It isn’t so much the will of the people but the will of the rich and powerful.
For example, in the last US election there was billions spent in 2024 by the political parties, and outside groups:
Parties themselves: https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race
Outside groups: https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_group
In contested elections both sides usually have a large amount of spending. If you only read the headlines you’d think it was only the winning side that spent any money.
Another thing that isn’t obvious is that PACs have high win rates because they’re usually strategic about which races they go after. The money influence can only move the needle a little bit, so they need to pick races and topics where the voters are already close to evenly split.
There have also been a lot of high profile examples of extreme spending on elections that didn’t lead to the desired outcome.
As media has fragmented, you really have to spend a lot to get in front of enough high propensity voters, and even more to turn out low propensity voters unless you're organically good at getting invited on to podcasts.
Buy ad buyers and media agencies that only work in politics are definitely a thing[1] also.
[1] https://oaaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/20.06.30-Politic... (this is an old list but illustrative)
You are skipping Super PACs which is pretty much exclusively ultra rich people political spending.
Here is the Super PAC spending and Kamala was destroyed by pro-Trump spending:
Conservative/Trump: $1,754,585,468
Liberal/Kamala: $786,990,015
Campaign spending isn't even close to the actual total spent on a campaign, any more.
I think you're thinking about this in the wrong way.
What you're saying is that people who don't have a lot of money to spend usually don't make it to the election.
Money definitely sways elections.
The few case where it doesn't are normally attributable to other problems with the spendy campaign.
In Wisconsin, the conservatives spent enormous sums of money talking about high level worldview issues like DEI and immigration. Which is all well and good if you're in a state where that's relevant maybe? But out here in opioid infested flyover country where people were worried about losing their housing the next week, those worldview kinds of things were just dumb issues to focus so much money on.
So yeah, you can win an election against a big spender. But normally that big spender is actually so dumb and detached from the voters that what's really happening is that they're beating themselves.
Similarly Mamdani in NYC is facing some truly awful candidates.
Someone also pointed out to me that it's not so much the money on a politician's side that sways them, but the threat of PACs et al spending a ton of money to unseat them if they don't "play ball". [2]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/winning-vs-sp...
American politics for all intents and purposes is a very simple game.
When there's no preferential voting system and therefore only two real parties in the political race it's easier to ensure you get the outcome you want either way. PACs don't really need to influence the election directly as much as ensure they have influence on politicians in the only two parties that have any power.
Massive amounts of money is a requirement in the US. Of course strategy still plays a role but if you do not have massive amounts of money in the first place, you don't matter.
Because you have to raise massive amounts of money, you need to prioritize big spenders, and thus you have to be responsive to the demands of those large donors.
For example Miriam Adelson who gave Trump 1/5 of his total haul, reportedly conditioned her $100M on allowing Israel to annex the West Bank:
https://forward.com/fast-forward/618034/miriam-adelson-fundi...
These folks have tremendous political influence which they are using to roll up Canada's economy and squeeze every cent out of the working class.
There's plenty to be made - it's just very under the radar.
Anecdotally, extended family of mine run a fairly decent sized construction contracting company out in BC (Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland), and have been having family members and family friends donate as a group for both Conservative and NDP MLAs for over a decade now, as well as helping organize voter drives and non-partisan activities at Gurdwaras (if partisan activities came up, they tended to be in Punjabi and thus not reported on - but tbf, in depth local news is dead in much of Canada as well outside of metros).
Lobbying is common across democracies, but how it manifests is different. I feel that there is also a level of visibility into the American system that really highlights bad actors, but similar scrutiny isn't as common in other countries other than maybe the UK.
It is quite different. Here is how campaign finance works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in...
And this includes all PACs and equivalents. We don't have dark money PACs.
Canada arguably has an even more ingrained system of lobbying.
I'd also bet that the vast, vast majority of voters are already going to vote for their chosen candidate, independently of whether they see $1 billion worth of ads or $5. If anything, "free" advertising like going on a podcast or working at McDonalds as a stunt seems to have more influence.
This is true of elections in two party systems. Most people have parties they align with and don't switch often. But there are persuadables.
