Fewer than 16,000 donors accounted for half the federal campaign contributions in 2016

[DonViejo]

Source: The Washington Post

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee January 19 at 6:00 AM

More than 3.2 million Americans contributed to federal candidates in the 2016 elections, but fewer than 16,000 of them provided half the donations— a sign of the increasing concentration of donor activity in the United States, according to a new report.

The analysis released Friday by the Bipartisan Policy Center mapped the growing influence of rich political contributors and independent political groups in the seven years since federal court decisions unleashed a new era of big-money spending.

Super PACs spent $1.1 billion in the 2016 elections, nearly 17 times more than such independent political committees put into federal races in 2010, the first year they came into existence, the report found.

“The system has completely transformed,” said Robert Bauer, a Democratic election law attorney who authored the report with GOP campaign-finance lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg and Stanford Law School professor Nathaniel Persily.






Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/less-than-16000-donors-accounted-for-half-the-federal-campaign-contributions-in-2016/2018/01/18/07a88420-fc61-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html

[CrispyQ]

1. What exactly is the People's opposition to publicly funded elections?

Or have so many just been brainwashed that "we don't want to spend our taxes on something like that?" I don't get it. We'll never get our government back as long as our elected officials are commodities.

[Dustlawyer]

8. +1!!!

PFE's are our only hope of saving our Democracy. To allow the rich and powerful to legally bribe/buy our politicians and then be surprised when they give a tax free pass at our expense is the height of foolishness and ignorance.

I wish I knew the answer to your question.

[CrispyQ]

10. Republicans have been very effective at making people fear & loathe taxes.

How many people check that little box on their tax form asking if they want $3 to go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund? Most don't understand what that fund does & think that somehow it increases their taxes. In the end, we have paid in liberty, so to speak, since our elected officials can now be bought.

A Checkbox On Your Tax Return Helped Kill Public Campaign Funding
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-checkbox-on-your-tax-return-helped-kill-public-campaign-funding/

snip...

You already hate tax season, and as you move wearily through the cold calculations of the 1040 form, you come across a familiar checkbox. It’s the one that requests permission to send $3 to the “presidential election campaign,” delivering cash to a bunch of politicians that you’re sure are awash in money anyway.

more...

When you agree to the $3 tax checkoff, it funds the Presidential Election Campaign Fund (PECF), a common pool of money that matches the fundraising of eligible presidential candidates in primary and general elections, for those who choose to take it. The $3 does not come out of your taxes; it’s just $3 less the government receives in tax revenue.

Almost from its inception in 1976,1 participation in the program has been on a steady downward trajectory. In 1980, 28.7 percent of tax returns had a checked box, the peak year of participation. But that support began to steadily erode, and by 2013, participation had fallen to 6 percent of all tax returns.

It’s not clear why the tax checkoff program became so unpopular with Americans. It might be disgust with U.S. politics, as approval ratings of Congress plunge to near all-time lows. Another cause might be the huge volume of private money that has flooded into presidential campaigns. The total amount spent on the 2012 election ($2.6 billion) was 40 percent greater than the amount spent in the 2000 election ($1.9 billion, in 2012 dollars), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Public cynicism about the sheer amount of money in politics might have led to disenchantment.

~more at link

Part of the reason approval ratings of Congress are at all-time lows is because we won't publicly fund elections. It's a wicked catch-22.

[FarCenter]

2. This may reflect the change in the law making "bundling" less necessary.

We also know quite a bit about the size of contributions and the number of donors participating in the campaign finance system. As Figure 8 below depicts, the number of donors contributing to candidate campaigns has increased steadily over the last decade, and the average donation has decreased in real dollars over that same period. Whereas only 65,970 people donated to candidate campaigns in 1982, more than 3.2 million did so in 2016 (which is still less than 2 percent of the adult population). However, donor activity has become more highly concentrated: In 2016, only 15,810 individuals accounted for half of all campaign contributions. By way of comparison, in the 2000 election, 73,926 individuals accounted for half of the donations.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/BPC-Democracy-Campaign-Finance-in-the-United-States.pdf

[unblock]

3. to be fair, their influence isn't as great once you factor in donnie's russian contributions....

[jmbar2]

4. How can we make the money irrelevant?

What is it spent on?
- Professional election consultants of all stripes - an industry unto itself
- Media buys - bad ads that people tune out.
- Ground game

We need to strategize how to win without having to feed two of those beasts. Drain the swamp.

[Blue_Tires]

5. Thank you, Citizens United ruling....

[LittleGirl]

6. maybe with a D congress

we can get a constitutional amendment to overturn that hideous law.

[SWBTATTReg]

7. Must remember that our votes aren't for sale...

Our opponents can't buy our votes, even if they offered $1000 each or more. It's not the money but the issues that we all stand for. Remember, other than tampering w/ our elections in multiple ways, DRump and cronies, w/ all of their money still lost the popular vote.

One problem w/ Citizen's United and/or corporations, is that they basically treat a paper entity as one of us, w/ free speech rights, etc., which opened up the spigots of money. However, w/ these entities do wrong, they basically aren't punished, which is wrong...most of us, if we do wrong, would go to jail. The paper entities? They might get fined if that.

These 'paper' entities have been accorded rights just like human beings, and this I feel like this has been taken too far out of context, and rules need to be re-established on money in elections, as well as the length and time to run elections and term limits should be applied always, that way, we don't get embedded political bias in our representatives, after all, they are here to represent the whole country, not just a slice of it. In short, more work needs to be done in this area...

[CrispyQ]

9. In some respects, the corpos have more & better rights.

"Corporate personhood is the fiction that corporations are people; slavery is the fiction that people are property."

Got that from this site: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/