Imbalance of Campaign Cash Doesn’t Bother Democrats *This* Election
2nd August 2016
This imbalance of campaign cash—Trump’s shoestring campaign struggling to subsist on less than half of Clinton’s vast fortune—is precisely the sort of “inequality” that Democrats and even the occasional misguided Republican often propose to deal with by means of government redistribution of wealth. A 2013 New York Times editorial about the New York State campaign finance system, for example, said “the most crucial reform of all” is “public financing of elections, which is essential to encouraging competition for legislative offices and reducing the influence of big money on the state’s politics.”
The usual voices supporting taxpayer-funded political campaigns as a way to get special interest money out of the system have fallen strangely silent now that Donald Trump is the one who is getting outspent, and now that Hillary Clinton is the one being aided by “the influence of big money.”
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Trump’s campaign is actually an excellent counter-example to the famous myth ‘whoever has the most money wins the election’, which ought to have been buried when Michael Huffington ran for the Senate in California in 1994.