Since 2010 the Supreme Court annulled limits on campaign donations // Bribery was legalizedformer President Jimmy Carter noted years later.
David Brooks and Jim Cason
Correspondents
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, November 6, 2024, p. 21
New York and Washington. One of the key factors in every American election is the vote of dollars, and the rich who have them. Both parties raise enormous amounts of private money to buy advertising, hire support staff, and pay almost all of the expenses of each candidate and the party in this race. For big donors it is an investment; They expect their dollars to at least buy access to politicians once elected, so they can influence their decisions.
According to calculations by Open Secrets, an independent monitoring project on money in elections, this presidential election has cost 5.5 billion dollars to date; the federal legislative amounts to 10 billion, making a total for the national election of 15.9 billion dollars.
For now, it is the second most expensive election in the history of the country, only surpassed by the 2020 national election, which cost 18.3 billion in real terms, although it is predicted that this, in the end, will be the most expensive of all.
The explicit participation of billionaires, some very public, others more discreet, never ceases to amaze, with the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, contributing more than 130 million to billionaire Trump’s campaign, while Michael Bloomberg contributed 50 million to Harris’s; In total, some 150 billionaire families have invested $1.9 billion in support of presidential and legislative candidates, with the vast majority (72 percent) flowing to Republicans, according to a new report released by Americans for Tax Fairness. To date, in all elections, from federal to local elections, 10.5 billion have been spent on campaign advertising, National Public Radio reported.
Money from the rich and large companies flows directly or indirectly to presidential and legislative campaigns, since according to a Supreme Court ruling in 2010, the limits were annulled, since conservative judges decided that the money of these to the electoral process is protected because it is a form of freedom of expression.
Former President Jimmy Carter, founder of the Carter Center, which is dedicated to transparency and monitoring of elections around the world, characterized the ruling as something that allowed legalized bribery in politics.
In an interview with the BBC in 2016, Carter explained: with the rich financing the campaigns, when the candidates get into office they do what the rich want, and that is to let the rich get richer and richer and leave out the middle class.
