carlfense Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 Judicial races once were largely polite, low-budget affairs. But in the 1990s, business and political groups began to focus on these elections as an important (and often cost-effective) path to influencing policy and regulation. Since then, judicial campaigns have come to look more like any other political circus: rallies, political consultants, attack ads, and a flood of campaign cash. As of November 5, election watchers at the Brennan Center, a liberal think tank that tracks legal issues, estimated that at least $13.8 million had been spent on TV advertising for state supreme-court elections nationwide in 2014up from $12.2 million in the last midterm election four years earlier. The funders of these campaigns arent generally motivated by a desire to lock up criminals. In fact, some of this years big donors to organizations running tough-on-crime campaignsincluding the conservative philanthropists Charles and David Kochhave simultaneously backed so-called smart-on-crime reform efforts aimed at shortening mandatory sentences and reducing prison populations. But fear works, election strategists believe. Why run on what really matters to your funderslike tort reform or deregulationwhen you can run against paroling pedophiles? http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/trial-by-cash/383631/?single_page=true Link to comment
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