“Money, like water, will always find an outlet”
In 2003, the Supreme Court heard the case of McConnell v Federal Election Commission, a challenge to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, a law that had tightened the rules on political donations and campaign advertising. In the joint opinion of Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor, upholding most of the Act, the Court observed:
“Money, like water, will always find an outlet.”
This single line has become one of the most quoted phrases in the study of American campaign finance (the raising and spending of money to fight elections). It captures a pattern that runs through the whole history of the subject: whenever the federal government has tightened the rules on political money, whether after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, after the BCRA of 2002, or after later Supreme Court rulings, new channels have generally opened up to let money flow into politics by other means. The tables below set out the scale of this money, where it has come from, and what it has been spent on.
The rising cost of running for president
Modern rules on presidential campaign finance date from the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1974, passed in the wake of Watergate (in which illegal corporate donations to Richard Nixon’s campaign played a central part). FECA introduced limits on contributions, required public disclosure of donations, and created a system of public funding for candidates who agreed to spending limits in return. Since then, the cost of presidential elections has grown enormously, particularly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC (2010), which allowed corporations, trade unions and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums independently of a candidate. Note that figures before 2008 mostly cover candidates’ own spending under the old public funding limits, while figures from 2008 onwards include the much larger sums spent independently by parties and outside groups, so the two periods are not directly comparable. None of the figures below are adjusted for inflation (the general rise in prices over time).
| Election year | Approximate total spending | Context |
| 1976 | $66.9 million | First election held under FECA 1974. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the first nominees to run under the new system, each accepting a $21.8 million general election grant instead of raising money privately |
| 1980 | $92.3 million | Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter; independent candidate John Anderson later qualified for a retroactive public grant of over $4 million after winning more than 5% of the vote |
| 1984 | $103.6 million | Reagan’s landslide re-election victory over Walter Mondale; both campaigns operated under the public funding system’s spending limits |
| 1988 | $210.7 million | Sharp rise driven partly by television advertising, including the notorious “Willie Horton” attack adverts targeting Michael Dukakis, funded not by the Bush campaign itself but by an independent group, the National Security PAC |
| 1992 | $192.2 million | Independent candidate Ross Perot spent an estimated $65 million of his own fortune challenging George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton |
| 1996 | $239.9 million | Bill Clinton and Bob Dole both accepted public funding for the general election; Ross Perot, running again for the Reform Party, qualified for a $29 million public grant based on his strong 1992 showing |
| 2000 | $343.1 million | George W. Bush became the first modern candidate to decline primary matching funds, freeing his campaign from the spending limits attached to them |
| 2004 | $1.02 billion | First presidential contest to pass $1 billion, and the last covered mainly by candidate committees, party conventions and public funds; Democrats Howard Dean and John Kerry joined Bush in turning down public funding so as to avoid its spending limits |
| 2008 | $2.4 billion | Figures from this point onwards include parties and outside spending alongside candidates. Barack Obama declined public funding for the general election; John McCain accepted the grant, worth around $84 million, becoming the last major-party nominee to do so |
| 2012 | $2.6 billion | First election after Citizens United v FEC (2010); rapid growth of Super PACs, including Restore Our Future backing Mitt Romney and Priorities USA Action backing Obama |
| 2016 | $2.4 billion | Donald Trump put around $66 million of his own money into his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, before relying more heavily on donor funding in the general election |
| 2020 | $5.7 billion | The most expensive presidential race to that point, driven by record small-donor fundraising through platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed, alongside record outside spending |
| 2024 | $5.5 billion | Kamala Harris’s campaign raised over $1 billion within about three months of entering the race after Joe Biden withdrew in July 2024, the fastest any presidential campaign has reached that total |
Figures are approximate and drawn from Federal Election Commission (FEC) and OpenSecrets data; see sources below.
The pattern in the table is hard to miss, and comes down to a small number of turning points:
- Spending crept upwards gradually across the last quarter of the twentieth century, staying under $350 million as late as 2000.
- It then leapt after 2000, once leading candidates began turning down public funding altogether: public money came with strict spending caps attached, so a candidate confident of raising more privately had every incentive to opt out.
- Barack Obama took this furthest in 2008, becoming the first major-party nominee to decline public funding for the general election itself; no nominee from either major party has accepted it since.
