Pro-Voucher 'All Children Matter' Doubled Legislative Giving in '06

On Friday, the non-partisan Missouri Citizen Education Fund (MCEF) released its analysis of 2006 political spending by pro-voucher interest group All Children Matter. The report points out that All Children Matter (ACM) nearly doubled its spending on legislative races since the previous cycle, boosting its outlays on House and Senate campaigns to $310,414 this year from $159,344 in 2004.

In the pay-to-play atmosphere that currently predominates under the capitol dome, political expenditures often correlate closely with expected policy outcomes. This makes MCEF's compilation of data critical to exposing the groups seeking to ram anti-public education voucher or "tuition tax-credit" legislation through the general assembly in 2007.

Though the MCEF report shoehorns a tremendous amount of data and analysis into a concise four page report and should be read in its entirety, it's worth pulling out a few pieces of the research for examination here.

Some toying with the numbers reveals that the grand majority of ACM's expenditures on 2006 legislative contests were concentrated into what we might call their top ten races. If we look at the ten legislative seats on which ACM spent the most, we find that $257,901 --or more than 83%-- of their 2006 dollars were spent on those races, despite the fact that those represent just about a quarter of the 39 districts in which ACM played. Consider the chart below, which examines those top ten races:

A glance at the chart should also make clear another key beneficiary, even if his name doesn't appear as a direct recipient of ACM funds. The House Republican leadership, specifically Rod Jetton and the House Republican Campaign Committee, were obvious targets of ACM's political largesse. Note that of the six house seats of the top ten that ACM played in, five of the beneficiaries were Republicans and the sixth beneficiary was a Democrat with only a primary opponent. Of the 5 Republican House candidates who benefitted from ACM's spending, four were key targets (Hobbs, Robb, DeStefano and Scharnhorst) of the campaign arm of the House Republican caucus.

In other words, beyond the obligation that these contributions were meant to inspire in individual candidates, they were also designed carefully to confer benefit upon the very leaders whom ACM will need to rely upon to move their agenda during the 2007 session. We'll see, if and when a vote comes up, whether All Children matter got its money's worth.

You can read the Missouri Citixen Education Fund report here. Also, Jo Mannies has more coverage of the MCEF report on the Post-Dispatch's blog.