Elections are about money, not votes!

It takes a statistical million dollars for a challenger to win against an incumbent. That’s why almost all fail. And that’s even when the electorate is disgusted with Washington.

Why?

Because voters want to keep their own congressmen and women, but want every other voter in every other district to ditch theirs. That kind of thinking keeps the current crop in power. They know that, and encourage that line of thinking.

The study of human nature is a highly prized resource used by our politicians. They understand human nature and pander to it. That’s why taxes go down, and spending (via borrowed money) goes up. Everyone is happy until the debts have to be repaid.

They hope that they’ll be long gone enjoying their huge retirement checks each month before that happens and they’ll blame the current crop of politicians. Guess who’s paying for that retirement?

So what happens to that million dollars if the unknown challenger manages to raise it, a very unlikely event?

In my district, there are about 400,000 voters. If we send out five mailings saying that I exist and this is what I want to do if elected, it’s all gone. If sending one letter costs about 75 cents to package and mail and I send mailing to each address, it’s still about 250,000 letters or about $200,000 per mailing!

If the public doesn’t know your name, they won’t vote for you. And as most voters don’t even know who are the incumbents, the ballot contains hints so you know who to vote for. Under the candidates names, it will say Incumbent next to one name. It’s a subtle hint to create a bias. Sad. The same goes for party affiliation, Republican or Democratic.

In fact, raising that amount is so unlikely that the Federal Elections Commission, the FEC knows that few challengers raise any significant amounts of money, and have the slimmest of chances to win. They don’t even want to know that the challenger exists unless they reach a dollar threshold. In spite of inflation, that threshold hasn’t changed since the ’70s. Why? So that the FEC is burdened with analysis of a huge number of minimal budget candidates and won’t have the time and resources to focus on the big money. One day, we’ll do a statistical analysis of the FEC database and publish the results.

Raising money is easy for an incumbent as they can do immediate favors for special interest groups, so the groups want to keep that incumbent in power. They are a known quantity. They don’t want some upstart with good ideas to stir things up, so they’ll give big money to the source of all of those current favors.

Those self-serving congressmen and women are the ones that the public hates. They don’t think about the consequences of voting for their own incumbent again and again and again and again, all the while griping about what a lousy job they are all doing in Washington.

Disagree? Your comments start here.