- The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC pushed the total higher still from 2012 onwards, by allowing Super PACs to raise and spend without limit alongside the official campaigns.
| Check your understanding 1. Using the table, explain why the figures for total spending look so different before and after 2008. 2. Identify two named candidates from the table who financed part of their own campaign from personal wealth. 3. “The public funding system created in 1974 has essentially collapsed.” Find one piece of evidence in the table that supports this claim, and one detail that complicates it. |
Where does the money come from?
Presidential campaigns are funded from a mixture of sources, and the balance between them has shifted considerably since the 1970s, particularly away from public funding and towards outside spending by independent groups.
| Source | What it means | Notes |
| Small individual donors | Ordinary supporters giving modest sums, often online (typically under $200 in total) | Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign pioneered large-scale online small-donor fundraising; Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns built on this, reporting an average donation of around $27 |
| Large individual donors | Wealthier individuals giving close to the legal maximum permitted per candidate | Remains the largest source of money given directly to candidates themselves, for example an individual giving the current maximum of $3,500 to Donald Trump’s or Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign committee |
| Political Action Committees (PACs) | Organisations, often linked to businesses, trade unions or interest groups, that pool members’ donations to give to candidates | Contributions are capped by federal law at $5,000 per candidate per election, for example from a corporate PAC or a trade union PAC such as the AFL-CIO’s |
| Super PACs and other outside groups | Independent groups that may raise and spend unlimited sums on adverts and campaigning, provided they do not coordinate directly with a candidate | Made possible by the Citizens United v FEC and SpeechNow.org v FEC rulings of 2010; in 2024, Future Forward (backing Kamala Harris) and Make America Great Again Inc. (backing Donald Trump) each spent hundreds of millions of dollars independently |
| Party committees | National and state party organisations, such as the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee | Fund both direct spending and spending coordinated with a candidate, such as each committee’s support for its own presidential ticket |
| Public funding | Matching funds for primary candidates and grants for the general election, financed by a voluntary checkbox on federal tax returns | Effectively abandoned by major-party candidates since 2008; John McCain remains the last nominee to accept a general election grant, worth around $84 million |
| Candidate self-funding | Money that candidates give to their own campaigns from personal wealth | Notable examples include Ross Perot (1992), Donald Trump, who put around $66 million into his 2016 primary campaign, and Michael Bloomberg (2020) |
Figures and definitions drawn from OpenSecrets and FEC guidance; see sources below.
Two trends sit side by side here, pulling in opposite directions:
- Online fundraising has made small donations far more significant than they were even a decade ago, letting candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama build large war chests from millions of modest contributions.
- At the same time, an ever smaller number of extremely wealthy donors have gained outsized influence through Super PACs. In the 2024 election, for example, the businessman Elon Musk alone gave an estimated $277 million to Donald Trump and allied Republican groups, more than the entire cost of some full presidential elections in the 1980s.
- Public funding, the system Congress built after Watergate to prevent exactly this kind of dependence on wealthy backers, has been left far behind by both trends.
| Check your understanding 1. In your own words, explain the difference between hard money and soft money. 2. Explain how a Super PAC is legally different from a Political Action Committee (PAC). 3. Why might a candidate end up more dependent on a single Super PAC than on thousands of small donors, even if the small donors give more money in total? |
What is the money spent on?
Campaigns divide their spending across several broad categories, although candidates are not required to report disbursements in a single standard format, so exact national totals for each category are difficult to establish precisely.
| Category of spending | What it covers | Notes |
| Advertising (television, radio and digital) | Adverts bought to reach voters through broadcast media, streaming services and online platforms | Usually the single largest category of spending in a modern presidential campaign |
| Staff and consultants | Salaries and fees for campaign managers, communications teams, strategists and pollsters | |
| Field operations | Canvassing, phone banks and data operations used to identify and turn out supporters on election day | Often referred to informally as the “ground game” or get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort |
| Polling and research | Surveys and opposition research used to guide campaign strategy and messaging | |
| Fundraising costs | Expenses involved in raising money itself, such as events, direct mail and digital fundraising platforms | |
| Administration and overheads | Office costs, travel, technology and legal or compliance costs, including ensuring the campaign follows Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules |
Categories are illustrative and based on standard accounts of how presidential campaigns allocate spending; see sources below.
Whatever its source, most of this money ends up being spent on reaching voters rather than on running the campaign itself:
- Television advertising has traditionally taken the largest single share of campaign spending.
- Digital advertising has narrowed the gap considerably since the 2010s, as campaigns have followed voters onto social media and streaming platforms.
