• Cover Story
• Table of
  Contents
• Contents By
  Topic
• Columns
  • Brownstein
  • Cook
  • Crook
  • Powers
  • Rauch
  • Stokes
  • Schneider
  • Taylor Jr.
• Regular
  Features
  • Hotline Extra
  • Inside Washington
  • Insiders Poll
  • K Street Corridor
  • People
  • The Week on the Hill

When Barack Obama recently suggested that his Internet-driven fundraising machine, which can harvest tens of millions of dollars in small donations in a single month, might render public financing of presidential elections obsolete, most observers thought that he was talking about doing without a federal check in the fall general election campaign, should he wage one. But the success that he and other presidential contenders have had in raising money online just for the nomination contests, and the growing costs of running in early caucus and primary states, may also relegate to the political Ice Age the matching funds that White House hopefuls once relied on to finance their primary-season campaigns.

“The matching-fund system as currently structured is dead,” said Democratic consultant Steve Murphy, who managed New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this year.

Although Murphy was confident that Richardson would have qualified for federal matching funds for the primary season by raising the required $5,000 in 20 different states in increments of $250 or less, he predicted that candidates will increasingly opt out of that system because of the limits on campaign spending—in each state and overall—that go along with accepting a check from the federal Treasury. In 2008, that overall limit for the nominating contest is $42 million. Through March, Obama had spent more than $183 million.

And even though the Federal Election Commission has loosened some of the spending limit regulations over the years to give campaigns more flexibility in their budgeting, most of the White House hopefuls abandoned the matching system this year for primary contests. (See chart.) Only six—Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and Reps. Duncan Hunter of California, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, and Tom Tancredo of Colorado—of the 19 candidates who participated in the parties’ televised presidential debates used matching funds in this year’s primaries and caucuses. (The FEC certified presumptive GOP nominee John McCain for matching funds, but he declined to use them.)

To be sure, some of the long-shot candidates didn’t qualify for matching funds and some of the main contenders, including Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, knew that their fundraising prowess would allow them to opt out of the system. But many middle-tier candidates, such as Richardson, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, also took a pass.

At the same time, the amount of matching funds used by candidates in the nominating contests has also fallen sharply from the high marks of $67.5 million in 1988 and $62.3 million in 2000 to about $20.9 million so far in 2008.