Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's important not to limit the amount of their own money that candidates can spend, but to give other people access to enough money to run competitive races.
There's no doubt that there's a public backlash against the way campaign money is raised, but I don't think the only alternative is to elect people with money.
Unfortunately, money in politics is an insidious thing - and a loophole in our campaign finance system was taken advantage of with money going to existing or new 527 groups with the sole purpose of influencing the election.
People have their constitutional right to contribute to a campaign and if they have discretionary money that they want to contribute to a candidate, whether a Republican or a Democrat, they should be able to do so.
Politicians are trying to attract people to issues.
If you create a system that makes the small donors the linchpin of the system in terms of how members of Congress directly raise the funds for their campaigns, then it gives everyday citizens much more of a role - a leveraging role - in the funding of those campaigns.
Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote.
What happens traditionally in a campaign is they will go out to their list once or twice a week to raise money from their fund-raisers, but when a candidate gets to a general election, you get some donor fatigue because they've already maxed out their campaign to give.
Elections are a competition with only one winner. Giving more money to the opponent every time one speaks on behalf of a favored candidate discourages the speech that triggers the matching funds.
The reality is that asking the public to fund political campaigns accomplishes nothing. Candidates continue to seek interest-group support through other channels, both financial and in-kind, and corruption problems abound.