Can a candidate put unlimited personal money into his own presidential campaign, or is he limited to $2,500 just like anyone else?
And could a billionaire candidate plausibly spend, say, $30 billion of his own money on a presidential run and practically plaster his ads over almost every TV, billboard, radio, newspaper and Internet outlet…drowning out almost every other candidate by simply outbidding them for ad space?
(i.e., “Hey, my opponent can only pay you $15,000 per minute of TV advertisement time, but I can pay you $200,000 per minute of ad time!”)
Though “give” isn’t really the operative word. A station cannot charge one candidate more than another for ad time of a comparable nature. And if the station offers ad time to one candidate it cannot refuse to do so for another. But a station can refuse to make its broadcast facility available for use to all candidates equally.
And there are regulations about the rate a station can charge. Generally candidates can demand the cheapest rate that was offered to its most favored non-political advertisers over a period of time (45 days for a primary, 60 days for a general election) prior to the election. This effectively would prohibit the OP’s scenario of one candidate outbidding all others for all available ad time.
Sir, We soundly reject your complaint: our offices were in full compliance of legal obligations, and gave every assistance in production and services required. The reasons that the only slots available were from 04:35 - 04:40 AM, between the Andy Dick Show ( repeat ) and the documentary of Weather Patterns in North-East Peru, are purely commercial and wholly confidential.
As you point you, correctly, that doesn’t require “giving,” but is a requirement that ad time be sold at equal rates and run in generally equal time slots.
But if I have $29 million and you have $3 million, I can buy more ads.
To answer the OP … yes, a candidate can - in general - put in as much of their own money as they want.
Mitt Romney, IIRC (too lazy to look it up) financed his own campaign to the tune of like $15 million in 2008 - and was a main reason he refused to spend any of his own money for 2012 (he felt he’d spent his “lifetime contribution” to his campaign for president). Source: Double Down
I don’t think Clinton and Bush were able to respond in kind to Perot’s prime time infomercials.
And no, you can’t buy the Presidency, even if you spend $30 billion. Presidential candidates get something like 10x free coverage compared to ads, probably more, since by September of a Presidential election year it’s THE subject on almost every talk show, comedy show, talking head show, etc. For every 30-second ad you see, you see an hour or more of free commentary and news on the race. If a billionaire isn’t otherwise a good candidate, and even if he is a credible candidate(as Perot was in 1992), he’s going to be at a disadvantage. Perot, because he hired lackluster political talent to run his campaign and then didn’t listen to them anyway. Then did something no intelligent candidate would ever have done by dropping out and getting back in.
Bloomberg would probably do better than Ross Perot did if he ran, but he’d still face an uphill climb against the two major parties, even if he spent more than them combined. But let’s say his problem is he’s an independent. So he wants to by the Democratic or Republican nominations? Uh uh. Unless you think Democratic and Republican voters are sheep, his blitz of the airwaves wouldn’t have a prayer of getting him the nomination.
This was one of the holdings of Buckley v. Valeo, the first S.Ct. campaign finance case, and the court’s rationale was that the only permissible purpose of campaign finance regulation is preventing corruption or the appearance thereof, and one cannot corrupt oneself with one’s own money.