REGIONAL— What happens when nearly $10 million in special interest money is poured into a single congressional district in one of the country’s least expensive media markets?

For residents, it means bearing witness to a deluge of political attack ads, the kind that have turned candidates into caricatures and all but hijacked the discussion of actual issues in Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District.

To the National Rifle Association, which has poured nearly $400,000 into the race, it’s about portraying incumbent Congressman Rick Nolan, a longtime hunter, as a gun control extremist, allied with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. For the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, it’s about portraying Republican challenger Stewart Mills as a vain Richie Rich, who was born into the easy life.

Up until recently, it was the candidates themselves and their campaign committees that used to define the issues, through literature and media advertising. And, for the most part, they kept their messages positive.

This year, both candidates are relatively well-funded, at least by traditional Eighth District standards. Mills has raised $1.9 million, helped by $325,000 of his own money. Nolan is just slightly behind, at $1.85 million.

But those numbers are dwarfed by the spending that’s pouring in from outside political groups, according to the latest data from the Federal Elections Commission. With several days of intense campaigning yet to go, those outside groups will likely top the $10 million mark, making the Eighth District race one of the most expensive House races in the country.

For Rep. Nolan, who was in Tower and Ely last Friday as part of his RV tour of the sprawling district, the relentless political spending has utterly changed the culture of Washington and is polluting both the airwaves and the public policy process.

It’s also put tremendous pressure on members of Congress to raise money, virtually full-time.

Nolan said he was shocked to discover how completely money has changed the experience of members of Congress. “They expect us to spend 30 hours a week in a call center across the street from the Capitol,” said Nolan. “And on top of that, they expect us to put in at least ten hours a week attending other fundraisers. That’s a full-time job right there.”

And the time spent “dialing-for-dollars,” as Nolan puts it, leaves little time for actual governing. “It’s no wonder Congress can’t get anything done anymore,” he said. Nolan has been criticized by some in his own party for his unwillingness to spend his time dialing for dollars. “But I didn’t come here to become a professional fundraiser,” he said.

Nolan, who served three terms in Congress in the 1970s and 80s, is in a unique position to grasp the changes that have left Washington a political shambles. “The shock for me was more profound because I’d been away from it so long,” he said.

One of his biggest disappointments is the virtual breakdown of what is known as “regular order,” which describes the processes and rules that used to govern how Congress did its work. During Nolan’s first three terms, members of Congress could offer amendments to bills that came up for a vote. And most bills and appropriations never made it to the floor without first going through the committee process, which members used as an opportunity to vet proposals and often solicit testimony from diverse interests.

These days, committees rarely meet, according to Nolan, and most legislation is handed down from the Speaker’s office and members must vote, often without the chance to offer amendments. It’s a process that liberals and conservatives alike have widely decried as dictatorial and destructive.

Nolan sees the breakdown in the committee system as a larger issue than just the lack of broader oversight. He said it was committee work that gave members of both parties the chance to get to know each other and to find common ground. “That’s where bipartisanship used to happen,” said Nolan.

By refusing to play by the new rules of Washington, Nolan said he’s been able to spend time working with reform organizations, like Public Citizen and Common Cause, on drafting legislation he hopes will get Washington working on the public’s business once again.

In late July, Nolan introduced H.R. 695, otherwise known as the Restore Our Democracy Act, a bill that would, among other things, overturn the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which helped further open the floodgates of special interest money into elections. At the same time, the bill would establish a system of public financing of congressional campaigns, would limit those campaigns to just 60 days, and would prohibit fundraising by members of Congress when Congress is in session. In addition, the measure would restore regular order to the Congressional process. The bill was forwarded to two committees for consideration, but its future remains unclear, given that most Congressional leaders are among the beneficiaries of the current system. But Nolan says many members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, share his frustration with the way things work, or don’t work, in Washington these days.

But before Nolan can push his reform agenda, he needs to win re-election, and that’s far from a certainty. Two polls in the past three weeks have reached wildly different conclusions about the state of the race —the first had Nolan up by 11 points, the second showed Mills up by eight. Both sides assume it’s more or less a dead heat heading into the final week of the campaign.

The uncertainty of the outcome is fueled by the unexpectedly strong showing, at least in polling, of Green Party candidate Skip Sandman, who is registering anywhere from four to seven percent support in recent surveys. Nolan said Sandman, who has campaigned little and spent almost nothing, is keeping the race tight, by siphoning off votes that would otherwise go to him. “It’s not that Mills has caught on fire. He’s in the race because of the Green Party,” said Nolan.

Sandman, a Vietnam veteran, is an elder in the Fond du Lac Band, who has appealed to many progressive DFLers and environmentalists with his strong opposition to PolyMet Mining’s proposed copper-nickel mine and the Keystone XL pipeline, two projects that Nolan says he supports.

Ultimately, next Tuesday’s outcome will largely be determined by turnout. “We learned a valuable lesson in 2010,” said Nolan, the year that saw longtime Congress-man Jim Oberstar defeated by Chip Cravaack. That year saw a big decline in Democratic turnout, with 90,000 fewer voters showing up at the polls in the Eighth District than in either 2008, or in 2012. “We’ve undertaken a coordinated effort to identify those 90,000 voters and get them out this time in support of Democratic candidates,” said Nolan. “I know it’s going to help.”