- Behind the adverts sits a much larger, less visible operation: hundreds of paid staff, pollsters and local organisers, whose task is to turn persuasion on a screen into votes cast on election day.
Taken together, the three tables above help to explain why the Stevens and O’Connor line has proved so durable:
- Each attempt to close off a route for political money (the FECA limits of 1974, the BCRA restrictions of 2002) has, sooner or later, been followed by the opening of a new one, whether that is the abandonment of public funding or the rise of the Super PAC.
- It is this recurring pattern of regulation and circumvention (finding a legal way around a rule) that we turn to next, alongside the legislation and court rulings that have shaped it.
| Check your understanding 1. List three categories of campaign spending, giving one concrete example of each. 2. Explain why “regulation and circumvention” is a useful phrase for summarising the history of US campaign finance so far. |
Analysing and evaluating campaign finance reform, 1974 to the present
The problem set out by Justices Stevens and O’Connor is, at heart, a clash between two goals that the American constitutional system has never fully reconciled. The first is the wish to limit the corrupting influence, or the appearance of corrupting influence, that large sums of money can have over elected officials, the concern that drove Congress to act after the Watergate scandal. The second is the First Amendment’s protection of free political speech, which the courts have repeatedly interpreted as covering not just what a candidate or donor says, but how much they are permitted to spend saying it. Reformers have spent fifty years trying to restrict the first without falling foul of the second, and, as the timeline below shows, each new rule has tended to produce a new way around it. Four terms recur throughout this story:
| Key terms Hard money: donations that are raised and spent within the contribution limits and disclosure rules set out in federal election law. For example, an individual may currently give up to $3,500 to a presidential candidate’s official campaign committee per election (so $7,000 across the primary and general election combined), a limit the FEC adjusts periodically for inflation. Soft money: money that was raised and spent outside these federal limits, typically donated to a political party for generic “party-building” activity, such as voter registration drives or general advertising, rather than to a named candidate. For example, before this practice was banned by BCRA in 2002, a corporation could give an unlimited sum directly to a national party committee. Political Action Committees (PACs): organisations, often linked to a business, trade union or interest group, that pool contributions from their members in order to donate directly to candidates. Contributions from PACs to a candidate remain capped by federal law, currently at $5,000 per candidate per election, a limit that has not risen since 1974. Super PACs: independent expenditure-only committees that may raise and spend unlimited sums from individuals, corporations and trade unions, provided they do not coordinate directly with a candidate’s campaign. For example, groups such as Priorities USA Action and Make America Great Again Inc. have each spent tens of millions of dollars independently supporting their preferred presidential candidate, with no legal ceiling on the total. |
| Year | Reform attempt | What it did | Outcome |
| 1974 | Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) Amendments | Created the FEC (Federal Election Commission); introduced contribution limits, spending limits and disclosure rules; set up voluntary public funding for primaries, conventions and the general election | Passed directly in response to the Watergate scandal; key parts struck down two years later |
| 1976 | Buckley v Valeo (Supreme Court) | Upheld contribution limits, disclosure and voluntary public funding, but struck down mandatory spending limits and limits on independent expenditure and candidates’ self-funding | Established that spending money on political speech is itself a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment |
| 1979 | Further FECA amendments and FEC rulings | Simplified disclosure requirements; allowed parties to raise unlimited “soft money” for generic party-building activity | Soft money grew from about $19 million in 1980 to roughly $487 million by 2000 |
| 2002 | Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, “McCain-Feingold”) | Banned national parties from raising or spending soft money; restricted corporate and trade union funding of “electioneering communications” shortly before an election | Upheld, in large part, the following year |
| 2003 | McConnell v Federal Election Commission (Supreme Court) | Upheld BCRA’s soft money ban and its restriction on electioneering communications | Source of the “money, like water” quotation; later substantially overturned |
| 2004 | Rise of 527 groups | Nominally independent, tax-exempt groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised large sums by avoiding explicit “vote for” or “vote against” language | Swift Boat Veterans alone raised over $25 million to campaign against Senator John Kerry |
| 2010 | Citizens United v FEC (Supreme Court) | Ruled that corporations and trade unions may spend unlimited sums independently of a candidate, as a form of protected political speech | Overturned the electioneering communications restriction upheld in McConnell |
