Whether it be the highest office in the land or a seat in Congress, running for federal office requires significant name recognition along with strong financial and human support.
With increasingly high stakes, politicians considering such a high-profile run often test the waters first by launching an exploratory committee.
This loosely defined process allows potential candidates to determine how viable their candidacy might be. Such efforts can be officially filed with the Federal Election Commission, but are not required to do so.
However, the Federal Election Committee has drawn clear lines on what they can and cannot do during this pre-campaign process:
- It’s OK to conduct polls, travel and make phone calls that help gauge support.
- It’s not OK to cross over into campaigning without registering with the FEC as a candidate. Barred actions include raising or spending more than $5,000, referring to themselves as candidates, launching political ads about their intentions, and informing the media that they plan to announce their candidacy on a certain date.
Exploratory committees which have registered with the FEC can quickly evolve into the candidate’s principal campaign committee once the politician decides to register as a candidate.
At that point, all financial activity that has already occurred must be disclosed in their first official report to the FEC.
Moving on up?
In mid-April, Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson announced that he had formed an exploratory committee to see how he might fare in seeking Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024.
Wilson, a Davis County Republican and real estate developer, has served in Utah’s House since 2011, and as Speaker since 2019.
According to Election Hive, Chris Coombs has helped shape policy and meet constituent needs on behalf of several Utah GOP politicians. Most recently, Coombs has been active in Wilson’s water-testing activities, an exercise now in its sixth week.
“It’s like a semi campaign because you’re not officially launched as a campaign,” Coombs said recently by phone. “What that allows you to do through the FEC is raise money. So there’s that side of it and also the grassroots side of it – meeting with folks, listening to them, seeing what they’re interested in seeing in D.C. – that sort of thing.”
As they’ve taken the pulse of various communities across the state, Coombs said they’ve noticed a recurring theme.
“In southern Utah they’re all worried about water because of growth. On the Wasatch Front, it’s more (about) transportation because of growth,” Coombs said. “It’s all umbrellaed under growth.”
As far as dollars raised and spent, Coombs said they expect to release those numbers by late June. And barring unforeseen circumstances, it seems likely that Wilson will file as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
“We’re still getting our feet wet,” Coombs said, noting that feedback has been very positive. “Everyone has been very welcoming and encouraging. Nothing bad.”
Costly campaigns
In 2010, U.S. Supreme Court justices altered the political landscape with their 5-4 Citizens United decision that allows corporations and other outside groups to contribute unlimited amounts of money to fund ads and other political tools that could help elect or defeat individual candidates.
Since these mega-dollars fuel super PACs rather than individuals, justices who ruled in the affirmative reasoned that these donations did not give rise to corruption or the appearance thereof.
The American Civil Liberties Union recognized the way Citizens United affected campaigns, noting that escalating costs “may make it more difficult for some views to be heard, and that access to money often plays a significant role in determining who runs for office and who is elected.”
However, the ACLU stopped short of supporting “campaign finance regulation premised on the notion that the answer to money in politics is to ban political speech.”
However, the FEC still enforces limits on individual contributions given directly to candidates. And every two years, those caps get adjusted to keep pace with inflation. For 2023-24, people can give $3,300 to their candidates of choice for each election (i.e. primary and general) in that particular cycle.
So who are you?
Some longtime politicians remember seemingly simpler times when candidates scrambled to get name recognition in creative ways.
Jim Bennett, son of former U.S. Senator Bob Bennett, reflected on events surrounding the 2010 election when Mike Lee bumped his father out of Congress.
“I don’t know if (Lee) set up an official exploratory committee, but he did not formally jump into the race until January or February of 2010, which is exceptionally late,” Bennett said. “But he had laid all the groundwork for it by doing cottage meetings that he called an evening with the Constitution and Mike Lee.”
Bennett said Lee drove home one simple message during those sessions: “Hey, I’m a guy who loves the Constitution, and you should love me for loving the Constitution.”
“But essentially what he was doing was giving a campaign speech and creating demand for him to run – so that when he stepped in to run, it was as if he was filling a void that he had actually created himself,” Bennett said.
During the GOP state convention that year, hardcore Republican delegates preferred Mike Bridgewater, with Lee barely making it on to the primary ballot. But primary voters gave Lee 51 percent of the vote and he went on to nab the seat that November.
Bennett also reminisced about the tactics wealthy businessman Fred Lampropoulos used to boost his bid for Utah Governor in 2004 – he bought a series of two-minute radio ads where he could comment on daily events.
“I wrote all those for him,” Bennett said. “He wanted to get name recognition prior to actually announcing.”
Bennett likened that “campaign before the campaign” to when a store has a soft opening before its grand opening.
But announcing an exploratory committee is something Bennet sees as a “legal fiction more than anything else.”
“Once you’ve launched an exploratory campaign, you’re campaigning already,” Bennett said. “Nobody is ever fooled by them.”
However, on rare occasions some wannabe candidates do end up quietly backing out from races they don’t feel comfortable pursuing.
“It’s kind of a way to save face. You set up an exploratory campaign and discover you don’t have the support or the chance you thought you had. So you just quietly fade into the background,” Bennett said.
Rob Bishop, a Republican who served nine terms representing Utah’s 1st Congressional District from 2003 to 2021 – after representing the Brigham City area in Utah’s House from 1978 to 1994 – said he never ran an exploratory campaign himself.
But Bishop believes such pre-campaign efforts serve one key purpose.
“The main reason would be to get a news story,” Bishop said, adding that they also allow for some early fundraising.
“Once you start raising money, I think you’ve pretty much made up your mind you’re going to do it,” Bishop said.
Bishop remembers going all in with $20,000 of his own savings for his initial run for Congress two decades ago.
“I was running in the primary against a millionaire who put a lot of his own money into it,” Bishop said, “and in the general election against a millionaire who put a lot of his own money into it.”
So fundraising played a significant role in staying competitive.
“It’s always harder for a challenger or someone who’s not in office to raise money,” he said. “So you either know ahead of time where you’re going to get the money – or you don’t.”
Aiming higher
There seems to be no clear cut formula for gauging and harnessing the shifting winds of political sentiment. Like the weather, things can turn on a dime.
In early 2000, former U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch launched his “skinny cat” campaign for President, to challenge “fat cat” GOP candidates George W. Bush and John McCain.
According to a 2018 KUER account of Hatch’s 2000 presidential bid, he said that if one million people each donated $36 to his campaign, he’d have as much funding as George W. Bush, “and that’s all I’d need to win the presidency.”
But Hatch only netted 1 percent of the Iowa caucus vote, and faded from that fray a few days later.
And in early 2013, Hatch filed an exploratory committee with the FEC to assess his chances at one more presidential run. But by spring, he had decided not to take the next step and officially announce his candidacy. That FEC report listed no revenues or expenses – with the exception of a $62,750 debt owed by the exploratory committee.
According to fivethirtyeight.com, 93 percent of presidential exploratory committees turn into actual campaigns.
So that intermediary step of testing the waters provides something of value – namely an extra chance for media attention.
But FiveThirtyEight noted that potential candidates can often get similar notice when they announce they’re considering seeking the nation’s highest offices by way of social media or kickoff rallies.
But Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, concluded that there’s nothing more attractive to news outlets than these two words: “I’m running.” That’s where candidates attract the strongest coverage.
