Nearly every candidate sends them. Emails with subjects like "Federal Deadline Looms" or "Send a Message With a Donation" or similar nonsense. All of these requests are a reflection of how the Citizens United case warped the operation of democracy and distorted perceptions of who really votes in elections, people or dollars? The message behind these annoying fundraising attempts could not be more clear. Or misleading. The message is that giving money to a political candidate can essentially allow you to vote multiple times. Every monthly Federal Elections Commission reporting cut-off for fundraising and expenses is a chance for a candidate to generate buzz for their campaign and a sense of momentum if the report shows they out-raised their opponent by a material amount. And since money is speech according to Citizens United, more money can buy more speech and a greater likelihood of victory.
Of course, there is a logical flaw of trying to run a Citizens United based campaign in the physical world, especially a campaign for President.
The idea that money is speech that leads to the elimination of limits on money into campaigns doesn't solve a core problem for a candidate or party who thinks they can buy an election win by buying up airtime / ad impressions. The problem is that there is a finite amount of TIME available in which those "impressions" can hit targeted voters. And the more you know about the status of a race in every gerrymandered portion of the entire national footprint, the more tempted you are to NOT spend money where you're leading so you can TRY to spend more money where you are behind but withing striking distance. And you likely WILL spend more money in those narrowly identified markets, partly because you HAVE the money by not spending it elsewhere but also because you are focusing your spend on a smaller number of TV stations, radio stations, and ZIP-targeted online ad impressions. Like any other market, when demand goes up and supply is fixed, rates go up. But a voter can only watch so much TV or YouTube per day. A candidate can spend a BILLION dollars instead of a MILLION and it won't give them 100x the lift.
In a world with a rational understanding of physics, media, politics and economics, the costs of running a national campaign should reach some limit of some sort. In a highly gerrymandered environment further skewed by electoral college distortions, a Presidential election with (say) 160 million voters comes down to only about four million voters in maybe twenty counties across seven states. Every other district is so far in the safe zone for one party or the other, there is literally zero payback for advertising there. So in the remaining "swing" districts, there has to be some upper limit on how much can possibly be spent on TV ads, radio ads, YouTube ad inserts by ZIP and direct mail ads by ZIP. So why would ANY Presidential campaign need to raise and spend five hundred million dollars?
The real problem with hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on political campaigns courtesy of Citizens United is that such spending isn't actually resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of political awareness on the part of voters for or against any candidate. It is simply funneling money to future cronies who act as "media consultants" and take a percentage of the "ad buys" for creating some of the spots or supposedly fine-tuning the selection of media outlets to use for each ad. But look at the ads being aired. When you are flooding the zone with ****, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon and it doesn't take multiple rocket surgeons to make those decisions. Taking a 5% or 10% "cut" of these ad buys is pure political corruption in a time machine.
Of course, the other obvious pattern of corruption in this Citizens United hell we occupy is that these hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending funneled through cronies to collect their skim eventually goes into the pockets of highly concentrated traditional media and social media firms. This bi-annual manna from heaven provides continued incentives for them to do nothing to prevent abuses of their platforms and zero incentive from a journalistic standpoint to report on this corruption in general or the particular corruption of any given candidate. Their attitude seems to be: With these financial windfalls coming in every two years, we'll just shut up and cash the checks.
WTH
