How can you say that our election is not so expensive?
Answers
WITH nearly every American election cycle new spending records are broken. This autumn's midterm elections are nearly nine months away, but already candidates in Kentucky's Senate race have raised $19.4m and spent $7.3m. In the 2012 cycle candidates in the Massachusetts Senate race alone spent over $85m. That is small change compared with that year's presidential contest, in which $2 billion was spent (the total cost of the 2012 elections, including congressional races, topped $7 billion). Not every country shells out so much on its democracy: in France, for instance, presidential candidates' campaign spending is capped at $30m. Why are American polls so pricey?
First and most importantly, American elections are expensive because America is a big, rich country: reaching a population of 314m costs a lot, particularly in competitive media markets such as New York and Florida. Also, each election cycle features thousands of contests: local posts that in other countries might be filled by appointees of party bosses are vigorously contested in America. Beyond those structural factors, some blame Citizens United, a Supreme Court decision in 2010 that freed corporations and workers' unions from spending limits on independent political broadcasts (ie, those that are not co-ordinated with particular candidates' campaigns). That led to a big increase in spending in the 2012 election cycle, which in nominal terms was the most expensive ever. Much of it came from "super-PACs"—political action committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, provided they disclose their donors—and catchily named "501(c)(4)s", non-profit groups that can spend slightly less freely than super-PACs but do not have to disclose their donors. But American elections have been expensive for a long time. Measured as a share of GDP, the presidential election of 1896 saw more spending than the four next-most expensive presidential elections combined. (The year before that campaign Mark Hanna, a senator, had said: "There are two things that are important in politics. One is money and I can't remember what the other one is.")