Just FYI based on your comment you might not be aware but just on ads D's outspent the R's 4.5 billion to 3.5 billion (https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...).
In general D's always outspend and out raise R's.
In general D's always outspend and out raise R's.
It's sort of fascinating how so many Democrats think that money-in-politics rigs the system against them even though Democrats benefit more from it.
Kamala raised 2:1 from campaign contributions (limits: https://www.fec.gov/updates/fec-announces-2023-2024-campaign...), while the inverse was true for Trump.
Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/
In politics what’s pretty consistent is it’s almost always a debate about what’s to my advantage or not, masquerading as a principled argument.
Judging from what I have seen of the foreign reach of "US" politics I am certain there is a lot of dark money and influence going around beyond any official numbers. I have doubts if those sorts of operations have any influence on the swing voters that were required for a victory. It seems more likely their needs were simply ignored.
It already seems so easy to throw money at a candidate if you wanted to, without even needing to do it behind closed doors.
I personally suspect, but can't really know, that this is what explains the dysfunctional state of US politics. It is simply too big a target for corruption for it to ever be able to operate effectively. You can see that many US states seem to have much more effective governance than the Feds despite having nominally the same two major parties. I also think this explains why Australia is better run than the USA, and why New Zealand and Norway are better run than Australia.