The billions spent on political ads was spent for a reason. Similar to why billions are spent on marketing in general. There is the old adage that sure half of the marketing budget is wasted, but it is never clear which half ahead of time.
https://www.b2bmarketing.net/half-the-money-i-spend-on-adver...
It's about convincing your people they need to show up or the other side will make your grandkids shit in litter boxes, or whatever lies it takes.
I don't think that is the same thing at all. Laurentian elite just refers to Canada's largest population cluster as a whole and saying that the upper class in general is influential, sure. But it is far from saying that a small number of billionaires are absolute key in the Canadian elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentian_elite
Canada has significant limits to political spending and I think that is amazing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_political_financing_in...
Only if you exclude outside funding. Conservative SuperPACs were incredibly well funded compared to Liberal ones last election: https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/super_pacs
And they were funded more than the official candidates themselves. Because then these groups can act without limits on their spending.
I bet a lot of trumps base considers themselfs conservative but look away from basically every inner political move trump made.
This is what confuses me about the "conservative core" your are speaking of. Where is it?
They (and a lot of democratic voters!) were always skeptical of things like very-liberal trade policy. The gap between that long-running strain in the voters, and what the bipartisan neoliberal consensus on trade (and immigration, for all Republican politicians complained about it when campaigning) had looked like among nearly all Federal elected officials from the early '80s on, is exactly the kind of thing that Trump exploited to swiftly take over the entire party.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2025007/artic...
money is not the only factor.
may not be the most money, but it's the most effective use of money.
PA roads were littered with trump signs because of people being paid to litter our streets with them. for months.
people are, sadly, very easily influenced. companies wouldn't pour so much into advertising, in general, if it didn't have such an effective influence
[0] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-har...
Most campaigns stretch the truth a bit here and there, but from what I personally saw and from what I read from other states where the campaigning was more intense generally the Harris campaign did not stretch nearly as far as the Trump campaign.
I'd expect that this let the Tump campaign get more out of a given amount of spending than the Harris campaign could.
"Absolutely, money does have a measurable impact on political outcomes"
https://www.investopedia.com/surprising-thing-billionaires-s...
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/winning-vs-sp...
Furthermore, in a country with somewhat free media you would always expect populist candidates to outperform with a given budget, because their platform is much better aligned with media interest; mass media does not want boring budget plans or quaint reforms-- rage-bait sells way better and nets populists tons of "free" online presence.
Which laws and which books? I can't find anything.
While (as far as I know) the law was never actually used to ban books (only documentaries), the case became infamous because the government argued that it had the right to ban books if it wanted to. See, e.g., the NYTimes article below: "The [government's] lawyer, Malcolm L. Stewart, said Congress has the power to ban political books, signs and Internet videos, if they are paid for by corporations and distributed not long before an election.".
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washington/25scotus.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/08-205
If media presence had surprisingly little effect on outcomes, then I would expect candidates to spend surprisingly little or be constantly outperformed by "underfunded" candidates-- neither of which is the case.
Not sure how you're defining "underfunded" candidates, but the incumbents in competitive races where enormous amounts are spent by both sides to try to gain an advantage don't win anywhere near as often as the incumbent in nom-competitive races which parties and PACs barely bother spending in. Ultimately the spending is positional and cancels out, and the biggest spender often loses because there's not nearly enough difference between the candidates' spending levels to affect whether voters hear their messages.
It's the same thing in elections. Because everyone is competitive, who donates what money or it's amount tends to not really matter. If a candidate were to sabotage their campaign they would lose, but in a competitive election it doesn't end up being statistically significant.
There is a lot of money in America, and comparatively not that much is actually spent on the election. Maybe it's still too much in an ostensibly democratic system, but it's worth noting.
It's not really helpful that the number is tolerable in terms of national GDP: election spending being so large in terms of median wealth simply excludes lots of capable potential candidates that are not well positioned to raise money (for whatever reason).
It also leads to completely outsized pandering to "rich donor" interests, because those finance the largest share of the campaigns, which is an obvious problem if you want to call yourself "democracy" (instead of oligarchy or plutocracy).