[bhouston]

Unrestricted campaign donations is a huge issue in US politics. It allows for the repeated undermining of democracy in favour of rich people's interests. It is anti-democratic to the core.

And I do not mean rich people who are in the upper 10% of income, it favours the ultra rich for whom a $100,000 political donation is pocket change.

[spiderfarmer]

As a European I already think there is not much democracy left in the USA. At a federal level it's moving towards an autocracy at a rapid pace, and a large part of the electorate seems keen to cheer it on.

At a local level money, gerrymandering and propaganda make it impossible to elect politicians who give a fair representation of people's interests. And with a two party system, it's more than likely that both of them fail to represent their policy preferences to begin with.

It frightens me that people are so easily manipulated and exploited.

[loudmax]

As an American, I don't disagree about the threat to democracy in the United States, but I caution against excessive cynicism. Autocrats and would-be autocrats rely on the populace losing interest in politics and tuning out entirely.

We need to realistically acknowledge the problems and work toward solutions. Not throw up our hands and give into injustice. The solution to democratic revival is citizen engagement, not despair and fatalism.

[spiderfarmer]

I’m European, it’s not like I can vote in your country.

[mamonster]

Its the exact same thing in the majority of European countries.

[r00fus]

It's moving slower in Europe, that's all.

[spiderfarmer]

Why do you think so?

[mamonster]

> Moving towards an autocracy at a rapid pace

Can be said for UK, France at least. Current UK prime minister is basically a guy who was parachuted in after the previous nominee was couped by her own party, France massively reformed the pension system last year by using a legal hack. Germany we'll see where it is in a year.

> Large part of electorate to cheer it on

When parties that are "far-right" (as labelled by mainstream media) are above 20% in most countries sure seems like we are getting there (given that most of these parties like RN, AfD, Vox, etc are branded as anti-democratic/autoritarian).

>Gerrymandering and propaganda

I mean in France 2 of the biggest TV stations (BFM/Cnews) are billionaire owned and run a certain line. Same can be said in UK(Skynews). Germany has dark money campaigns exactly like the US, only you don't hear about them(because all the money goes to CDU/CSU).

>Two party system

I guess this is the European innovation, but with the concept of Brandmauer/Cordon Sanitaire you effectively have that any opposition party can be frozen out of government by the "establishment" parties.. I don't care that CDU/CSU and SPD are 2 different parties when they basically switch between each other for the last 20 years. Same thing was the case with PS/LR in France.

I am not familiar with Nordic countries, they are probably fine, but in the heartland stuff is not going in the democratic direction. And I didn't even mention countries like Poland, Hungary, etc.

[spiderfarmer]

I agree with you on most points. But none of the countries have a candidate that publicly admires is yearning to please dictators, who says that "presidency for life" sounds "pretty great" and who talks about political opponents as "enemies", who "have to be dealt with". The simple fact that another violent upheaval at the next election would surprise no one, is a dead giveaway that the USA is on a very dangerous trajectory.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220443867/trump-s-rhetoric-i...

[mamonster]

I understand your sentiment. I just don't think that thinking that we in Europe have it a lot better than the US simply because we did not yet get a person with Trump's BSing skills is very prudent, given that the directions that our systems are headed to seem to be very similar.

A politician with Trump's Reality Distortion Field is bound to arrive in Europe within the next decade or so, at which point it will be the same thing.

[rayiner]

> money, gerrymandering

Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.

Within the Republican Party, billionaires billionaires wanted someone other than Trump: https://fortune.com/2024/02/26/ken-griffin-koch-brothers-rep.... But he’s going to win the primary.

More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.

The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.

As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?

[spiderfarmer]

I am not only talking about elections. I'm saying money and gerrymandering result in politicians ignoring the policy preferences of a large part of their electorate, especially after they have been elected. If your interests are no longer represented, why bother voting at the next election?

  "Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their policy preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy."

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-...

  "Still, the researchers hold that gerrymandering harms our democracy. “Elections are a way to hold politicians accountable for what their constituency wants,” said Kosuke Imai, professor of government and of statistics as well as leader of the ALARM Project research team, which uses big data and computational algorithms to study redistricting. “But if many lawmakers are in safe seats, guaranteed to win by a relatively comfortable margin, there’s less incentive to respond to what voters want."

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/biggest-probl...

[mindcandy]

> the evidence shows money isn’t buying results.

There are different kinds of results.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.

And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.

All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.

[bhickey]

> As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect?

Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.

[rayiner]

Republicans won the Congressional Popular vote exactly half the time since then: 2010 (by almost 7 points), 2014 (by almost 6), 2016, and 2022.

As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, Democrats benefit tremendously from the quirks of the US Presidential system, which lends itself to nationwide machine politics.

[tptacek]

One of these complaints, that Republicans benefit from the structural tilt away from densely populated states, is objective. The other, your argument that Democrats reliance on immigrants enables machine politics, is subjective. They aren't directly comparable arguments; the latter argument feels like special pleading.

