The Clinton campaign raised and spent much more money than the Trump campaign: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
This problem goes well beyond any single political candidate.
You need to think about these things in nuance rather than just looking at hard numbers.
People say Sanders got crushed by Clinton, ignoring the media blackout on his campaign for the first half of the primary and the fact that he started in the low single digits for name ID and ended with 45% of the votes.
Context matters.
Yes, that's part of my point. Suppose you overcome the many Constitutional and logistical problems and pass campaign finance laws that limit candidates to spending a fixed amount of money and prohibit third party spending. This would give an even bigger advantage to candidates who are already well known, political insiders, and those the media chooses to give attention to.
People say Sanders got crushed by Clinton, ignoring the media blackout on his campaign for the first half of the primary and the fact that he started in the low single digits for name ID and ended with 45% of the votes.
And the DNC blatantly putting their thumb on the scale. Sanders did as well as he did largely because ordinary people were able to contribute to his campaign and help get his message out.
Money is a proxy to power. Power can be expressed in different ways, such as influence as seen by both Clinton and Trump.
How does this refute that money from any source can influence elections? We need campaign finance reform now.
Currently the only leverage that someone from outside the government class has is money, and reform that takes all of that power from the citizenry and puts it in the hands of the government is downright scary.
The U.S. desperately needs campaign finance reform.
To the extent that this is true, campaign finance laws couldn't have stopped it. If anything, restricting the ability of Americans to express their opinions makes foreign propaganda even stronger.
Again, the investigation is still underway and the full extent of the assistance is still unknown, meaning you can't assert that until the findings are released.
“You can't assert that kids died in this school shooting until the investigation is over, since the extent was unknown.”
It similarly does not work if parents are preparing the funerals.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report back in January 2017 decisively stating this:
> We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.
> Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.
> […] We [CIA, FBI, NSA] have high confidence in these judgments.
> We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment.
My own opinion is that asking politicians who take "Big Money" to pass legislation to put a stop to that is unrealistic. It will never, ever, happen.
What is realistic is to personally pledge and publicly announce that you will stop voting for any politician who takes or uses Big Money and urge others to do the same.
When you get enough representatives elected who don't take that Big Money, and defeat enough who do, passing that legislation will be possible. But not before then.
This is happening right now. People are beginning to do this. We all need to do this.
So the government gets to decide which political parties can run candidates? That sounds a little too much like certain 'democratic' dictatorships. I don't think we want to (or can) put that much power in the hands of the government.