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Here Comes the Judge: Stimulating Donors in Michigan’s Circuit Court Races
In 2000, Senator John McCain challenged George W. Bush for the Republican presidential
nomination. Although his effort fell short, his relative success in the primaries helped to catapult the
campaign finance issue into the forefront of the American political agenda. Subsequent sessions of
Congress saw dozens of campaign finance reform initiatives introduced, and President Bush reluctantly
signed the Campaign Finance Reform Act into law in March 2002.
While no shortage of attention is given to the politics of campaign finance reform at the national
level, the machinations of state judicial races have existed in obscurity. However, it is an area of politics
that has become a hotbed of interest group activity and is increasingly drawing the attention of scholars and
the media. In recent years the cost of running for a state judicial seat has accelerated, easily outpacing the
rate increases seen in spending for federal elected office (Kaplan 1999). To put a finer point on it, major-
party supreme court candidates increased the amount of money they raised in the period from 1994 to 2000
by 250 percent (Michigan Campaign Finance Network 2002). Ironically, at the end of the 2002 election
cycle, Senator McCain held a press conference in which he explained his position. “Clearly the campaign
finance reform issue has moved to the courts, and so I have more than an objective interest in how our
judges are elected. They are the latest hunting grounds of big money and special interests” (McCain 2002).
The nonpartisan group Justice at Stake, sponsors of McCain’s press conference, concluded that in
2000, “state supreme court candidates raised $45.6 million – a 61% increase over 1998, and double the
amount they raised in 1994”(Goldberg 2002). In the same election year, the Michigan Supreme Court
justices were involved in the second most expensive judicial races in the country, with winning candidates
spending an average of $1,287,990. Given this trend of increasingly expensive races for Michigan’s top
judicial office, one could reasonably expect to see similar increases in Michigan’s lower courts.
There has been no significant study of lower court campaign finances in Michigan, but two stories
from the 2002 election provide anecdotal evidence to suggest that the big dollar campaigns for judicial
office are not limited to only the state’s highest court. Judy Baxter spent $617,455, nearly $600,000 of it
her own, in an unsuccessful bid to win a seat on the Michigan Kent County Circuit Court (Guthrie 2002).
In Wayne County, Lynn Pierce spent over $200,000 in her failed bid to take a seat on that county’s Circuit
Court.
These cases are extraordinary in their level of spending (Kent County Circuit Court judges
dismissed Baxter’s spending as an aberration), but such examples have helped spark a growing debate and
body of research. Broadly, this research can be classified into two categories: judicial selection and
campaign financing. An inherent tension exists between the belief that judicial officers, like other public
officials, be held accountable to the electorate on the one hand, and the critical desire to see that the
judiciary retains its independence on the other (Lovrich and Sheldon 1983, Hall and Aspin 1987,
Champagne and Haydel 1993, Wohl 2000, Hall 2001). Judicial ethics put these candidates in the
unenviable position of appealing to voters and raising campaign funds while making campaign statements
that do not stray from the most generic and benign pronouncements of the candidate’s support for the
general concepts of justice, equality and fairness.
Individuals seeking other public office positions do not face this restriction. In fact, it is expected
that a successful run for office requires a candidate to make public assertions that not only garner media
attention, but energize their base and in turn aid in the raising of campaign funds. Justice Stevens describes
this friction when he wrote a dissenting opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court case The Republican Party of
Minnesota vs. White (2002).
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In his dissent, Justice Stevens drew a distinction between judicial candidates
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Several judicial candidates filed a lawsuit claiming the Minnesota judicial canons, which prevented
judicial candidates from “announc[ing] his or her views on disputed legal or political issues”, violated their
First Amendment rights. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision declared that this “announcement
clause” did violate the First Amendment.
Convention