>> We leave it there. Mordecai Lee, thanks so much. You're
welcome. It's widely reported that one big reason Joe Biden
was pressured to drop out of the race was because of big dollar
contributions to his campaign from major donors were on track
to drop by half if he stayed in like, from $50 million in June
to a projected 25 million now, we've gotten used to
astronomical campaign funding numbers, but where does this big
money in politics leave the average voter? We turn to Nick
Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign,
which tracks expenditures. AndNick, thanks a lot for being
here. be here.
>> So to that question, who is running the show when it comes
to choosing candidates? >> Oh, I mean, I think you have
to look to the wealthiest of the wealth. I mean, if you look to
just the way that our campaign finance laws are structured,
especially in a state like Wisconsin, you can just look
back to 2015 and under the Walker administration, that
campaign finance law rewrite that we saw, it really created a
scenario where it's like the Wild West here. It's a scenario
where individuals are able to donate and max out instead of
$10,000, you can max $20,000 to within the state, to the
governor, or to the Supreme Court. You can do unlimited
amounts of campaign donations to political parties and committee.
And then it took off the guardrails as far as the
transactions between the ittees and the political
parties. And so it almost has created this money laundering
scenario, where now we get into a federal election where, let's
say you've maxed out to your candidate of choice in a
presidential election, you can only max out $3,300. But you
let's say you got a lot of money that you want to spend, you'd go
straight to the party of your choice, or you'd go straight to
the committee of your choice, and you can just write a blank
check and then they can take that and go straight to the
campaign and so for people like you and I, who I mean, I don't
sit on tens of thousands or even millions of dollars that I get
to play with every day, we get to look on the outside looking
in, and they're over here playing kingmaker, trying to
pick the candidate that's going to do their bidding and going to
serve their bottom line and do their agenda. And so we've been
in desperate need of campaign finance reform for so long. And
Citizens United has opened the floodgates and Pandora's box in
a way that it leaves the everyday citizen a little less
powerful than what we could be if there were better regulations
to actually give us a better seat at the table.
>> So, over the course of the past 14 years, that Citizens
United has, that ruling has been in place. What are the numbers
look like in this cycle? In terms of spending?
n, before we before we were coming into this year, I
was just studying last year in a off year. And here in Wisconsin,
I mean, we broke records. I mean, we were at 56 or $55
million spent on a nonpartisan supreme Court seat. And then
coming into this year, both the head of the Democratic Party and
the head of the Republican Party, both said, we're
predicting that we're going to break records this year, and now
we're in 2024, a presidential year. We've got new maps, we've
got constitutional amendments. We have all these things
happening. And so the electorate is really paying attention, and
it's looking like we're on pace to break even more records. And
like in the Senate race between Baldwin and Hovde, Hovde,
they're already in the top ten as far as money raised and money
spent, in the entire US and so we're right now, I mean, like I
said, the Wild West. I mean, I think that's just minimizing it.
>> Is there a particular party that has the edge in this, money
raising, edge, I
think I don't know necessarily if that's the way to look at it,
because both parties know what the animal is in the room, which
is they need to outraise the other out the other the other
party. But when you look at at least in a state like Wisconsin,
I can tell you this much, from the numbers, it looks like the
Republican Party has been taking more out of state money than the
Democrat Party. It looks like that way. At least that's how
the trends are. And so and that's interesting just because,
I mean, here in Wisconsin, I mean, we live here and, people
here obviously want to have skin in the game. And so if there's
people that are coming in from out of state and there's dark
money, they don't want necessarily people making
cisions on their lives if they're just outside the state
throwing money and then making decisions and so, to that point,
I think both parties are doing everything in their power to try
and find the ways to try and shore up as much money and burn
it as fast as possible so that they can try and get their
candidate in office, because it candidate in office, because it