Reply #16: it would also be nice

[hfojvt]

if there were enough Democratic voters so that a person who spent $4000 of his own money and 200 hours of his time trying to fight Reaganomics would actually win his primary election too. Instead, as it turns out, you sorta need corporate cash or a personal fortune even to win a primary http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=153x9552

But I am not sure how campaign finance works either. Consider the Democratic Primary in Kansas for the Senate. It costs $1,760 to file for that race. Even with that barrier, we had five candidates. Suppose it was free, or publicly financed. Are you gonna get 200 candidates then? Then what? Do you give them all half an hour of state-wide TV time? Who is gonna watch 100 hours of campaign speeches? Do you print a campaign guide? Who is gonna read hundreds of pages? Plus, even with 5 candidates we probably should have a run-off system. But we don't. So Lisa won fairly handily with 31% to 24% a 6,000 vote margin. But meanwhile almost 8,000 idiots voted for Conroy who did not even bother to campaign.

I went to campaign forums where I got 2-5 minutes to speak. What the heck are you supposed to say in 2 minutes? You cannot say very much. Same thing for papers. Because their space is limited, they wanted you to answer each question with less than 50 words or so. Given the need to educate the voters, how are you supposed to do THAT with just 50 words?