Health insurance companies love it.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
You literally just talked about how the people everyone got to select from are those that could raise billions for a campaign. Hell the current president is a billionaire - literally the wealthy - and staffed important posts by other wealthy people. Congress is stacked by wealthy people, in no small part because the salary for congress is not commensurate with the responsibility it has.
Also, your numbers seem off for the Harris v Trump campaign (not what I’m seeing looking online) but it doesn’t matter (I highlight where you may have made the error below).
> Nobody has ever bought my vote. How about you?
No one serious about this issue suggests that they hand out money for votes. Well Elon actually did engage in that in this prior election cycle in swing states so there is that undermining your rhetorical comment.
But it’s also the height of naïveté to either not believe advertising/marketing (aka propaganda) works (you know, the trillion billion dollar companies of Google and Facebook) or to believe that politics is somehow immune from its effects as well (which requires ignoring how political movements work or what we learned about propaganda and its efficacy in WWII). And all of that takes big $. Of the 1.2B Kamala raised, 40% was small dollar donations. Of the 400M Trump raised, only 133M was small dollar donations (28.8%). Note: if this is where you’re getting the 3:1 number you’re not reading the data correctly - democrats spent ~1.9B total vs Republicans 1.6B and Trump directly spent >900M (presumably carrying over the donations from the previous campaign? Not sure).
And again - I’ll refer you to the research showing the general popularity of a proposal is irrelevant to it getting passed. How popular it is among wealthy does have that effect. And it again, you seem to struggle when I say this and try to point out some particular piece of legislation - it’s percentages. It doesn’t matter if it’s not an absolute. You don’t need to win every battle to win the war.
Anyway, Walter you’re a smart guy. I expect more from you than rudely dismissive comments that insinuate committing a crime is the only way money and wealth can influence and “buy” politics (and ignoring that Republicans did attempt to do so this past cycle)