Campaign Finance Needs to Change. Now.

Campaign finance is a very controversial topic. The one thing that is for sure is the fact that money is a huge part of our political system in the United States. If you want to run for office, whether that be as a congressman, senator, or even the president: you are going to need a lot of money to do so. This is the sad reality that has take over our elections. Without money, you cannot get noticed (television ads, events at restaurants, ect.), without notice people will not know who you are or your platform, and without that you cannot get elected. To remain competitive, everyone has to conform to this money dominated system that has taken over politics.

Based on the research that I have done this semester, no one can really agree on anything related to campaign finance reform. Some say that the way we currently finance campaigns is corrupt and we should limit the amount of money in politics. However, others argue that it actually promotes democracy. This comes from the idea that money allows more voters to be reached and even sometimes can be used to register voters who may not have voted otherwise (Time Magazine Article).

The argument that money helps grow democracy and can help register voters is debunked in the article  As more money flows into campaigns, Americans worry about its influence by Drew DeSilver and Patrick Van Kessel from Pew Research Center. This shows that even though every year the campaigns are getting more and more expensive, the voter turnout is not increasing. In fact, voter turnout did not increase in the 2014 Senate election despite it being the most expensive election yet, the turnout actually dropped and was the lowest since 1990.

According to Get Over It: Campaign Finance Limits Don’t Work, it has become common place for individuals to spend millions on Senate and House of Representative races and billions in presidential elections. There have been efforts to change the system, yet these have not really done anything other than create loopholes for people to work with. Buckley v. Valeo “held that limits on direct contributions were acceptable because of fears of corruption and bribery, but that limits on money spent outside of campaigns were unconstitutional impediments to free speech.”

Political Action Committees, super PACs, and 501(c)(4) groups are two groups that people can donate unlimited money to. Neither of these groups can be directly associated with the candidate, but they donate money to the candidate that others donate to them. This is just one example of a loophole in the attempts at regulating campaign finance.

Here is a minute long trailer for the HBO documentary by Alexandra Pelosi: Meet The Donors: Does Money Talk?, a documentary about the people behind the money that influences our elections.

This clip, which I also included in my remix video, shows the highlights of the hour long documentary. It shows how wealthy the people who are donating lots of money are, and trust me these people are the one percent of the one percent. This documentary was trying to determine if what people think is really true: do these big donators expect favors from the candidate or access to the candidate if they donate?

The questions that this documentary poses is whether or not money influences politics in the way that we, the public, think it does. A common perception among people, as mentioned in the documentary, is that those who donate get more access to the candidates and that donating money means that candidates will make and vote for legislation that favors the donator in some way.

Nearly all of the people who Pelosi interviewed said that they donate because they think that it is the right thing to do and they are making an investment in the future of America. Now, do they really believe this or did it sound better for the cameras? And how about those that Pelosi did not interview or those who refused to be interviewed?

Even if this documentary could not answer every question that the public has about how campaign finance actually works, it did highlight some important facts. There is an insane amount of money poured into each candidate by individual people: millions and millions of dollars. Also, these people get access to the politicians, much more than any regular citizen would.

A 2013 Gallup poll entitled “Half in U.S. Support Publicly Financed Federal Campaigns” showed that a majority of Americans would support publicly funded campaigns while nearly 80 percent were in favor of some type of campaign finance. The support for this issue was generally spread out among races, genders, and political parties, showing that it is a common issue that we as a country should address.

Something needs to be done about the influence of money on our politicians and our political system as a whole. My remix video focuses on not only the money in politics, but how much time the politicians spend raising money. Overall, politicians spend nearly half of their time raising money so they can be reelected. Should they not be working to make new legislation and doing what we elected them to do.

Also, the people that they are getting donations from are not people like you and me, they are the wealthiest people in the country who do not have the same issues as everyday citizens. It is plain sad what our system has become. Everything seems to revolve around money and raising money for our elected representatives.

This is what the system has come to. To even be considered for an election you have to have money and people donating to you. There is no way around this and that is the problem. If we could change the system so that congressman and senators do not have to worry about raising money to keep their jobs and instead worry about actually doing their jobs, that would be ideal.

I doubt our founding fathers had this in mind when they designed our country. There is no reason that so much money and time should be wasted. Most people are also simply unaware of the amount of money that goes into elections because they honestly don’t believe that it could be in the high millions and the billions.

This is just simply not acceptable and we need to actually do something to change it instead of just complaining about how awful it is all the time.

The focus of my video is brining awareness to the issue and showing people the problems in the system. I use clips from Congressional Fundraising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah’s The Federal Election Commission: An Enormously Dysfunctional Agency  and American Heroes: Campaign Donors Go Big  to highlight the issues. Other footage is from Taking The Hill: Inside Congress and Meet the Donors: Does Money Talk?.

The music in my video is Axel Thesleff’s Bad Karma. The words in this song are in a language stemming from India known as Punjabi. The lyrics are repeated over and over and they are “o na kar maan rupaye vaala baar baar ke na rajje” which means “Don’t keep on wanting money, people have loads and they’re never happy.”

Slightly ironic? Indeed, that was the goal.