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I'd love to get money out of politics. Make political advertising illegal. Give candidates a web site to post their resume. That's it. No more tv, radio, magazine, web, or newspaper campaign ads.
This shit is obscene.
A two month campaign season would help. Political donations may only occur between Labor Day and Election Day. No donations, fundraisers, or campaigning may occur before or after those dates.
As long as we're making a wishlist, I'll also take a spending max for the main campaign combined with any supporting PAC (i.e. no shell PACs pretending to be regular citizens supporting a candidate on their own dime). No more billionaire bankrolling to simply outspend the average person.
I would like public funding of elections and a dragon
What color dragon do you want?
The trouble with a time-limted campaign is that it's a big country, and politics are local. You'd basically hamstring every candidate who does not have a national profile.
Nationally funded campaigns are the best path to getting money out of politics. Money isn't speech, and donations to candidates should be entirely illegal. If anyone wants to run issue ads, that's fine, make your case to the American public and disclose the source of the funds. But endorsing a specific candidate is quid pro quo bribery.
Each state funds its own events, and qualifying candidates get a stipend for travel and lodging. No staff, no speech writers, just the candidates and their ideas. Show up, make your case, move on to the next state. 50 debates would cost a tiny fraction of what we spend now, and it would be our money buying it.
There are a thousand kinks in our electoral process, from balloting to gerrymandering to disenfranchisement, but none of it gets fixed while the process is inherently corrupted by legal bribery.
The issue I could see with this is that political groups would have a very strong incentive to get around this and would try to push the limits of it. For example, if advertising about specific candidates is made illegal, groups might make ads promoting or attacking certain political positions instead, as a proxy for the candidates. If you make political advertising for anything illegal, even if not mentioning a specific candidate, then it would get even more thorny, because almost anything can be a political issue. For example, some right-wing political group might try to claim that gay marriage is a political issue and that any depiction of it in media is therefore advertising a stance on it, and sue anyone showing such on those grounds to try to silence people they don't like.
Finally, political groups might just buy ads using organizations based outside the country, or use the advertising money instead on hiring people to go on social media and shill for their preferred candidates or positions, having the same effect as advertising without actually running ads.
Outlaw fundraising, give every candidate that can get enough signatures $20,000 to run for office, let them compete on ideas, give each candidate the same amount of air time on TV. I think Japan does something like this.
$10M to get to second place in a winner take all contest? This is the kind of brain we need running the country. /s
This is perhaps the first contest where the winner may be in prison and may not be able to legally or politically "win".
Winner is also 77, unhealthy, and going through a very stressful period of his life. Probably a decent chance of him dying of a heart attack or something.
Stop. I can only get so erect
If that happens, I imagine within 30 seconds of the news being released. We're going to get soo many conspiracy theories about it. With those those conspiracy theories, there's going to be problems for everyone else.
10m at a chance to win by default basically.
If someone had this tenacity 8 years ago.... But this time it actually almost makes sense to try to bank on him failing out. But then again, he survives it all, always so
The only way any of them still make any sense running is if they assume that Trump is going to be dead or in prison by next year.
Vivek's entire brown-nosing campaign is just a VP audition.
Conservatives in a nutshell
A lot of money to finish in second place.
They're chasing the VP position.
Stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen. She's not gonna happen.
She's better than the other chucklefucks on the Republican debate stages.
Would you really rather Trump or DeSantis if it was inevitable that a Republican wins the presidency?
Plus, if she gets the Republican nomination, it's very likely Biden becomes a shoe-in because Trump would either be disqualified or running as an independent (which would really split Republican voters).
If it's inevitable, sure. But it's by far not inevitable. I'd rather take my chances against Trump, because Biden has already shown able to beat him and Trump would rally the democratic base to vote more than if Haley were running. If republicans have realized this, they're smart to swap their focus to a new nominee.
She will be the VP or front runner depending on if Trump goes to jail.
Repubs won't vote a woman in to the White House. Especially if she's currently trailing DeSantis who has become a joke candidate.
They do not have a legitimate contender outside of Trump. Which is ridiculous considering who the opponent will be.
Trump wants a loyal disruptor who is willing to go on the attack with nonsense. Haley has demonstrated all of those qualities, and she can mollify conservative women who feel icky voting for Trump. She is the best choice for VP out of the candidates still in the race. He's not going to pick Meatball or anyone who has directly criticized him. Every critism she's leveled at the former president has been wrapped in compliments, so he'll smugly claim victory when she joins him at the podium.
And if Trump bows out, is ruled out by the courts, or is otherwise unavailable, his supporters aren't going to back DeSantis or Christie. She wins the bigotry ladder competition with Ramaswamy, and she'll say whatever she needs to say to convince conservatives that she will be their woman in the White House. Trumpers will slide over to her camp and say "see, we're not the misogynists, you are!"
In the race to be the next person 40 points behind Trump? 🤔
The GOP base is way too racist AND sexist to ever make her the nominee.
Imagine spending $10,000,000 of someone else's money to maybe win a distant second place in the Republican Primary against a guy who can only be described as a meatball on stilts.
Imagine donating $10,000,000 to someone to maybe win a distant second place in the Republican Primary against a guy who can only be described as Meatwad on stilts.
Meatwad is funny and cute. Trump is neither. If Trump is like any of the ATHF he's Shake.
Nimarata Nikki Randhawa isn't going anywhere. A woman, one off from an immigrant won't even have solid MAGA support, assuming the lead insurrectionist is doing time.
Imagine using that $10 million to idk, help people?
🤷♂️
Nope, lemme stroke my ego and plaster my face on TV and Pop-up ads
I think a lot of people lack imagination about what can happen between now and the primaries/general. Trump could be found guilty for numerous crimes. He could go to jail. He could lose his money and properties in that civil trial. He is also an old man that could get dementia, be diagnosed with cancer, or suddenly die of natural causes. If he is suddenly out of the running, being second is very valuable.
“But for most of those events, people will support him anyways!” Maybe. This is all unprecedented. I don’t know where people get their level of certainty from.
You act like they wouldn’t vote for his corpse
I think you misunderstand me. I am not "acting like" anything is certain. I am explicitly endorsing uncertainty. One of the things I fucking hate about the internet is all the insane confidence, and groupthink around that confidence. If it later turns out he loses, a bunch of people will come out and say, "I always thought that. I don't think anyone thought he would win from jail." and I'll want to scratch out my eyes.
Some definitely will never abandon him. He has a high floor. But he needs support from more than his rabid base to dominate the primaries like he has. Will moderate suburban Republicans also support him from jail? If you're confident about predicting that, the prediction is based on no historical data because it's unprecedented.
lol. Trump’s her daddy. She just can’t accept it.
Yeah it would one thing if she were actually throwing her own money into the gutter just to overtake the turd in front, but it doesn't come out of her pockets. And frankly I'm not sure which is the bigger turd, her or Ron De-Shithead. They definitely do have other people's money to use to turn this nation into a happy little sewer for bigots like themselves.
Ron is the bigger shithead. I wouldn't like it but I could probably stomach Haley being president. However, for that reason, Haley will also never win the GOP primary.
That's a lot to pay to try and pick up Tim Scott's 15 supporters and Pence's seven.