still has almost 30 times more IE spending than Shaw.
Across the board this election cycle, the parity ends where the independent expenditures begin.
Keeping the positive, accentuating the negative
On paper, independent expenditure spending in 2023 is almost exactly split between positive ads ($883,146 as of Oct. 30) and negative ($896,593), but when we track the shift between 2019 and today, some patterns emerge.
In 2019, most independent spending was positive. Wendle’s supporters spent over 4 times more money supporting her than attacking Beggs. Likewise, the Woodward faithful spent about 3.5 times more money supporting her than attacking Ben Stuckart. The only IE campaign that went negative in 2019 were Stuckart’s supporters, who spent almost nothing on positive ads about him, but spent over $200,000 targeting Woodward. (Woodward still had almost $190,000 more IE spending than Stuckart.)
When we track the changes to independent spending this year compared to 2019, the private groups supporting conservatives have more or less maintained their positive spending while adding nearly $600,000 of new negative spending. Groups supporting liberal candidates … have pretty much sat this election out.
On the liberal side, Wilkerson supporters have added a small amount of independent spending, but that’s compared to Beggs, who barely broke $10,000 in support in 2019. Brown supporters have spent $143,000 less than Stuckart’s supporters did, a massive difference. Nearly $140,000 of that comes from decreased negative spending against Woodward.
Conservatives, meanwhile, have spent about the same, though slightly less on positive advertising, especially for Plese, who is working with a little over $31,000 less in positive messaging compared to Wendle. Woodward has gotten about $7,500 more shine from her supporters in business than last time.
The real change is in the more than $575,000 of new spending Woodward and Plese supporters have spent attacking Brown and Wilkerson. When we zoom back out, that’s the majority of the spending story for both mayor and council president.
Liberals have been able to play it close with conservative candidates in fundraising the last two cycles, but they couldn’t match the business groups giving their preferred candidates glow ups in 2019, and they certainly can’t match the negative spending battering them in 2023.
How are IEs tracked?
The state PDC logs independent expenditures as being either “for” — in favor of — or “against” a given candidate or ballot measure.
For measures, it’s straightforward, an IE is either in favor of the proposed measure, or opposed.
For elected offices, things get a little more complex: because it’s possible to run positive and negative ads against any given candidate, there are four categories of spending for general election races. In the case of Woodward vs. Brown, the PDC tracks pro-Woodward money and pro-Brown money, as well as money that’s anti-Brown and anti-Woodward, respectively.
Why? Because IEs will often run ads that are explicitly positive or negative about one candidate without mentioning the other. So an ad that only focuses on Woodward’s accomplishments would all count in the pro-Woodward column. An ad attacking Brown would all count against Brown. Many ads, though, have a mix. In cases where a mailer has an anti-Woodward message on one side and a pro-Brown message on the other, the cost of that ad would be split between those two buckets. It’s complicated, but it gives a nice level of detail about not just how much money is being spent, but how that money is being deployed tactically.
Editors note: For the purpose of this analysis, we are treating IEs supporting Woodward and expenditures attacking Brown as benefitting Woodward. Similarly, expenditures supporting Brown and those attacking Woodward count as benefitting Brown.
