Are the mega-rich controlling the presidential election?

by philg

Last weekend, I spent some time in the company of at least 4800 “mega-rich”:

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(The hotel in Chicago has more than 1600 rooms.)

Are the mega-rich controlling the 2016 presidential election?

“Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race” (New York Times, February 1, 2016) shows that Hillary Clinton has raised more than twice as much as Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush is the top choice of rich Republican-oriented donors. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has spent less than nearly all other candidates and raised $0 from “Super PACS.”

Now the results from Iowa are available. The voters were equally fond of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Jeb Bush received less than 3 percent of the vote.

Are the mega-rich controlling the election in some other way that isn’t measured by candidate fundraising and/or PAC spending? Or is it safe to say that Americans are not reliable puppets for the Koch brothers and the Clintons’ Wall Street and Silicon Valley friends?

[Separately, it seems that there is no reason to abandon my policy of (mostly) ignoring Donald Trump. He attracted less than 25 percent of one party’s vote and if any of the professional politicians quit the race their supporters will presumably be most likely to choose another professional politician, e.g., Ted Cruz. Maybe readers can explain why so many Americans, and even a lot of Europeans, wanted to talk about Trump-the-Candidate 24/7.]

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4 thoughts on “Are the mega-rich controlling the presidential election?”

  1. > explain why so many Americans, and even a lot of Europeans, wanted to talk about Trump-the-Candidate

    Immigration, duh. You can believe them. They were pretty clear about what they were agitated over on both sides. The billionaires and the elites of both parties (and the corporate establishment all over the world) want borders porous to labor and goods. When trump says: We wouldn’t even be talking about immigration if I hadn’t brought it up. Well, that’s absolutely true. The establishment doesn’t want it raised in a serious way, but the majority of the population is deeply concerned about it.

    It’s about the implicit white identity of America and particularly the Republican party. You have a lot of people who don’t like the plan of a minority white America, and you have a lot of people freaked about deviating from that in-place plan.

  2. We have to get past Iowa and New Hampshire for the effects of funding become more apparent. Those two early states pride themselves on being “retail”, they wish to see a candidate in person. In later contests it simply isn’t possible for candidates to be seen by a large slice of the voting public in person. At that point purchased TV ads become much more influential and hence the money that buys them.

  3. bobbybobbob, you raise an interesting point, but nearly every treatment of immigration I come across paints it as a race issue. I wish people on all sides could allow for people like me, who couldn’t care less what race or color the ILLEGAL immigrants are, but, instead, care very deeply that this “immigration” is ILLEGAL. And, further, and more importantly, I see the office of PotUS being able to choose to enforce these laws or not, depending on his attitude about it. To me, this is a full-stop Constitutional crises.

    Basically, the ONE job the PotUS ACTUALLY has, under the Constitution, is to protect the borders, and it’s the ONE job Obama has SPECIFICALLY said he will NOT do. Change the Constitution, or change immigration law. Let a billion people come to the country per year, but do it intentionally, and by the book. I don’t care if that puts me in the minority. What I care about is that the Presidency has become a sovereignty, with so much power that he is effectively writing new laws at his whim. So much for checks and balances. That’s EXACTLY NOT like the Constitution was written, nor why or how this country was founded.

    If someone were to found a new country today, I still think our Constitution would make a great starting point (with stuff about social welfare, guns, and privacy made more clear). Tell you what: they could have ours; we’re not using it.

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