I don’t know.
I know it’s expensive flying from campaign events to others. Feeding and funding campaign workers. (Even with loads of volunteers, someone at each local campaign office has to be paid) Bills gotta be covered.
But, billions?
Wouldn’t a prudent person running for office be so applauded for donating the whole war chest to charities that they’d get free, ongoing publicity for months? Just think of the noise it would create.
Seems a natural, to me.
Am I nuts?
Billionaires donate sizable sums of money all the time without getting much press or praise. It wouldn’t generate much noise. Warren Buffett just gave away $5.3 billion in June of this year with almost no fanfare at all.
And there isn’t really an alternative to spending heavily in U.S. politics. If Trump is going big on spending, Kamala has no choice but to keep up or surpass him. If Kamala tried to do what you suggest and donate it all to charity and have no $$ for a campaign and then lost the election to Trump, I think only the Trump-supporting half of America would be pleased about that.
I just saw on CNN she’s outspending him, out collecting him. It seems he’s just stopped spending or out of funds.
Buffett ain’t running for the presidency. He could get publicity for his charitable donations. All he has to do is pick up a phone. I bet he doesn’t care or want the noise.
This.
Should the USA spend a whole lot less on political races? IMO, sure. But you’d have to get any restrictions past the Supreme Court; which claims that any restrictions on spending money are restrictions on free speech, and for the most part won’t allow them.
Bear in mind that a lot of us on this board – and probably nearly all of us who post in political or politically-related threads – actively seek out information about candidates. But we’re weird (in the good sense of the word.) Most people don’t do that. If candidates don’t advertise, most people won’t know about them. And if one advertises and the other doesn’t, most people will only know what the one who advertises says about their opponent.
Harris may be collecting more money than Trump; but that doesn’t mean the Trump campaign is dead broke to the point at which they’ve stopped spending. And even if they had: many people are following news sources which give Trump free positive publicity while denigrating Harris.
Most of that money actually spent on the campaign is spent on TV advertising.
What bothers me more than how much is spent on American elections is that it’s reported as one of the most important metrics.
“Candidate X has raised 25 trillion quatloos this quarter, while Candidate Y has only raised 23 trillion.” And it is an important metric, unfortunately. But the amounts don’t correlate to people willing to vote for them, it only matters how many wealthy people they can persuade to donate and that in turn translates into political power.
Even people who would much rather be above this cannot escape it. I remember Al Franken describing how many of his days were filled with fundraising rather than doing the work of a senator. He seemed humiliated by it, but couldn’t figure a way out either. The whole thing is sad.
No. Not nuts. However, there might be legal restrictions on the charity. They can give money to other candidates.
The people who manage campaigns would get paid less, and be less likely to get jobs in future campaigns, on your model. So they have an incentive to advise candidates that an emphasis on funding raising and campaign spending works. Reminds me of:
— Upton Sinclair
Fundraising is the locale of damaging gaffes because of the temptation to appeal to contributors instead of swing voters. Examples include Hillary Clinton’s deplorables remark and Trump on the Medal of Honor.
While Harris believes in raising money, she does give away a lot to downballot Democrats.
That’s the part that bothers me. Fuck TV ads. (a modest amount is okay)
I’d give more if they told me the money was going to get out the vote efforts, lawyers to fight the shenanigans, or other organizational goals, but I’m not interesting in helping them put four ads per hour instead of 3.
Harris is outspending Trump on TV ads almost 10 to 1 in all battleground states except Georgia and Pennsylvania. He’s matching her there.
The tiny scale of such spending should also be put in perspective compared to how immense the outcome of an election is.
The United States’ GDP is $25 trillion. If a campaign war chest of $2.5 billion had the effect of winning the presidency, it would result in massive impact in the direction of the entire nation. Imagine if spending just two dollars would determine whether a giant cruise ship would sail to Italy (as opposed to Brazil.)
She is sending money downballot but not a whole lot in the scheme of things. To be fair, this is not unusual at all for any presidential candidate. She is keeping the vast majority in her war chest.
I wish she’d spend more. Those two states may well be the crucial battleground states for winning the electoral college. I’m very, very nervous about a Trump win and what it would mean.
I assume she’s saturated the media market with ads, so hopefully she’s spending on other things to get the maximum number of her voters to the polls. If she loses, I doubt it will be because she didn’t run enough TV ads.
My understanding is that Harris has opened more campaign offices in Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the country. Those offices are for direct get-out-the-vote efforts.
Note: The link requires a subscription, but the headline is sufficient for this one, I think.
I’m not a political consultant, but that’s a good use of money in my view.
In my view, too. Harris and her team have the whole Obama and Biden ground game architectures at their disposal. She’s using them to the max.
If the ads are on shows rather than news stations, I expect they’re an attempt to get actual information about Harris to people who only watch/read those news sites which are heavily biased against her, but who may watch other TV shows.
(I do agree that four ads an hour seems a bit much. I hope that at least they’re different ads. – and, come to think of it, aren’t those ads just displacing some other ads? is the station actually running more ads, total political and non-political, than it usually does?)
The total amount spent in the 2020 election was $14.4B which is like, enough to buy two large pizzas for everyone in the US.
Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has canceled $160B in student loans, the CHIPS act is expected to cost $280B over 10 years and spur $900B of economic activity, over $100B of foreign aid has gone to Ukraine and over $20B has gone to Israel, the Inflation Reduction Act is $390B of spending, Biden’s infrastructure bill was $1200B, the American Rescue Plan was $1900B.
It’s likely that if there were 2 - 3 more democratic senators, there would have been another trillion or so dollars flowing into green jobs, the care economy, universal pre-K, public transit funding, subsidized housing and prescription drug reform.
Put in this context, while a lot of that $14.4B was wasted, I’m not exactly eager to find out by how much when decisions this big are being impacted by that decision.
My brain blew up. 
I’m so tired of hearing, “Kamala raised X more than DJT!” or whatever. Who cares! That’s wasted money, as far as I’m concerned. I want to know how more money translates to more winning. I can’t believe that it does and the thought of all that money going to something like that is depressing to me.
Yeah, this why the $$$ worry me.