If someone appears to be repeatedly personal, lean towards patience as they might not mean offense. If you are sure, however, then do not deepen the problem by being negative; instead, simply place them on ignore by clicking the unhappy yellow face to the right of their name.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy❤
No. of Recommendations: 20
Here’s an unusually detailed story of where the money in politics is going, presented in readable, logical fashion for you on a Monday morning. It is a gift article, and feel free to lift it and repost in other social media venues or to your crazy Uncle’s email as the spirit moves you.
Republican Donors: Do You Know Where Your Money Goes? We long ago blew past any meaningful controls on political giving in American elections. Now we should focus on the rules governing political spending, which are in equally terrible shape. For that we can blame the Trump campaign and the federal government’s feeble enforcement efforts.
Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare. There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent.
Federal Election Commission campaign disclosure reports from 2020 show that much of the money donated to the Trump campaign went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates. This year’s campaign disclosures are shaping up to be the same. Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.
During the 2020 election, almost $516 million of the over $780 million spent by the Trump campaign was directed to American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based private company created in 2018 that masked the identities of who ultimately received donor dollars, according to a complaint filed with the F.E.C. by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. How A.M.M.C. spent the money was a mystery even to Mr. Trump’s campaign team, according to news reports shortly after the election. More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/opinion/republi...The story is, by the way, written by a former advisor to several Republican candidates and officials.
Further in the article details how little of the money seems to be going … anywhere. Harris’ TV spending is way larger than Trump’s. Remote offices are being opened by Democrats in greater numbers and earlier than Republican. All of the things that cost money don’t seem to be happening on one side as much as the other.
Can you guess why?
No. of Recommendations: 5
You ever get the feeling that the TV, Social Media, and Ad Companies are the ones driving the never ending campaign? I get 10-15 emails and texts a day asking for political donations. This money is sent to the media companies ( except for Trump donations, lol, that goes straight to his slush fund(s) ). It is in the media industry's self interest to drum up discord, discontent,
rancor,....... on a perpetual basis, to keep the fear and angst up in the Public. This is doing absolutely nothing good for the Country, just keeping us divided, because that is what "sells".
We are in serious need of Campaign Reform. ( and it ain't gonna happen )
No. of Recommendations: 2
Further in the article details how little of the money seems to be going … anywhere. Harris’ TV spending is way larger than Trump’s. Remote offices are being opened by Democrats in greater numbers and earlier than Republican. All of the things that cost money don’t seem to be happening on one side as much as the other.
Trump is the greatest...grifter.
No. of Recommendations: 1
the Harris surge has already forced the GOP to start spending heavily on ads in swing states.
this must be very painful, as trump surely thought both that popular vote and the campaign money was already 'his'.
with so much money and so little time left, both parties must be waiting for the final 2 weeks to chase the low information voter.
curious if anyone can find metrics showing an ad bidding war for this timeframe.
No. of Recommendations: 12
with so much money and so little time left, both parties must be waiting for the final 2 weeks to chase the low information voter.
curious if anyone can find metrics showing an ad bidding war for this timeframe.
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Here is the logical flaw of trying to run a Citizens United based campaign in the physical world.
The idea that money is speech that leads to the elimination of limits on money into campaigns doesn't solve a core problem for a candidate or party who thinks they can buy an election win by buying up airtime / ad impressions. The problem is that there is a finite amount of TIME available in which those "impressions" can hit targeted voters. And the more you know about the status of a race in every gerrymandered portion of the entire national footprint, the more tempted you are to NOT spend money where you're leading so you can TRY to spend more money where you are behind but withing striking distance. And you likely WILL spend more money in those narrowly identified markets, partly because you HAVE the money by not spending it elsewhere but also because you are focusing your spend on a smaller number of TV stations, radio stations, and ZIP-targeted online ad impressions. Like anything in a market, when demand goes up and supply is fixed, rates go up. I can only watch so much TV or YouTube per day. You can spend a BILLION dollars instead of a MILLION and it won't give you 100x the lift.
In a world with a rational understanding of physics, media, politics and economics, the costs of running a national campaign should reach some limit of some sort. In a highly gerrymandered environment further skewed by electoral college distortions, a Presidential election with (say) 160 million voters comes down to only about four million voters in maybe twenty counties across seven states. Every other district is so far in the safe zone for one party or the other, there is literally zero payback for advertising there. So in the remaining "swing" districts, there has to be some upper limit on how much can possibly be spent on TV ads, radio ads, YouTube ad inserts by ZIP and direct mail ads by ZIP. So why would ANY Presidential campaign need to raise and spend five hundred million dollars?
As someone stated or implied somewhere upstream, we're at the point where the hundreds of millions of dollars going into campaigns courtesy of Citizens United isn't actually resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of political awareness on the part of voters for or against any candidate. It is simply funneling money to future cronies who act as "media consultants" and take a percentage of the "ad buys" for creating some of the spots or supposedly fine-tuning the selection of media outlets to use for each ad. But look at the ads being aired. When you are flooding the zone with ****, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon and it doesn't take multiple rocket surgeons to make those decisions. Taking a 5% or 10% "cut" of these ad buys is pure political corruption in a time machine.
Of course, the other obvious pattern of corruption in this Citizens United hell we occupy is that these hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending funneled through cronies to collect their skim eventually goes into the pockets of highly concentrated traditional media and social media firms. This bi-annual manna from heaving provides continued incentives for them to do nothing to prevent abuses of their platforms and zero incentive from a journalistic standpoint to report on this corruption in general or the particular corruption of any given candidate. With these financial windfalls coming in every two years, we'll just shut up and cash the checks.
WTH
No. of Recommendations: 3
...a Presidential election with (say) 160 million voters comes down to only about four million voters in maybe twenty counties across seven states.
This is the ridiculous distortion of our Presidential election process by the electoral college.
The electoral college process literally disenfranchises most voters. Unless you are in a swing state, when it comes to POTUS, your vote doesn't count. So stupid.
