History 7/2010 President Obama on Citizens United: "Imagine the Power This Will Give Special Interests Over Politicians

[Passages]

It seems appropriate to look at our history while witnessing events today. Musk is funneling $45 million a month to Trump, out in the open. Who else is funding him we don't even know about yet? This is why I believe we must expand SCOTUS.


JULY 26, 2010 AT 3:07 PM ET BY JESSE LEE


With a Senate vote tomorrow on legislation to undo some of the damage from the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the President laid out the stakes in no uncertain terms:

A vote to oppose these reforms is nothing less than a vote to allow corporate and special interest takeovers of our elections. It is damaging to our democracy. It is precisely what led a Republican President named Theodore Roosevelt to tackle this issue a century ago.

As the President discussed in his State of the Union address months ago, this decision essentially opened the floodgates for the influence of huge corporations, including foreign-owned corporations, on our elections. Speaking in the Rose Garden, the President explained what this new limitless flow of undisclosed money will mean:

They can buy millions of dollars worth of TV ads –- and worst of all, they don’t even have to reveal who’s actually paying for the ads. Instead, a group can hide behind a name like “Citizens for a Better Future,” even if a more accurate name would be “Companies for Weaker Oversight.” These shadow groups are already forming and building war chests of tens of millions of dollars to influence the fall elections.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/07/26/president-obama-citizens-united-imagine-power-will-give-special-interests-over-polit

[travelingthrulife]

1. I vividly remember that state of the union speech

I remember the scoundrel Alito angrily shaking his head and saying 'Nope". Well, here we are and Alito could not be more thrilled.

[Igel]

2. I read something interesting about ad purchases and effect on electorate.

Somebody looked at ad purchases in some market (details aren't important). The Trump/Biden polling had been fairly stable before a lot of ads airing for a month.

Then they looked at the polling afterwards. They concluded that the millions in ad purchases moved the needle 0.016% (0.017%?). Trivial, unless the margin of victory is not just paper, but onion-paper thin.

Elsewhere, ads had a bigger effect--not huge, but at least an order of magnitude larger.

Conclusion: If the electorate pretty much already knows what it thinks is important then the ads fall on deaf ears. If the candidate on either side is mostly or largely unknown then ads can have an effect (pointing out that campaigns typically spend a lot of money on focus groups to see which ads actually have an effect--some are viewed negatively by the target group, some positively, some are met with .)

This was linked to and reliably reported in another, derive article, which went on to say two things. (Citing research without a link is asking for my disbelief and resentment for wasting my time, whether I like the conclusions or don't, and now I wish I'd kept either link. But I'm too unmotivated right now to search for either.)

1. Just to find the ads that might matter costs beaucoup $. Then running them costs money, but it's only worth it if the needle is moveable.

2. Biden and Trump have needles that are pretty much frozen, given polling, at least in a way that the easy ads (positive or negative) are likely to affect. However, Harris or another (D) candidate *would* be (largely/mostly) unknown and so the ads could possibly move the needle.