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
