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Supporters say the strategy is crafted to avoid clashing with the Citizens United v. FEC ruling, which held that corporate election spending is protected by the First Amendment.
Citizens United is usually one of the things that Dems, for some reason, keep blaming when they lose general or an issue elections, just as "media" and "SOROS!!" and some other predictable things the Reps blame on their losses - because it's easier than examining, let alone admitting, the actual reasons for bad elections results.
With or without CU, "money = free political speech" has been the fact of political life before, and even more so in the digital information age, which slightly predates the CU decision in 2010.
The days of knocking on doors for GOTV, that mostly benefited the unions, have been going away in most (at least, non-rural) locales - you can't stop people from becoming "influencers" and "sharing" their opinions on ex-Twitter, YT, TT, and multitude of blogs and boards, from which the information (and misinformation) flows.
In fact, misinformation/disinformation campaigns by the bad actors, like Russia (Operation Overload aka Matryoshka / Storm-1679, Storm-1516 etc.), Qatar, Iran, would be a lot more difficult to counter without CU, as those expenditures are not bound by any laws.
www.wired.com - A Pro-Russia Disinformation Campaign Is Using Free AI Tools to Fuel a 'Content Explosion' -
Consumer-grade AI tools have supercharged Russian-aligned disinformation as pictures, videos, QR codes, and fake websites have proliferated. - 2025-07-01
www.sgdsn.gouv.fr - Matryoshka - Operation Overload - Storm-1679 - A pro-Russian campaign targeting media and fact-checking community
In the last several elections (2026, 2024, 2020, 2016) the side with the substantial money advantage lost or didn't do as well as could be explained by the dollars spent - the decisive factors were the [exceptionally poor] quality of the candidates (Hillary Clinton, Biden-2020/2024, Harris-2024) and their campaigns.
Harris had $1B, the expenditure of which still seems unexplained, even after a 1-year "post-mortem", Trump and RNC had $500+M in the bank while DNC was broke, Musk spent $500M or so on several campaigns, including TX... and the results of that were dismal.
So the excess of money isn't at all the guarantor of victory... in fact, most of this money is poorly spent - watching 300 stupid commercials in the course of campaign (as opposed to 200, 100?) doesn't usually change people's opinion when they usually make one after a few early "infomercials" or actually read about candidate and props in more details, or discuss them on boards.
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#27 | Posted by visitor
Why hasn't Trump pulled out all the stops towards subverting the recent elections?
Because the American people did what they needed to do: turned out in the millions required to scare that bully silly.
Is Trump done with his maliciousness? Of course not.
But we just shot him in both legs, so it's a lot harder.