Our View: Running for Congress comes with a high price of admission | Opinion

There’s something refreshing in the fact that hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on the race to fill the Merrimack Valley’s seat in Congress are coming directly from the pockets and piggy banks of candidates themselves.

It means this election — still a toss-up among 10 Democrats, a Republican and an independent — is relatively unspoiled by the big bucks of special interests who spend lavishly to ensure the jobs of their most favored incumbents. As of yet, there is no incumbent in this district, with its seat being vacated by Rep. Niki Tongas, much less a favored one. So, let’s enjoy a campaign where the influence of big money is held at least moderately in check.

Still, one can’t help but see candidates pouring this kind of cash into their campaign chests without at least a little lament about how much personal savings and borrowing are necessary to mount a run for Congress. It ain’t cheap. A lot of people — especially first-timers — have no support network, much less donor lists, so they write the checks themselves.

The dozen candidates still in the 3rd District race have raised nearly $8.5 million among them as of the end of June, according to reports to the Federal Election Commission. Nearly 1 in 10 dollars — more than $805,000 worth — came in direct contributions by the candidates, or personal loans made to their campaign funds.

The most self-sufficient has been Abhijit “Beej” Das, the 44-year-old hotelier and Democrat who loaned more than $325,000 to this campaign — or 56 percent of all the money he’d raised — through the end of June.

“It was absolutely a necessity,” Das told the Boston Globe for a story about the level of self-financing in the race last week. “Making the first set of phone calls, you would know pretty early that people are going to say, ‘You’ve never run. What faith do we have that you’re going to have viability?’ So, you loan your own money to say, ‘I’m serious.’”

Personal funds aren’t just a signal of intent, of course, they’re a necessity for many newbies. And they don’t just come into play in the Merrimack Valley.

On the North Shore, businessman and former Green Beret Joseph Schneider is the Republican challenging Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton in November. Of the $80,000 he’d raised through the end of June, more than a quarter was his own money. For his part, Moulton, the two-term congressman, raised more than $2 million, none of which was his own, according to his reports to the elections commission.

The election two years ago marked a banner year for the self-financed candidate. President Donald Trump won the White House on a campaign wherein nearly 1 in 5 of all the dollars he raised came from his own bank account. An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics identified at least 47 other races for U.S. House, Senate and the presidency in which candidates spent at least $500,000 of their own money. In a handful, more than 90 percent of a candidate’s funds came from his or her own accounts.

The center’s analysis noted that candidates who are heavily self-funded tend to be newcomers, and the vast majority are unsuccessful.

“The main reason is they tend to be extremely inexperienced in politics,” Jennifer Steen, an associate professor of political science at Arizona State University, told the center’s website, OpenSecrets.org. “Often they don’t have compelling resumes, they don’t have compelling credentials.”

And, in some cases, the center’s analysis noted, candidates plunk down really big bucks. There was Trump and his $66 million in self-funding two years ago. Before that were the likes of Joe Corzine, who spent $60 million getting elected to the Senate from New Jersey in 2010, and Linda McMahon, who spent nearly $100 million of the money she made while building up the WWE wrestling empire on failed bids for the Senate in 2010 and 2012. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dropped nearly $45 million into his unsuccessful run for president in 2008.

Those kind of figures make $746,400 sound like small potatoes — though maybe not so much for state Sen. Barbara L’Italien, who last week mortgaged her home in Andover for that much. A campaign spokesman would not tell the Globe or other media outlets whether she planned to put some of that money into her campaign, to which she’s already loaned $70,000.

As ever, the money that piles up around election time is more evidence that we need to change the way we pay for our elections. When running a campaign costs so much money — and the personal stakes for candidates are so incredibly high — it’s no wonder that special interests have the leverage and influence that they do.