This year’s spending to elect a president and members of Congress will hit at least $15.9 billion – putting 2024 on track to become the nation’s most expensive federal election, according to a new analysis from OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics.
The ultimate problem is, even if they are cheap, if one side has more money than the other, then that side can outspend the other on ads, meaning they get larger outreach, potentially more influence (tho money doesn’t always buy influence - who wants to take the risk), and so on.
I legitimately don’t even know how this much money is even spent,
Well, you can use money to buy outreach. Which can bring in more votes. So they are connected.
One of the reasons Biden dropped out was because donors had decided to withhold money from his campaign.
I imagine it’s more popular in certain parts of the US (e.g. the midwest). In particular where we need to pull never trumper votes away.
Texts cost money. Emails are not free either if you are doing it with a high enough volume. See https://sendpulse.com/knowledge-base/email-service/general/how-much-bulk-email-costs for a comparison. (This is because it costs the underlying ISP some money to deal with the traffic involved.)
The ultimate problem is, even if they are cheap, if one side has more money than the other, then that side can outspend the other on ads, meaning they get larger outreach, potentially more influence (tho money doesn’t always buy influence - who wants to take the risk), and so on.
Actual campaign funds have to be reported regarding spending, you can view that info over at https://www.fec.gov/data/browse-data/
This stuff is generally opaque and hard to understand, but a good “rule-of-thumb” kind of guide to it is available at https://www.propublica.org/article/how-to-understand-political-contributions-campaign-finance
Agreed.