money will continue to dominate everything
The Clinton campaign raised and spent much more money than the Trump campaign: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
The Clinton campaign raised and spent much more money than the Trump campaign: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
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.
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.