How Florida’s Campaign Finance System Got Here

Florida’s campaign finance system did not become complicated overnight. Over decades, changes to state law created new ways for political leaders, candidates, corporations, special interests, and political committees to raise and move large amounts of money.

Understanding how the system developed helps explain why following political money in Florida can be so difficult today.

In the late 1980s, Florida lawmakers abolished leadership funds. But decades later, a new version returned.

In 2012, under Senate President Mike Haridopolos and House Speaker Dean Cannon, Florida re-established leadership-style fundraising organizations known as Affiliated Party Committees.

These committees can be established by certain legislative leaders, including the President of the Senate, Speaker of the House, and minority leaders.

Their purpose is to raise and spend money to help elect candidates from the leader’s political party.

Unlike individual candidate campaign accounts, these committees can operate with significantly greater fundraising power.

Another major shift came in 2013 under Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford.

Florida eliminated organizations known as Committees of Continuous Existence, or CCEs, which had become controversial because of how some elected officials were using them.

But the legislation did something else that would have a lasting impact on Florida politics.

It removed the existing contribution limit for Political Committees.

Lawmakers with money remaining in their CCEs were also able to transfer those funds into newly created Political Committees.

The result was a political fundraising system where committees could accept contributions far larger than those permitted in individual candidate campaign accounts.

Florida law now allows several types of organizations to participate in political spending, including:

Political Committees

Affiliated Party Committees

Electioneering Communications Organizations

These organizations can raise and spend substantial amounts of money to influence elections.

They can also transfer money between political organizations.

That ability creates one of the biggest transparency challenges in Florida campaign finance.

A contribution may begin with a corporation, organization, industry group, wealthy donor, or another political committee.

But that money does not necessarily stay where it was originally contributed.

Funds can move from one committee to another, and sometimes through several committees before ultimately being spent on advertising, political consulting, mailers, digital campaigns, or other election activity.

The transactions themselves may be publicly reported.

But understanding the complete path of the money can require voters to search through multiple campaign finance reports and connect those transactions themselves.

The farther the money travels, the harder it can become to understand where it originally came from and what political activity it ultimately helped fund.

Candidate campaign accounts operate under contribution limits.

Political committees operate under a very different fundraising structure.

That distinction creates an enormous incentive for political fundraising and spending to occur outside traditional candidate campaign accounts.

A candidate might face limits on how much an individual donor can contribute directly to their campaign while a political committee supporting political activity can receive dramatically larger contributions.

That can give corporations, wealthy donors, industries, political organizations, and other special interests significantly greater financial influence.

Florida maintains public campaign finance records.

But transparency requires more than simply making records available.

If voters must search through hundreds of transactions, multiple committees, and layers of transfers to determine where political money originated, the information may technically be public while still being extremely difficult for the average person to understand.

That is where Come Clean Florida believes reform is needed.

Voters should be able to quickly answer basic questions:

Who provided the money?

Where did the money go?

Which committees handled it?

What political activity did it ultimately fund?

Who benefited from the spending?

Following political money should not require becoming a campaign finance investigator.

Many of the practices described above are permitted under Florida law.

That is precisely why the law deserves scrutiny.

The question is not simply whether political committees are following existing campaign finance rules.

The bigger question is whether those rules provide Floridians with the transparency and accountability they deserve.

Florida voters should be able to clearly see who is financing their elections and how political money moves through the system.

If the money can move, voters should be able to follow it.