Campaign Finance As A Floor Rather Than A Ceiling

It seems utopian to even be thinking about such things, but I want to register agreement with Jonathan Bernstein that much better than futile efforts to restrict the use of money in politics are efforts to use public financing to guarantee the existence of a financial floor that ensures that legitimate candidates have some chance to get a campaign off the ground without needing to do oodles of fundraising:

If I had my ideal system, I'd probably give House major party nominees some substantial amount of public financing ($500,000? $1/constituent? $1/voter?), come up with a similar formula for the Senate, enforce strong disclosure rules on top of that, and call it a day (actually, I'd also keep the current system for presidential elections, with the assumption that no serious nomination candidates or major party nominees will ever use it, but just in case). You want to drop $10M into a House district? Fine. You're going to waste most of it, and the opposition can run against some outsider trying to tell the locals how to vote (you better make sure opposition research won't turn up anything about you), and that's the end of the story, as far as I'm concerned.

One thing to note about this proposal is that it would probably do more than a million googoo anti-gerrymandering proposals to increase the number of meaningfully contested House races. No matter how you draw a district, there's always a median voter and thus always in principle a way to beat the incumbent. But challengers all suffer at a major financial disadvantage and parties want to concentrate their fundraising efforts on the friendliest districts. That gives too many incumbents a too comfortable time.