| 2010 | SpeechNow.org v FEC (Court of Appeals, DC Circuit) | Struck down limits on contributions to groups that only make independent expenditures | Created the Super PAC, alongside Citizens United |
| 2010 and 2012 | DISCLOSE Act (proposed) | Would have required disclosure of large donors funding independent political adverts | Blocked twice by Senate filibuster (59–41 in 2010; 51–44 in 2012) |
| 2014 | McCutcheon v FEC (Supreme Court) | Struck down the aggregate limit on the total amount an individual could give across all candidates and committees combined | Limits on how much a donor may give to any single candidate remained in place |
| 2014 | Congress ends convention public funding | Redirected the public money previously used to fund party nominating conventions towards paediatric medical research | Left only primary matching funds and the general election grant, both largely unused by then |
| 2019 and 2021 | For the People Act (H.R.1) | Would have created a voluntary small-donor matching system and stronger donor disclosure rules | Passed the House of Representatives twice; failed a Senate cloture vote 50–50 in 2021 |
| 2021 | Freedom to Vote Act | A narrower bill including donor disclosure rules and public financing for House of Representatives campaigns | Failed a Senate procedural vote, 49–51 |
| 1996 onwards | State and city-level alternatives (Maine, Arizona, New York City, New York State) | “Clean Elections” and small-donor matching schemes provide full or matching public funding outside the federal system | Show that reform remains possible below the federal level, even where federal reform has stalled |
| 2026 | NRSC v FEC (Supreme Court) | Struck down federal limits on how much a political party may spend in coordination with its own candidates, overturning FEC v Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001) | Decided 30 June 2026; parties may now spend without limit alongside their candidates, though limits on contributions to parties themselves remain in place |
Dates, case citations and figures drawn from Ballotpedia, Justia, Oyez, FEC.gov, the Brennan Center for Justice, OpenSecrets and Congress.gov; see sources below.
| Check your understanding 1. Explain the significance of Buckley v Valeo for later attempts to regulate campaign spending. 2. Choose one reform from the timeline and explain how it was later undermined or worked around. 3. Why has the Federal Election Commission (FEC) struggled to enforce campaign finance law effectively? |
Case study: PACs, Super PACs and hybrid PACs in recent presidential elections
The Key terms box above defines Political Action Committees (PACs), Super PACs and, implicitly, a third and less familiar vehicle: the hybrid PAC, also called a Carey Committee after the 2011 court case that created it (Carey v FEC). A hybrid PAC runs two separate bank accounts side by side, one that behaves exactly like a connected PAC, giving limited sums directly to a candidate, and one that behaves exactly like a Super PAC, raising and spending without limit provided it stays independent of the campaign. Comparing all three side by side, across three different presidential elections, shows how far outside spending has grown since Citizens United v FEC and how little the precise legal label now seems to matter:
| Type | Legal position | Example (presidential election) | Scale |
| Connected PAC | May give directly to a candidate’s campaign, but capped at $5,000 per candidate per election, a limit that has not risen since 1974 | A corporate or trade union PAC giving the maximum $5,000 to a presidential candidate’s campaign committee | Individually small; there are thousands of registered PACs, but none may give a candidate more than the cap |
| Super PAC | May raise and spend unlimited sums, but only independently of a candidate, with no direct contributions and no coordination | Restore Our Future (pro-Romney) and Priorities USA Action (pro-Obama), 2012 | Restore Our Future spent $142.1 million; Priorities USA Action spent $65.2 million |
| Super PAC | As above | Make America Great Again Inc. (pro-Trump), 2024 | Raised $410.5 million and spent around $376.9 million, including $251.7 million opposing Kamala Harris directly |
| Hybrid PAC (Carey Committee) | Runs two separate bank accounts: one operating as a capped connected PAC, the other as an unlimited Super PAC | Future Forward (pro-Harris), 2024 | Raised over $950 million and spent around $517 million on the presidential race, the largest single-candidate outside group in US history |
Figures drawn from FEC filings as reported by OpenSecrets, the Brennan Center for Justice and Ballotpedia; see sources below.
Three points stand out from this comparison:
- The gap between a connected PAC and the other two vehicles has widened enormously since 1974: a connected PAC’s $5,000 cap has not moved in fifty years, while Super PACs and hybrid PACs now each raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars per election.
- The legal distinction between a Super PAC and a hybrid PAC made little practical difference to the scale of spending in 2024: Make America Great Again Inc. (a pure Super PAC) and Future Forward (a hybrid PAC) both ran operations costing several hundred million dollars, each dominant on its side of the race.
