Campaign finance in the United States
[4] Critics assert that following a number of Supreme Court decisions — Citizens United v. FEC (2010) in particular—the "very wealthy" are now allowed to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns (through Political Action Committees, especially "Super PACs"), and to prevent voters from knowing who is trying to influence them (contributing "dark money" that masks the donor's identity).
[5] Consequently, as of at least 2022, critics (such as the Brennan Center for Justice) allege "big money dominates U.S. political campaigns to a degree not seen in decades" and is "drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans.
Nonprofit, non-governmental grassroots organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics, Consumer Watchdog and Common Cause track how money is raised and spent.
Jane Mayer notes that in 1972 a $2 million dollar political donation by an insurance magnate (by W. Clement Stone to Richard M. Nixon) in 1972 "caused public outrage and contributed to a movement that produced the post-Watergate reforms in campaign financing".
[33][35] At least according to one academic, (Geoffrey Cowan, Annenberg family chair for communication leadership at USC), campaign spending does not correlate with electoral victory.
[39] She found that political money "carries more weight" in states with "more highly compensated legislators, larger chambers, and more professionalized leadership structures", where the "majority party's advantage is tightly contested and whose legislators are more likely to hold hopes of running for higher office";[39] less weight where legislatures have term limits and voters are more highly educated.
[51] DeVos compares restrictions on campaign finance to the tyranny of 1984's "Big Brother", and defends the use of money to buy political influence in the service of conservative governance and "traditional American virtues".
[52] On a more practical level, Contrarians (David Primo and Jeffrey Milyo) argue that the public has been deceived by "the incessant message" propagated by 'the media, politicians, reform groups, and scholars", that money in politics is bad.
[42] "Legal scholars and social scientists say the evidence is meager, at best, that the post-Watergate campaign finance system has accomplished the broad goals its supporters asserted.
"[41] Political scientist Kenneth Mayer also agrees that looking at those 1970s reforms, there is no evidence that stricter campaign finance rules reduce corruption or raise positive assessments of government.
[55] A 2017 study found that "only a small portion of Americans make campaign donations" and that both Democratic and Republican donors "are more ideologically extreme than other partisans, including primary voters.
[57] A 2022 study found that billionaires are increasingly using their personal wealth and that of corporations they control to, "drown out regular voters' voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation's economy — especially the tax system.
[69] There are no limits on soft money and some examples are donations for stickers, posters, and television and radio spots supporting a particular party platform or idea but not a concrete candidate.
All outside groups that aren't political parties — except for a few traditional PACs that make independent expenditures — are allowed to accept unlimited sums of money from individuals, corporations or unions.
However, in common practice the term is usually applied only to such organizations that are not regulated under state or federal campaign finance laws because they do not "expressly advocate" for the election or defeat of a candidate or party.
In August 2014, a new smartphone app called "Buypartisan" was released to allow consumers to scan the barcodes of items in grocery stores and see where that corporation and its leaders directed their political contributions.
In an effort to distinguish between funding that could be limited because it was for the purpose of electing a candidate and so subject to corruption, and funding for independent expenditures that could not be limited because there was no corruption danger, the Court listed eight words or phrases in footnote 52 of that opinion — "vote for," "elect," "support", "cast your ballot for", "____ for Congress", "vote against", "defeat", "reject", or any variations thereof[100][101] — as illustrative of speech that qualified as "express advocacy".
[103] Furthermore, in 1996, the Supreme Court decided Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC, in which the Court ruled that Congress could not restrict the total amount of "independent expenditures" made by a political party without coordination with a candidate, invalidating a FECA provision that restricted how much a political party could spend in connection with a particular candidate.
[104] As a result of these rulings, soft money effectively enabled parties and candidates to circumvent FECA's limitations on federal election campaign contributions.
After the passage of the BCRA, many of the soft money-funded activities previously undertaken by political parties were taken over by various 527 groups, which funded many issue ads in the 2004 presidential election.
The FEC's rationale was that these groups had specifically advocated the election or defeat of candidates, thus making them subject to federal regulation and its limits on contributions to the organizations.)
The reach of the "electioneering communications" provisions of the BCRA was also limited in the 2007 Supreme Court ruling Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc.
In Wisconsin Right to Life, the Supreme Court stated that the restrictions on "electioneering communications" applied only to advertisements that "can only reasonably be viewed as advocating or opposing a candidate."
"[108] Citizens United struck down, on free speech grounds, the limits on the ability of organizations that accepted corporate or union money from running electioneering communications.
[112] In 2008, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Republicans John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul decided not to take primary matching funds.
This procedure has been in place in races for all statewide and legislative offices in Arizona and Maine since 2000, where a majority of officials were elected without spending any private contributions on their campaigns.
In 2008, the non-partisan California Fair Elections Act passed the legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger signed it, but the law did not take effect unless approved by voters in a referendum in 2010.
[126] A proposal to implement Clean Elections in Alaska was voted down by a two-to-one margin in 2008,[127] and a pilot program in New Jersey was terminated in 2008 amid concern about its constitutionality and that the law was ineffective in accomplishing its goals.
[131] Vouchers have been proposed in other cities and states as a means to diversify the donor pool, help more candidates run for office, and boost political engagement.
One U.S. Representative, Duncan D. Hunter of California, for example, was sentenced to 11 months in prison in 2020 "for spending 2018 campaign donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for his children.
