Democrats are clear about the fact that they don’t like it when corporations and the super-rich pour money into politics. Countless threads on this forum, and blog posts and editorials elsewhere, dealing with the Koch Brothers and the Citizens United decision, testify to that.
Democrats also raise tons and tons of money. In 2008, Barack Obama set records. In 2012, he broke his own record. In 2016, Hillary shattered that record. Many have pointed out how little time she spent in key states like Wisconsin, and the reason was that she was busy raising money instead. The Democrats are not shy about courting the super-rich. Obama once had a fundraiser at the home of a billionaire property tycoon named Rich Richman. Cost: $32,400 per person. But that’s a trifle compared to the $353,400 that was charged to sit with Hillary and Hollywood celebrities last April.
So it would seem that the only argument that Democrats can make would go like this: raising truckloads of money from the rich is bad, but we need to win, and in order to win we need to raise truckloads of money from the rich. And thus they end up doing what they say they hate, and Democrats end up lining up to vote for candidates who are floating on piles of money, time after time.
But now Donald Trump has shown up and proved that you can win an election without devoting all your time to fundraising. Indeed, without devoting barely any time to it. During the Republican primary, he faced a huge number of challengers backed by huge sums of money. At the lead was Jeb Bush, whose SuperPAC raised a nine-figure sum. Trump spent virtually nothing. We all know how that ended: Trump got 1,543 delegates while Jeb got 4. In the general election campaign Trump did raise money, but not with the same consuming zeal that Hillary did. Counting the money he raised and SuperPAC money, Trump spend about half as much as Hillary.
Of course he had the advantage of being a billionaire who gave his own campaign millions. However, the lesson to take away from the election is that winning the spending game does not matter. Hillary rolled a tidal wave of money through Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, sometimes outspending Trump by 20 to 1. She lost all four of those states.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the only race where big spending didn’t lead to victory. For example, in the 2014 North Carolina Senate Race, Democrat Kay Hagan outspent her opponent and lost anyway.
So it seems pretty clear. Democrats have been liberated from the need to soil themselves with obsessive fundraising from corporations and billionaires. The approach of trying to grab billions of dollars from those sources each cycle, and then use that money to flood the airwaves with advertising clearly isn’t working, so the Democrats might as well abandon it. Switch to putting limits on how much they’ll take from the corporate sources and how much one billionaire can give. Focus on small donors. (Bernie Sanders has shown that you can raise a respectable amount this way.) Then the Democrats won’t look so hypocritical and won’t be vulnerable to the “crooked” attack that Trump used so effectively.