- Both leading 2024 campaigns became dependent on a single outside group of this kind, funded in turn by a small number of very large donors, such as Timothy Mellon’s $150 million gift to Make America Great Again Inc., which is itself the pattern that concerned Congress when it first legislated in 1974.
| Check your understanding 1. Explain the difference between a Super PAC and a hybrid PAC. 2. Using the case study, assess how far the legal distinction between different types of outside group actually limits the amount of money reaching a presidential election. |
Judged against its own original aims, this history supports two quite different conclusions, and A-level students are expected to weigh both rather than simply pick one:
Reform has largely failed to control money in politics
- Each rule has closed one channel only for the money to reopen another: soft money after Buckley v Valeo, 527 groups after BCRA, and Super PACs and “dark money” (political spending whose ultimate donor is not disclosed) after Citizens United and SpeechNow.org.
- The public funding system Congress designed in 1974, meant to reduce candidates’ dependence on private donors, has been turned down by every major-party nominee since 2008, and Congress itself ended convention funding altogether in 2014.
- The FEC, the very body created in 1974 to enforce these rules, is a six-member commission split evenly between the two parties and needs four votes to act; researchers have found that around 40 per cent of its enforcement votes deadlocked between 2017 and 2020.
- More recent attempts at reform, including the DISCLOSE Act and the For the People Act, have repeatedly failed to pass Congress, generally along party lines.
The system may be working broadly as the Constitution requires
- Since Buckley v Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court has consistently treated spending on political speech, though not direct contributions, as protected by the First Amendment, on the grounds that limiting how much a person or group may spend restricts their ability to communicate a political message.
- Direct contribution limits, which the Court views as posing the clearest risk of corruption, remain in place and have not been struck down by any of the rulings above.
- Disclosure requirements, upheld in both Buckley v Valeo and Citizens United v FEC, mean that most political spending, dark money being the significant exception, is publicly recorded.
- On this reading, the answer to persistent loopholes is not more restriction, which the courts are likely to strike down again, but better disclosure, so that voters can judge the influence of money for themselves.
On balance, the case study above tips the argument towards the first interpretation. Future Forward alone raised over $950 million in 2024, more than the combined cost of every presidential election held between 1976 and 1996. This suggests that the precise legal label attached to a channel for political money, hard money, soft money, a connected PAC, a Super PAC or a hybrid PAC, matters less in practice than the underlying principle established in Buckley v Valeo: that spending money on political speech is constitutionally protected, and is therefore extremely difficult to cap. Fifty years of reform have repeatedly succeeded in relabelling the channels through which political money flows, and in forcing more of it into the open through disclosure, but they have not yet succeeded in reducing the total amount flowing through them.
The internet and campaign finance
The internet has changed campaign finance in two directions at once. On one hand, it has widened participation by letting candidates raise very large sums directly from ordinary supporters, bypassing the traditional PAC and major-donor networks described above. On the other, it has opened a new and less regulated channel for exactly the kind of undisclosed spending that reformers have tried to close off since 1974.
- Online fundraising platforms now handle small-dollar giving at a scale unimaginable a generation ago. In the 2024 cycle, the Democratic platform ActBlue processed around $3.8 billion in donations, and the Republican equivalent, WinRed, around $1.7 billion, figures that dwarf the entire cost of any presidential election held before the 2000s. This pattern was pioneered by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and taken furthest by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, whose average donation was reported at $27.
- Small-dollar fundraising is not evenly spread through a campaign, however: it tends to cluster around short, highly publicised moments. Kamala Harris’s campaign, for example, raised nearly $50 million within seven hours of her 2024 launch, largely through ActBlue. This suggests the internet has changed the timing and visibility of giving as much as who gives.
- Digital advertising has also grown into a major and less transparent category of spending. Political advertisers spent an estimated $1.9 billion on online adverts across the major platforms during the 2024 cycle, and digital advertising can be microtargeted (tailored to narrow audiences using personal data) in a way that television advertising, still subject to long-standing federal disclosure rules, cannot.
- Because online political advertising is not subject to the same disclosure rules as broadcast television, it has become a growing route for dark money. In the 2024 cycle, groups that do not disclose their donors spent more than $281 million on online adverts without reporting that spending to the FEC at all.
