One week has passed since the 2024 Presidential election, and the postmortem continues in earnest. Everyone seems to have strong views on what went wrong or right—depending on their perspective. The results have generated intense emotional reactions spanning from shock to fear to excitement to vindication. However, missing from all the election strategy second-guessing is a conversation regarding the absurd amount of money involved in our politics.
As with many fundamental political concepts in the United States, I was blissfully unaware of how campaign finance regulations worked (e.g., who can donate to campaigns and how candidates can use donations). That is, until I was assigned to debate the merits of campaign finance regulations for my American Politics class. The class, taught by Upper School history teacher Debbie Linder, helped to chip away at the political ignorance I started with.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets the opportunity to take Ms. Linder’s class, and these are the sort of details people are not interested in learning on their own. “We don’t, as they say in ‘Hamilton,’ want to know how the sausage is made. And yeah, it’s complex,” Ms. Linder said.
For me, the debate highlighted not just how complex the issue is, but how little campaign finance gets discussed––ironic, given that opponents of campaign finance reform argue that spending money on elections is akin to “speech.”
Money and politics have gone hand and hand since the country’s founding. The question of regulating campaign finance has a long history, extending as far back as 1757, when George Washington courted potential voters by buying them drinks of punch and hard cider. Various regulations continued into the 1970s, when the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and its amendments set the stage for how federal elections are financed today. Without getting too in the weeds (or stepping on Ms. Linder’s toes), restrictions have been passed through the years to prevent the sort of corruption that invariably accompanies big-dollar involvement in elections. People have long worried about the appearance of wealthy individuals or corporations “buying” their preferred outcomes.
While initial court challenges upheld campaign finance laws, the view that dominates the election law landscape today is that limiting how money is spent on campaigns infringes on the constitutional right to free speech. The Supreme Court articulated this position in its 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, holding that corporations, unions, and other groups could spend unlimited funds calling for the support or defeat of a particular candidate, as long as such support is not provided in direct collaboration with the candidate. We have Citizens United to thank for the explosion of PACS and super PACS and the fact that $5.5 billion was spent on the 2024 Presidential election.
The amount of money flowing into our Presidential elections is ridiculous, and no one needs to be an election law expert to realize that. You do not need to know anything about campaign finance laws to be concerned. This election cycle, billionaire Elon Musk offered voters $1 million for supporting his super PAC, donated more than $118 million to Donald Trump’s campaign, and is now slated to be a governmental “efficiency czar” in the new Trump administration.
It also seems that some of the problems people hope a President will solve could be much closer to resolution if even a fraction of the $5.5 billion was put toward the actual problems rather than toward elections. Once election spending reaches the billions, successful political leaders have to focus more on marketing and fundraising skills than effective policymaking. Academic research estimates that up to 70% of candidates’ time is spent raising money. This figure becomes absurd in any other context. None of us would ever be comfortable getting on an airplane if the pilot only cared about their salary.
Opponents of campaign finance regulation repeatedly point to concerns about the infringement of free speech. Latin senior Andres De Marco said, “The right to free speech in our Constitution, in our First Amendment, is unequivocal, and there is no constitutional requirement that free speech must be equitable, and I think that right has to be granted to everybody.”
But extreme levels of money in politics do not protect speech—they stifle it. For one thing, it has become virtually impossible to run for political office at all without very deep pockets or other funding sources. Wealthy voices therefore take up a disproportionate amount of public airtime, causing other ideas to be drowned out, or other voices to give up entirely. A Brennan Center report by Daniel I. Weiner pointed out that a very small group of Americans now wield “more power than at any time since Watergate, while many of the rest seem to be disengaging from politics.”
Senior Wyatt Parr echoed Weiner’s concern, noting, “People that have less money should not have quieter voices.”
Unregulated campaign financing is akin to handing certain candidates a megaphone and being content with allowing the loudest voices—rather than the best ideas—to win. It is also profoundly inefficient. In the age of free and readily available social media, why does anyone need billions to spread their political ideas?
It is unclear to me why opponents care so much about protecting the First Amendment, and so little about protecting democracy. When the top 100 donors to super PACs contributed 78% of all super PAC spending in 2018, can we really call ourselves a democracy by and for the people? As James Madison wrote at our country’s founding, the government belongs to all of us, “not the rich more than the poor.” And don’t just take my—or Madison’s—word for it: 96% of Americans agree.
Sadly, almost as many Americans who want money out of politics also believe nothing can be done about it. Still, as with all political issues, acknowledging and understanding the problem is the first step. Campaign finance may not be as flashy a topic as immigration, abortion, or other hot-button issues that took center stage in the 2024 Presidential election, but it plays a fundamental role in our democracy. Money does, indeed, talk—and it is imperative that we learn and listen.
