In our candidate-centered and money-driven political culture, public campaign financing provides a great opportunity for independent and small-party candidates to run serious, constructive, and visible campaigns. It is an essential electoral reform and it is the first item in the Green Party of the United States Platform regarding Campaign Finance Reform:
4. Campaign Finance Reform
Provide full public financing of federal, state and local elections, including free candidate statements in official government voter guides, and free and equal radio and television time on the public airwaves for all ballot-qualified candidates and parties.
Public financing plays an important role in my campaign for Governor of Maryland. I aim to be the first Green Party gubernatorial candidate in Maryland to qualify for public financing, and I plan on advocating for wide expansion of the current public campaign finance system. I also hope to use our campaign to advance a more ambitious and far-reaching vision of public finance: one that invests in political party-building between elections, not just every four years.
In this post, I will outline some of the background of public financing in Maryland, how qualifying for these funds would create a step change for the Green Party, and share more about the bigger vision.
Campaign Finance In Maryland
Maryland has set up a “Gubernatorial Public Financing System” that allows all candidates running for governor to qualify for public matching funds. To qualify, a gubernatorial ticket must have: ”1,500 eligible private contributions and a total of $120,000.” If a campaign meets the qualifications of the system they are eligible for matching funds. There are a set of complex formulas about how much funding a campaign qualifies for; this chart helps explain it.
This means that if 1500 people each donated $100 to raise $150,000, the campaign would be eligible for $1,050,000 in public matching funds.
Two caveats about public financing. First, the public campaign finance system is controlled by the elected and appointed representatives of the two party system. They can change aspects of it if they want to. Second, the money that is available for the general election is based on how much money is in the fund and then how much is spent in the primary. If the candidates from the two parties spend most of the money in the public financing fund in their primaries, then there will be less available for a Green Party candidate in the general election.
These caveats are important: they mean that even if the campaign qualifies for the public matching funds we could receive zero public dollars. Nonetheless, Maryland’s gubernatorial public financing system provides tremendous potential and opportunity.
A Step Change For The Green Party in Maryland
In my professional capacity my job is to help lead transformative changes to the operation of our business. I read a newsletter from a thoughtful product management expert Ryan Singer. A recent newsletter included this passage:
In quiet times and times of plenty, there will always be room for incremental optimizations. But when the pressure's on and the business needs to move from A to B, what's needed is a step change. -Ryan Singer, FeltPresence.com
I think this also helps explain how I feel about Green Party Gubernatorial campaigns in Maryland.
Since 2006 the Maryland Green Party has run 4 candidates for governor. Each of them has tried to pass the vote test- the minimum number of votes to keep the party on the ballot – 1% of the vote in the Gubernatorial election. All of those campaigns have failed to meet the vote test, and thus have forced the party into grueling, expensive, and time-consuming petition campaigns to remain on the ballot.
Petition campaigns distract from the ability of the party to organize, advocate, and describe how our values connect to the solutions we offer. As a party we are stuck on point A, making incremental optimizations and saying things like “with 0.7% of the vote we had the second best gubernatorial race in the history of the Maryland Green Party.”
Petition campaigns distract from the ability of the party to organize, advocate, and describe how our values connect to the solutions we offer. As a party we are stuck on point A, making incremental optimizations and saying things like “with 0.7% of the vote we had the second best gubernatorial race in the history of the Maryland Green Party.”
We need a step change to get to point B, where we maintain our place on the ballot by routinely passing the vote test. This will allow us to focus on building the party and connecting with our voters.
The pursuit of public financing for my 2026 campaign is a key element in making this step change happen. Not only would the money that came from matching funds help ensure we pass the vote test, but the list of >1500 voters who provide qualifying donations would help to ensure that future gubernatorial campaigns can also qualify for public financing.
Beyond that, more and more Maryland jurisdictions are starting to adopt public financing for their city and county elections. If we have >1500 Marylanders who donate to the gubernatorial campaign, some of those donors will be in jurisdictions that also have public campaign financing. Creating a network of donors who can help candidates qualify for public financing up and down the ballot will move the party and its candidates forward and allow it to make additional step changes. It is also important to cultivate a culture of financial support for Green candidates – too often our candidates deprioritize fundraising to the point that their campaigns can’t afford the things they need to succeed.
I know public financing for a gubernatorial campaign is a daunting goal, and we may not reach it, but setting up a campaign organization that is designed to pursue this goal will help position us to stop settling for incremental increases, and start making step changes.
The pressure is on: it’s time for us to build the kind of Green Party that can meet the moment, and grassroots funding and public financing are a key part of this.
A Glimpse of a More Radical Vision
I recently discussed a vision of the Green Party based on the associational party building ideas of Didi Kuo and Tabatha Abu-El Haj and a new report by Lee Drutman making the case for more and healthier political parties. In that report Drutman links these two ideas together with an expansive party-focused version of Public Campaign Financing.
We might also envision changes to campaign finance law, particularly public funding for qualified political parties (not candidates). If campaign finance law could channel organizing and fundraising activities to operate within the political party, this would be a powerful pro-party change. However, rules that channel organizing and fundraising activities to outside organizations or individual candidates undermine party operations. Not all party activities are equal. A party that mainly focuses on advertising and messaging is typically linked weakly to non-elites and controlled by a small group of donors, consultants, and politicians. Such parties are warning signs of crumbling democracy. Instead, as Didi Kuo and Tabatha Abu-El Haj argue, political parties “should foster deep ties to local communities. They should prioritize social interactions with communities and voters, and they should do so in ways that ‘listen’ to the community. This requires investing in state and local parties as organizations with year-round offices, staff, and events.”
While I am not going to go into a lot of depth about this framing right now, it is an intriguing exploration of what a more radical version of public campaign financing could look like. I hope to develop on this idea throughout the campaign.