Political Campaing of the USA
An American citizen cannot be elected to Congress or the White House without a multi-million dollar election campaign. Such a person is forced to borrow money from businessmen so that he can pay political dividends to sponsors within the whole period of a political career. Presidential candidates are generally forbidden to take money directly from corporations.
However, there are many legitimate mechanisms for processing these investments. For example, a company gives money to a candidate in the form of private donations from their employees (by law, every US citizen can donate up to $2,700 to a presidential candidate). In addition, businessmen can conduct parallel election campaigns.
In the USA, there is so-called Political action committee (Super-PAC), which is not limited by law either in the matter of attracting money from corporations, or in the question of their spending to support one or another candidate.
Finally, according to the decision of the Supreme Court adopted in 2010, companies and trade unions have the right to freely spend money on supporting or criticizing presidential candidates, and they are not obliged to publish data on the amounts spent.
Donald Trump Campaign
The pre-election “wallet” of the Republican candidate Donald Trump is modest in size.
During the entire campaign, an eccentric billionaire, according to The New York Times, by the end of June had collected only 67 million dollars, of which 64.5 million were the budget of his headquarters (some of them were attracted in the form of loan funds) and only 2.5 million came from subcommittees.
For comparison: his main opponent Ted Cruz scored $158 million (92.5 million – his fund and 65.5 million – super committees). 40% of these investments came from the state of Texas considering one of the centers of Republican business. Jeb Bush, who retired after the primaries in Florida in mid-March 2016, managed to gather up $162 million by this time. He was generally the favorite of the Republican sponsors in this campaign – his fund amounted to only $35 million, while the budget of the supporting super committees amounted to $127 million.
Now Trump’s headquarters is building a new financial strategy and trying to attract new funds, however, even though Mike Pence was chosen by his partner as close to financial circles and Trump’s appointment as the only and unique Republican presidential candidate, the sponsors are in no hurry to grant their donations.
Apparently, at the end of the election campaign, Trump will deliver an anti-record in terms of the number of funds collected among the race favorites for the last few election cycles.
Fortunately for Trump, he can save funds. So, he does not need to spend millions of dollars on advertising – even farmers from Iowa and surfers from Hawaii know an eccentric billionaire.
Trump does not need to buy airtime and pay for the articles of journalists – they themselves catch every word of an eccentric billionaire. When you watch cable broadcasts, many of them are one 100% full of Trump.
Finally, Trump, in case of urgent need, can always get money out of his own pocket – his fortune is estimated at about $4.5 billion. And this comparative financial independence gives a hope that in the event of Trump victory he will not be obliged to pay political dividends to American corporations.
However, to become a president means, first of all, to reach the White House, to overcome the disbalance among the Republicans and the powerful political and administrative machine of the Democratic Party. Every candidate should also resist businessmen that fear for the safety of their political investments.