Campaign finance is not an inherently evil process. Monetary incentives from advertising and traveling force political candidates to garner support from many groups while making compromises and better establishing their platform. However, the U.S. has a system that’s plagued with loopholes and becoming concentrated among a few very wealthy groups with opinions that don’t always represent the views of most voting Americans.
New laws for campaign finance have slowed down in Congress after a few large ones in the past 50 years. That does not mean this problem should be ignored because it has become easier to contribute to political campaigns without revealing one’s identity. I think it’s important to think about the question, why would anyone donate to a political campaign? The donors want a certain candidate to win because it aligns with their political values, but again, the donations are consolidated and shielded in ways that undermine the whole election process.
The House put for the For the People Act which would address some of the secrecy in campaign donations but that bill will likely not pass because it does not have bipartisan support. So, I want to discuss how this process can be reformed although reforming it is a complex process because the people who have benefitted from lots of campaign funding are the ones who get elected and then must change the laws.
To explain the exigence and rhetorical situation of this issue I can cite the 2020 election cycle which resulted in the most campaign spending of any U.S. election. Combining both presidential and legislative races, candidates spent 14.4 billion dollars campaigning. In 2016, which was also a record setting year at the time, candidates spent 7 billion dollars (both numbers adjusted for inflation).
Then, I want to give a brief explanation of why politicians think they need this much money to win. I also think I could create a small table or graphic to illustrate campaign finance laws that already exist and how they have been challenged for some additional context. Along with the explanation of the laws, I could explain the growth of groups like PACs which have been a source of controversy because they are inherently opaque but spend a lot of campaign money for certain candidates. The last thing
This issue is a result of a mechanical problem. Politicians have recognized that their integrity often depends on transparency so some of them pushed laws forward that limited donations and forced disclosure. However, many of those laws leave ample loopholes and create difficult discussion about freedom of speech which caused the Supreme Court to shut down aspects of different campaign finance laws over the past 100 years. Essentially, the laws inadvertently don’t accomplish what they set out to do because private entities intentionally abuse for their own political benefit which created this mechanical problem.
At its core, this issue is about mandates and system changes. The current state of campaign finance shows that groups will go to great lengths spending money to support a candidate no matter how they must bob and weave through U.S. laws. There will need to be a crackdown on certain types of campaign financing or at the minimum, more transparency introduced. On top of those more obvious solutions, I think there is also an argument to be made for capacity builders that promote spreading information about what groups fund which candidates. Most people probably don’t care that a candidate got money from a big company because they all need the money to campaign, but there needs to be a group that spreads the information clearly about where candidates get their money so voters can make more informed choices.
With how much the spending grew between the last 2 elections, I think now is the time to put a stop to the growing costs of campaigning. It is already too expensive for any average person to run for office and the amount of money spent on campaigning is wasteful because it’s spent on things like advertising when all these billions of dollars could be spent fixing the problems that politicians claim to want to solve. The biggest challenge in creating good solutions is making them realistic with the current system we have because the Supreme Court routinely defends secretive campaign funding, but that does not mean it is not worth trying to create better ways to spend money in politics.
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