[rayiner]

I understand the “structural tilt away from densely populated states” to be a different thing than gerrymandering. Whichever party outperforms in sparely populated rural states (historically, it was democrats) has an advantage under the US system.

The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.

It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.

[leereeves]

False. Republicans won the popular vote in 2022, 54M to 51M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...

[chabes]

> Without gerrymandering

Emphasis on this part

[rayiner]

Yes, that’s why OP cited the Congressional popular vote. What’s happening is that both parties gerrymander, so it largely cancels out. For example in Maryland, democrats won 65% of the 2022 Congressional popular vote, but hold 87.5% of the House seats. The 450,000 or so excess Republican votes—votes for republicans which didn’t contribute to a Republican house seat—cancels out some excess Democratic votes in Montana or Wyoming.

[psadauskas]

Take a look at Figure 1 in this study (about halfway down): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.

[felixgallo]

'wall street and silicon valley', as if there weren't hundreds of millions of dark money billionaire slush funds and the world's biggest and most effective propaganda network in play.

Gerrymandering absolutely has an effect, and this has been well documented. Here, for example: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-pr...

[Gormo]

Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.

For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations. I'm also curious as to the reasoning by which you think this would undermine democracy, given that the election result is still being determined by the voters, and the candidates seek money primarily to use in their attempt to persuade voters.

[tivert]

>> Unrestricted campaign donations is a huge issue in US politics. It allows for the repeated undermining of democracy in favour of rich people's interests. It is anti-democratic to the core.

> Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.

> For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

It's pretty obvious he probably wasn't referring specifically to hard-money campaign donations, but referring to the post Citizens United situation. That's pretty clear, if you don't read the comment pedantically and over-literally.

So a rich guy can give unlimited amounts to a candidate's Super PAC, an those have ways around the restrictions on coordinating with the campaign itself.

[Gormo]

I don't know if that's obvious, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and explicitly state their positions before I presume that they are simply regurgitating erroneous media hype.

Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.

[tivert]

> Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.

Only when viewed over-literally. If you take a perspective akin to "duck typing," it's both.

But even if you're totally right, this whole digression on the term "campaign donations" is a nitpick that doesn't undermine the OP's point. Which was billionaires spending unlimited money on politics is anti-democratic (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is).

[Gormo]

Well, I don't agree that it's both in the slightest. The FEC attempted to justify prior restraint on speech by making a spurious argument that speech is equivalent to money and is therefore within the scope of its power to regulate campaign contributions. The court ruled that no, speech remains speech regardless of whether money is spent to facilitate it, and is always under first amendment protection.

Further, the problem with unlimited campaign donations -- i.e. actual transfers of funds into the hands of candidates -- is that it creates a situation in which a given candidate might become materially dependent on a specific individual or organization to the point that it creates an entrenched quid-pro-quo relationship that would control the exercise of their duties in office.

But in this case, the complaint of "billionaires spending unlimited money on politics" doesn't describe an instance of that problem at all, because the money is being spent in an attempt to persuade voters, not create patronage relationships with the candidates themselves.

The elections are still up to the voters, and to describe people using their resources to publish their opinions in open discourse as "anti-democratic" is exactly backwards -- creating an apparatus that can preemptively restrict what political information voters are allowed to see is about as anti-democratic as it gets.

> (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is)

The closest thing to "one-party control of the media" being threatened here is a situation in which a state body (ultimately under the control of incumbent politicians) is allowed to preemptively curate what information may be distributed by the media. This is the exact thing that the Citizens United ruling put a stop to.

[rayiner]

Except Citizens United, the actual entity, was a relatively small non-profit. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has 3-4x the revenue and over 20x the assets.

[azemetre]

I believe the answer is “What are Super PACs” Alex.

[dragonwriter]

> I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations.

SuperPACs, one of the main engines of US spending on politics.

[Gormo]

"SuperPAC" is a loaded term used to refer to independent advocacy groups that spend money to publicize their own political positions; direct coordination or transfers of funds to any actual political campaign is prohibited to them, so referring to these as campaign donations is not really accurate.

[dragonwriter]

Since the 2012 cycle, groups nominally independent of the candidate have formed single-candidate superPACs for almost every major candidate in every election, and the coordinate message and activities with the formal campaign committees indirectly via public messaging, even if they avoid other coordination (they certainly try to avoid being caught in other coordination.)

Legality aside, not considering donations people make to these single-candidate SuperPACs as just as much “campaign donations” for all practical purposes as those made to candidate committees is willful blindness.

[tivert]

Nevertheless, they coordinate:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/10-ways...

[Gormo]

An that's already illegal, so there's already a basis for legal action against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns. So what else are you proposing?

[tivert]

> An that's already illegal so there's already a basis for legal action

Is it? It looks to me like they're exploiting loopholes, which is legal.

The article's from 2015, and I understand that stuff is still going on (e.g. Ron DeSantis's campaign and SuperPAC coordinating through open letters discussing strategy).

> against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns.

Who said anything about "directly"? I've noticed you doing that a lot in this thread: missing the meaning, twisting it, then quibbling with your reinterpretation.