Taken together, this suggests the internet has not resolved the tension between free political speech and the risk of corruption that runs through this whole topic; it has simply moved a growing share of both small-dollar democracy and undisclosed dark money onto a platform that 1970s-era campaign finance law was never designed to regulate.
| Check your understanding 1. Explain how online platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed have changed the way presidential campaigns raise money. 2. To what extent has the internet made political spending in the USA more transparent, or less? |
Conclusion: money, water and 2026
Does money still find a way through in 2026? On 30 June 2026, the Supreme Court answered this question again, in real time. In NRSC v FEC, the Court struck down the federal limit on how much a political party may spend in coordination with its own candidates, overturning FEC v Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001), a limit Congress had relied on for a quarter of a century. Coordinated party spending had been one of the last channels still subject to a meaningful federal cap; it no longer is. The chronology in this document can therefore be read, quite literally, up to the week in which it was written: the pattern Stevens and O’Connor described in 2003 has continued for more than twenty years since, and was still operating a month before this document was completed.
Is it fair to say that, by 2026, it is essentially all soft money? Not literally. Soft money, in the strict sense, means unlimited donations to a political party for generic party-building activity, and that specific practice has remained banned since BCRA in 2002; the NRSC ruling did not touch it, nor did it alter the separate limits on how much an individual or PAC may give to a party or a candidate directly. But functionally, the description is not far off. The practical effect Congress was trying to prevent in 1974, large sums of money reaching a campaign with no meaningful cap, has re-emerged through a sequence of legally distinct routes: soft money itself, then 527 groups, then Super PACs and hybrid PACs, then dark money, and now unlimited coordinated party spending. None of these is technically “soft money”, yet each has served the same function. The proportion of election money moving through the strictly capped, disclosed “hard money” channel has fallen steadily since 2002, even as the banned label itself has stayed banned.
Are US presidential elections decided simply by whoever spends the most? The evidence is mixed, and this is exactly the kind of claim a good exam answer should be cautious about accepting at face value:
- Barack Obama outspent both John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), and won both elections, a pattern often cited as evidence that money buys victory.
- Yet Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump in 2016 and lost; Michael Bloomberg spent over $1 billion of his own money seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination and won only American Samoa.
- Most strikingly, in 2024 Kamala Harris and her allied groups raised and spent around $2 billion in total, compared with around $1.45 billion supporting Donald Trump, and Trump won.
- Political scientists generally treat the relationship as correlation rather than simple cause and effect: strong, already-popular candidates tend to attract the most donations, meaning donors are often picking likely winners rather than creating them, and beyond a basic competitive threshold, additional spending appears to bring diminishing returns.
On the evidence gathered in this document, money looks close to a necessary condition for a competitive presidential campaign, a candidate with too little of it cannot get a message seen at all, but it is not a sufficient one. It cannot buy a popular message, a disciplined campaign or a favourable political climate, and it has not, in half a century of trying, been brought under lasting control. The water, in short, is still finding its outlet.
“Money, like water, will always find an outlet.”
| Check your understanding 1. “US presidential elections are decided by whoever spends the most.” Evaluate this view, using at least two named examples from this document. 2. Explain what is meant by describing US campaign finance reform as a game of “regulatory whack-a-mole”. 3. Why might voters, courts and legislators disagree about whether the current system is a success or a failure? |
This clash between free political speech and the control of money in elections is one of the sharpest contrasts between the US and UK approaches to politics; it is picked up directly, and set alongside the UK’s capped, disclosed system of party funding, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.
Sources
Federal Election Commission, campaign finance statistics and historical reports (fec.gov)
OpenSecrets, “Cost of Election”, “Presidential Elections” and “Dark Money Basics” (opensecrets.org)
McConnell v Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003)
Buckley v Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976); Citizens United v FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); SpeechNow.org v FEC, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010); McCutcheon v FEC, 572 U.S. 185 (2014); Carey v FEC, 791 F. Supp. 2d 121 (D.D.C. 2011); NRSC v FEC, 609 U.S. ___ (2026)
Federal Election Commission, “Supreme Court finds limits on coordinated party expenditures unconstitutional in NRSC v FEC”, FEC Record, 1 July 2026 (fec.gov)
OpenSecrets, PAC profiles for Restore Our Future, Priorities USA Action, Make America Great Again Inc. and Future Forward (opensecrets.org)
OpenSecrets, “2024 in review: total outside fundraising for presidential candidates”, February 2025 (opensecrets.org)
Bipartisan Policy Center, “Trends in Campaign Financing, 1980–2016” (bipartisanpolicy.org)
Brennan Center for Justice, research and analysis on campaign finance and FEC enforcement (brennancenter.org)
Ballotpedia and Congress.gov, legislative history of FECA, the DISCLOSE Act, the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act