“After a year of fundraising and with just seven weeks until the first contest in Iowa, super-PACs have had little success influencing public opinion, baffling candidates and their donors alike. Trump’s dominance in the polls and free media like TV appearances, combined with a field of more than a dozen candidates, has made it hard to stand out or even to pick a target to attack,” Bloomberg reports.
“Many candidates, wary of costly advertising campaigns that could burn through cash quickly, are now sitting on tens of millions of dollars, concerned that any spending would get lost in the noise.”
Gabriel Sherman: “You’d think buying an election would be easy. This is, after all, the rough pitch that political consultants deliver when persuading donors to part with their money. (It’s also the primary theme of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.) The formula traditionally goes like this: Out-raise the competition, bludgeon them with attack ads, and watch the votes roll in. In the five years since the Supreme Court enshrined unlimited campaign contributions to organizations not directly affiliated with candidates, money has poured into the political system. And yet spending the cash haul effectively has never been more difficult.”
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