More than a billion dollars. Think about that.
It’s $5 per person of voting age, which is about Facebook’s ad revenue per user in a month. Think about that: has Facebook ever convinced you of anything? Because that’s 12x the advertising intensity of PAC funding.
The causal inference the article draws is insane. California voters rejected more rent control by a 60-40 margin. Facebook can’t convince more than 0.9% of users to even click on each ad, but somehow a fraction of the level of advertising changed peoples’ minds about rent control?
The difference between the two is one I can choose to avoid, the other is affecting who chooses my rights and laws with less focus on the people affected by those decisions and more on the affect to those funding their campaigns.
Put differently, corporate political advertising amounts to about 0.5% of advertising in the US. That tells you a lot about how unimportant it is to companies’ bottom lines. It’s basic arithmetic. These political decisions are worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If corporations invest only a billion influencing them, that means the influence is very attenuated: it only affects votes at the margins.
There are ample reasons to be concerned about the effect of money on the American political system. Personally I am more focused on regulatory capture through lobbying than elections per se. In the current system it looks to me as if billionaires win regardless of who's in office.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Huffington [1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/05/the-koch-brother...
Now, I could be 100% wrong because I'm not looking at any data to back up what I'm stating next but from what I remember what you say above is not 100% true.
From the time the campaign starts until the campaign ends and the election is complete the PAC's $ can not go directly to a candidate. The problem is what happens to / with that money after the campaign is over? From what I've heard that money can go directly to a candidate (or now official-elect) with no strings attached.
Of course, I do not have a citation handy, but I've never heard of leftover PAC $ being reimbursed to those donating nor have I ever heard of candidates or a PAC donating the leftover PAC $ to charity.
> Mostly, it’s up to the super PAC. “Super PACs have fairly broad discretion on what they can do with excess funds,” says Robert Kelner, chair of the Election and Political Law Practice Group at the law firm Covington & Burling. They can transfer them to a charitable organization, use them for wind-down expenses like clearing out offices or filing reports, or pay consulting fees. The main thing they can’t use leftover money for is to make contributions to a candidate for federal office.
But so will the 1 million donating $5 each if they do it through any sort of organization. Have you ever donated to Planned Parenthood? Or the NRA? Or whatever political org you happen to align with?
Those organizations get heard because of the money and votes behind them.
Similarly, this cycle was defined by an overwhelming fundraising advantage for Democrats. The Democrats did well, but they did not do well proportionately to their financial edge. There were races where we just dominated the GOP --- on the field, in the air, with endorsements, and all that backed by money --- and the GOP won anyways. Money helps, but it doesn't "decide" elections.