We need to get the big money out of our elections; it turns them into auctions for the 1%.
Only the extraordinary efforts by voters to push back against attempted voter suppression prevented the right from stealing the election. Never again! The right has embarrassed us by holding corrupted elections full of voter suppression and election tampering to an extent that we have criticized very harshly elsewhere.
Thank god for DoJ observers and even for the international observers. Other countries invite them in proudly, to demonstrate their transparency and the integrity of THEIR elections. Shame on the right for their corruption! And to think they have the NERVE to assert as gospel that the left 'steals' elections.
Only the extraordinary efforts by voters to push back against attempted voter suppression prevented the right from stealing the election. Never again! The right has embarrassed us by holding corrupted elections full of voter suppression and election tampering to an extent that we have criticized very harshly elsewhere.
Thank god for DoJ observers and even for the international observers. Other countries invite them in proudly, to demonstrate their transparency and the integrity of THEIR elections. Shame on the right for their corruption! And to think they have the NERVE to assert as gospel that the left 'steals' elections.
Where did you get this poster from Dog? Didn't the spending of the two parties almost mirror each other? The President only won the popular vote by 3 million, the math isn't adding up.
ReplyDeleteI believe this reflects the spending as well by the various PACs. If you add up the amount donated by the millionaires like Adelson and the Koch Brothers, the gap was larger. It is very hard to check the math; I believe this figure made assumptions about spending based on things like tv advertizing purchases, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf you have better numbers, that you can document, please by all means provide them. I'm open to any well-founded corrections.
I'll try. My figures come from this website. http://www.fec.gov/index.shtml
ReplyDeleteObama: $547,931,528.48 http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2012/M10/C00431445.html
Romney: $298,399,266.68 http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2012/M10/C00431171.html
Now these numbers were year to date in October. The reports were submitted on October 20th and 19th. I would like to add that a November report has yet to be submitted from either campaign, but I will be happy to reconfigure the numbers once those reports come in.
These next figures are from this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/who-won-the-popular-vote-2012_n_2087038.html
Obama: 61,173,739 votes
Romney: 58,167,260 votes
I will now divide the amount of money spent as of late October by the number of popular votes.
Obama: $8.95 per vote
Romney: $5.13 per vote
I would like to remind everyone that these numbers WILL change. The November figures are not in yet. Also, my numbers were reached using figures from the two websites I linked to.
So....this seems to very then, based on WHEN you start counting the Romney spending - only the general election, or do you also count the primaries? Romney was definitely running for office during that time period, he was just spending large against other Republicans as much as against Obama.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the FEC (Federal Elections ommission)does NOT count the PAC spending, only direct campaign spending, so as I noted in my earlier comment, even though nominally those PACs were NOT supposed to be coordinated, when you have one of them run by Romney's personal lawyer, the same one who runs his sham-blind-trusts, etc. it's pretty clear that the donations to those were donations to electing Romney, that simply used a tax dodge to avoid full disclosure.
It doesn't make sense to me that Romney, who early on was spending a LOT more than Obama, AND spending it for a much LONGER period comes out that low. While Obama had a lot of successful fund raising the last few months, he did not outraise Romney by all that much, and he was only spending the prior six months before the election, not running ads, mailings, etc. as far back as Romney was.
It all depends on what numbers you use, and I suspect that it would be pretty easy to reach those numbers above if you simply count in the primaries - which is fair to count I think, since it WAS part of running.
But no, I reject the Romney $5.13 per vote; that doesn't make sense, given what I've seen of spending.
The figures for comparison btw has Bachmann spending 12 to 1 against Graves to win. I'm not sure she will ever raise that kind of money ever again, or to win again if she did run.
I think she can see the writing on the wall. It would not surprise me to see her fail to finish out her term of office if she can find a good life boat to jump to, leaving the sinking ship of her congressional career - pulling a Palin. She is all about her personal power and wealth, not the job, and sure as hell not her constituency.
Those figures Dog were based on the general election only. Something does seem off though. I've read quite a few articles about the Billion dollar campaign. They included the fact that Romney and Obama campaign money mirrored each other. I too find it hard to believe that Romney would outspend Obama by that much.
ReplyDeleteI don't find it hard if you look at the huge amounts of money from the billionaires to Romney. I think it looks maybe a little on the high side, but not that much, for what Romney spent. Obama did not have similar PAC funding; pro-Obama PACs were dwarfed by pro-Romney money.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the figures in the above calculations (which I wouldn't take as gospel either, just as a rough approximation) are based on including ad purchases for or against each candidate.