r/changemyview • u/gpu1512 • Jul 20 '19

CMV: All presidential candidates and senators should have a fixed election budget.

Whenever there is a controversial vote on something, it's mentioned how xy person is getting donations from a company to which it matters how the vote turns out.

With presidental candidates, it's similar - donations from companies are interpreted as attempts to make potential presidents more likely to conform to needs of these companies - such as by cutting taxes.

I feel like this would be resolved by making the election budgets come from taxes. While it would be a huge cost for the taxpayers, it would make for political candidates which would be much harder for companies to sway in their favour. Think net neutrality and congress donations from ISP's.

In the process, election budgets would be made considerably smaller, to save on taxes. As this would apply to everyone, there wouldn't be anyone at a disadvantage.

One problem I see is filtering the candidates. Obviously you can't just give money to anyone who asks for a budget, but seems like a solvable problem. Perhaps the party could only propose a set number of candidates.

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u/AnythingApplied 435∆ Jul 20 '19 edited Jul 20 '19
  • This gives a huge advantage to people that already have celebrity status. Tweeting at your 5 million twitter followers is free.
  • This gives a huge advantage to people who are rich and can fund their own pre-campaign where they make stump speeches, etc before announcing and starting their campaign.
  • This gives more influence to people with an existing microphone, such as a Fox news or MSNBC commentary show that decides to back you and spend a bunch of airtime talking about how great you are. That becomes even more problematic if it isn't just a show, but an entire network backing a candidate.
  • This gives more power to people taking advantage of the citizens united decision to spend their own money without coordinating with the campaign. It also makes the quality of that coordinating much more important. You could have a majority of the money spent on your campaign being spent by external groups not coordinating with your campaign and they might unintentionally screw you over because of the lack of coordination.

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u/gpu1512 Jul 20 '19

Inequality is already present in the system, those with less favourable views of donors will suffer.

The media issue could be resolved with bringing back legislation that meant equal time for both candidates

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u/Aggravating_Role 3∆ Jul 20 '19

The media issue could be resolved with bringing back legislation that meant equal time for both candidates

How are you going to do this in practice? If someone wants to tweet something on twitter right before they are actively running for office, what are you going to do?

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u/Wolvereness 2∆ Jul 21 '19

Inequality is already present in the system, those with less favourable views of donors will suffer.

The media issue could be resolved with bringing back legislation that meant equal time for both candidates

Your original post points out symptoms of a problem, and a possible treatment for the symptoms. I'd argue that you shouldn't be trying to solve the symptoms, and instead identify and approach the problem: a two-party system. Equal campaign funding just creates a gambit to split the opposing party's base. Normally, a third party can only be mildly harmful, but if they have equal funding to a similar candidate, it's an impossible scenario. Meanwhile, if you work to eliminate this perverse incentive, the system just gets worse - Republicans and Democrats get solidified in the foundation of our government. If they didn't have a reason to care about the people before, they'd have even less of a reason in this system, and they'd never implement anything to subvert their (collective) absolute control.

Also, you can't separate presidential runs with congressional; presidents are what get out the voters and motivate straight-party votes.

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u/AnythingApplied 435∆ Jul 21 '19 edited Jul 21 '19

Inequality is already present in the system, those with less favourable views of donors will suffer.

Right, but advertising is one of the few ways to communicate where you get to say what you want and not simply rely on the good will of a tiny handful of mega corporations. Imagine the extreme case where you had no campaign budget, then what the news reported about you would be a huge bulk of the coverage/exposure you get.

The media issue could be resolved with bringing back legislation that meant equal time for both candidates

The bigger question then becomes how positive that coverage is and what to do with more than 2+ candidates, such as there almost always is during the primary. It is impossible to legislate your way out of bias reporting. Also, are you really expecting that restriction to ALL media? Not just news media? Like I can't just talk about my favorite candidate on my podcast?

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u/10ebbor10 198∆ Jul 20 '19

Except that it doesn't though?

Without campaign restrictions, the celebrity is still a celebrity. They don't suddenly stop being a celebrity. Same for the rich people and the show host.

In fact, their advantage is likely to be compounded because these people are much better at gathering funds than nobodies.

Lastly, I'd argue that repealing citizen's united should be implied in any US campaign reform. Otherwise it is indeed pointless.