Presidential campaign accounts

A few days ago, the Liberty Times published a story about the financial accounts for the Tsai and Han presidential campaigns. I rarely talk about the role of money in politics because we generally don’t have very good data to look at. This is real data, so maybe it’s worth a quick glance.

However, before I talk about the actual data, let’s quickly note that there are limits to these data. These data come from the Control Yuan, which collects data on political donations based on legal requirements established in various versions of the so-called “Sunshine Laws.” Unfortunately, there are lots of shady spots in the Sunshine Laws, so you can’t expect that these data are the full story. There is not really any penalty for misreporting. If someone shows evidence that a politician has misreported, the politician can simply file a new, accurate report within a certain period of time. Moreover, these reports only cover the accounts of the Tsai and Han campaigns, narrowly construed. They don’t cover all the spending of other organizations, such as the DPP and KMT, various legislative candidates who helped out, or outside supporting groups, such as the Friends of Tsai Ing-wen (小英之友). Finally and most importantly, it isn’t clear to me what the time period is. A quick glance at the Control Yuan website seems to indicate that most of these data start from Sept 1, 2019. Of course, by Sept 1, both campaigns had been in full swing for seven or eight months. So, these data are by no means the full story. Still, they are at least part of the story. And since I don’t think contemporary presidential campaigns are like, say, legislative campaigns from the early 1990s in which as much as 90% of the actual expenses were illegal (read: vote-buying) and off-the-books, these are probably not completely worthless data.

 

[A quick note on currency and numbers. Even after all these years, my brain still doesn’t process large numbers in NT dollars very well. This has something to do with the basic difference between English numbers, which are based on three zeroes (thousands, millions, billions, trillions) and Chinese numbers, which are based on four zeroes (ten thousands 萬, hundred millions 億, trillions 兆). I instinctively understand small numbers, since I live with those in my everyday life. After a brief experience house hunting in Taipei several years ago, numbers up to tens of millions 千萬 also make sense to me. But once you start to get in to the hundred millions 億 and above, my eyes glaze over and I need to start converting into US dollars for anything to make sense. So I’ll give you the data in both NTD and USD, but I’m going to discuss everything in terms of USD.]

 

So how much does it cost to run a presidential campaign? Tsai’s reported budget is roughly USD 20 million, while Han’s is roughly USD 15 million. As noted above, this doesn’t cover the entire campaign, but it probably covers most of the last four months, when the campaign expenses were probably at their highest. My very rough and uneducated guess is that the total cost for the entire campaign (starting at the beginning of 2019) was probably about three times these amounts. But I could be way off with that guess, so don’t quote me on it. That’s real money, but a hell of a lot less than American presidential candidates are burning though, even considering the difference in population size.

 

Liberty Times broke down both the revenues and expenses into several categories. Let’s look at donations first. In NTD, they are as follows:

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Revenues (NTD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
338,148,598	Individuals	371,129,494
160,569,287	For-profit businesses	45,263,389
14,500	Political parties	6,000,000
6,442,000	NGOs	1,230,400
59,565,732	Anonymous sources	32,676,370
21,512	Other	11,170
564,761,629	Total revenues	456,310,823

 

Divide the numbers by 30 to convert to USD, and you get the following:

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Revenues (USD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
11,271,620	Individuals	12,370,983
5,352,310	For-profit businesses	1,508,780
483	Political parties	200,000
214,733	NGOs	41,013
1,985,524	Anonymous sources	1,089,212
717	Other	372
18,825,388	Total revenues	15,210,361

 

The two candidates got roughly the same amount from individual donations, but Tsai got significantly more from private enterprises. This latter gap is both entirely predictable and simultaneously a bit surprising. On the one hand, businesses want to buy influence, so they always donate more heavily to candidates who look likely to win (and will be in position to make decisions). Since Tsai was clearly leading by September, it isn’t surprising that businesses bet on her. On the other hand, businesses have traditionally favored the KMT. This is especially true for all those businesses that have operations in China. They want traditionally want a government who will help them access the China market, and some of them have to openly support the One China candidate in order to satisfy pressures from within China. So it’s a little surprising to me that all those Taishang didn’t donate more than USD 1.5 million to the Han campaign, just a public relations ploy to their Chinese associates.

The fact that Han actually got a bit more than Tsai in individual donations is also striking, given that Han was trailing in the polls. We heard stories all year about the fervent Han fans, and this might be a reflection of that die-hard support.

 

What about the expenditures? Here are the data in NTD and USD. Note that I have translated 宣傳  as “messaging.” Sometimes this term gets translated as “propaganda,” which has always made it sound somewhat Soviet to me. Other possibilities, such as “advertising” or “communications” don’t quite seem to capture the broadness of this category.

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Expenditures (NTD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
325,861,233	Messaging	381,286,374
101,796,817	Events	23,511,551
67,913,244	Personnel	6,388,387
6,590,742	Transportation	3,401,994
29,209,856	Rent and office	932,371
57,524,974	Other	10,655,529
588,896,866	Total	426,176,206

 

 

Tsai Ing-wen (DPP)	Expenditures (USD)	Han Kuo-yu (KMT)
10,862,041	Messaging	12,709,546
3,393,227	Events	783,718
2,263,775	Personnel	212,946
219,691	Transportation	113,400
973,662	Rent and office	31,079
1,917,499	Other	355,184
19,629,896	Total	14,205,874

 

Both campaigns spent more on messaging than any other category. However, while Tsai spent about half of her budget on messaging, Han reported spending nearly 90% of his money on this category.

The media stories were all about how the campaigns spent money to appear on new media. They had a field day breathlessly telling us that Han spent two and a half times as much as Tsai for his appearance on the Nite Nite Show. I guess I’m just not that interested by that little story. I’d like to know how much they spent on You Tube shows, Facebook, Line, traditional media, and so forth. But we don’t have that data here.

Han reports spending USD 1.5 million on everything else. This seems a bit unlikely to me. I will believe that he didn’t spend anything on renting out campaign offices, but only if you tell me that people donated space for little or no cost. Of course, that should be counted at market rates (for both donations and expenses), but this is one of those shady spots in the Sunshine Laws.

The gap in personnel costs is stunning. Tsai reports spending ten times as much as Han on staff! I would be willing to believe that Tsai ran a fully staffed and professional (read: expensive) campaign while Han had to make do with a relatively amateur operation, but this difference is astonishing. After all, the KMT has ample experience running real campaigns; they should have minimum standards for staffing.

The gap on events, where Tsai reported about four times more spending, seems more reasonable to me. We all remember Han’s big, spectacular events. However, as someone who spent the campaign looking for events to attend, it was my clear impression that the Tsai campaign put on a lot more events. A lot of them were smaller, but those all cost money. She was doing several events nearly every day, while he seemed to drop off the campaign trail for two or three days at a time. This also explains the gap in transportation expenses.

 

Several times over the past few years, I have thought about how the KMT and DPP seemed to have switched roles. These expenditure reports are another example. 25 years ago, the DPP would have been running the shoestring campaign with no professional staff, no fancy offices, and spending everything they could on their message. The KMT was the one with all those overhead costs. I don’t think the DPP has gotten to the old KMT levels of unproductive bureaucratic bloat, but these numbers suggest that they are now the ones running the big, slick, professional operation.