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All of this Citizens United stuff kinda rests on the assumption that money in politics actually has much of an effect at all.
From what I've read it doesn't really change the outcomes anyway; e.g. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) conducted this study where he controlled for the fact that politicians who are more likely to win get more donations in the first place, and concluded that extra campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes.
Does money matter in business?
There are all kinds of startups that produce huge companies with very little money. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage somewhere. Meanwhile billions have been spent on unsuccessful ideas like the metaverse. Sure, there are the Venture Capitalists that invest in businesses but they probably just pick ones that are more likely to succeed anyway. OK, this is a strained metaphor but you see my point. There's a certain way of seeing things where money really doesn't matter that much in business but the idea is so perverse it's ridiculous.
I say that money is instrumental to politics in the same way that money is instrumental in business. The more money the better. It's not the only thing you need but it is very useful. You need a bare minimum of money to get into politics. But then money can buy influence, you can bribe people in legal (or illegal) ways. You can threaten to donate to opponents to influence people. You can arrange to get positive media coverage, you can use agenda-setting power to make yourself seem like a 'favourite' or 'a serious candidate' right at the start. You can hire muckrakers, staff, strategists, speechwriters. Money makes the world go around. Politics is nothing if not worldly.
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This is a very narrow view that ignores second order effects. If I know this is how the system works, I'm not even going to consider representing positions that will attract no donations, because the donators have no interest in advancing those positions. I can't just campaign with no money, because the function of the money is to make people aware that I'm running and get me in their mind in the first place.
I feel like someone like Steven Levitt is probably a smart person, who has surely thought of this very obvious dynamic, and it really makes me question his sincerity on anything else he has to say.
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Citzens United wasn't really about money, though; it was about campaigning. Hillary Clinton was trying to prevent people from campaigning against her on the grounds that spending money to do so was illegal.
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Yeah, spending is definitely not sufficient. Michael Bloomberg spent hundreds of millions of his own money and never cracked single digits in the Democratic primary. And, IIRC, Trump's spending in 2016 was actually quite small relative to other candidates.
Marketing is useful for driving brand awareness, but people aren't going to buy a poop sandwich just because they saw it advertised on TV.
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Surely it can tip tight races and there also must be a floor or a minimum amount one needs to run a campaign at all. It might not be THE factor but it is A factor for sure. If no one hears your message then it doesn't matter how good it is.
I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that there is a sharply diminishing marginal effect in terms of electoral outcomes, and the practical impact gets maxed out quickly. It's easy to point out examples where massive spending achieved approximately nothing (Michael Bloomberg, Carrick Flynn, etc).
But even so, there can still be a corruptive effect if politicians believe that money buys elections, and most of them do.
I think the world has changed. Money in politics had more influence 2 decades ago because the media landscape was controlled by tv which costs money for ads.
I think most politicians have begun to realize this. The new reality is influencers on social media can level any money edge. Ad spending has close to zero effect on me. What people talk about on twitter does affect me.
Money does seem to be beneficial for the ground game part of elections. Zuckbucks probably did flip Wisconsin. Still that took a lot of money. This election will have Musksbucks on the other side and Zuckerberg hasn’t backed Trump but has recently said he admires him.
For ground game to matter you probably need to be close enough already. Though I might even be underestimate long term ground game. Cali is locked in left because of the Dems infrastructure and Jeb Bush really started turning Florida red with infrastructure. Those things are one part competency and one part money. Once built out they largely self-fund.
I would be interested on how close to the line Zuckbucks are since they are not exactly speech but funding supposedly neutral ground game.
The best example I can think of off the top of my head of money winning election is in the Democratic primary for the Pennsylvania 2014 gubernatorial election. Tom Wolf was a businessman from York who had briefly served as state treasurer several years prior, not exactly a guy with strong name recognition. But he declared early and bombarded the state with TV ads before most of the field even had their campaign apparatus together. He had such a commanding lead, with the remainder split among several candidates, that he was able to start attacking Corbett directly weeks before the election. Granted, that was his own money and not PAC money, and the field was relatively weak, but it shouldn't have been that much of a cakewalk for a guy who had virtually no public profile before that.
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I hear that, but you do know those names, without massive stacks they would never even have been in the conversation.
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