Wealthy Candidates Should Fund Their Own Campaigns

I ’d have more respect for rich people in politics if they didn’t spend their time begging people who are much poorer than they are for money.

Donald Trump (net worth: $2.5 billion), while he did put up some of his own wealth to enter politics, now has an entire ecosystem of affiliated organizations that use the most absurd “mega-MAGA-patriot-take-our-country-back-55-times match” schemes to schmooze $10 out of random elderly people and then spend more attacking Republicans rather than supporting them. Doug Burgum (net worth: $1.1 billion) is giving people $20 gift cards if they donate as little as $1 to his campaign. And Vivek Ramaswamy (net worth: $630 million) has turned his campaign into a multi-level marketing scheme.

All of this is legal. It’s just so unseemly.

But they are responding to incentives. The first incentive was created by the RNC for this election cycle. Candidates must have at least 40,000 unique donors to participate in primary debates. Trump will have no problem meeting that mark, but Burgum and Ramaswamy, using some of their own money, are buying donors. That’s right, not buying votes — we’re still months away from the first election — they’re buying donors so that maybe they can get a chance to buy votes.

The second incentive is the weird belief that politicians think Americans have about people self-funding campaigns. It’s conventional wisdom that self-funding a campaign is icky. It suggests that you don’t have real support among Americans and are flaunting your wealth in a distasteful way. This was perhaps best exemplified by Michael Bloomberg’s (net worth: $94.5 billion) billion-dollar 2020 Democratic primary campaign in which he only won American Samoa.

It didn’t work for Bloomberg, but maybe that has more to do with Americans’ hesitance about putting an environmental fundamentalist who would prefer that you not be allowed to buy soda in charge of the country.

The conventional wisdom is backwards. Voters should appreciate candidates who, if nothing else, believe enough in themselves to put their own money on the line in pursuit of elected office. And they should be skeptical of candidates who have exorbitant means to do so and beg for money anyway.

Imagine someone approaches you about investing in a new business he is starting. He outlines the business plan, the ways that the new product fills gaps in the existing market, and an advertising campaign to get the word out. It seems promising, and the presentation was full of energy, so you ask him how much money he has already put into the venture.

“Oh, nothing,” he replies.

You’d be a bit concerned. If he’s so confident that his business idea is good, he should want to put money into it now and reap the return later.

Perhaps you follow up and ask what other investors are already involved. He replies, “A few thousand people who gave me $10 each.” If you didn’t walk out of the room before, you’d definitely walk out now.

Of course, politics isn’t about making a profit, but the argument applies to nonprofit activities as well. Let’s say someone tells you about a great charity to help the poor. He describes the programs it runs, the results it achieves, and the value it provides to the community. If he doesn’t donate to it himself, though, does he really believe in it? If the people who do contribute are a smattering of small donors giving because their inbox was full of annoying emails, does that speak well of the charity? If the non-donor pitching you the charity is a billionaire, you’d be even more suspicious.

Yet when it comes to running for president, harassing people for their change like a panhandler on the side of the road is supposed to be the right thing to do. This is partly a consequence of the big-money-in-politics fear that has animated some of our campaign-finance laws and jurisprudence. But there are any number of ways (which both sides use) around campaign-donation limits, especially by routing money through issue-advocacy groups.

It’s actually remarkable how little money Americans spend on politics, relatively speaking. Yes, the 2020 presidential election was the most expensive in U.S. history, with both sides spending a total of $5.7 billion. But if the 2020 election were a corporation, it would need $1.5 billion more in revenue to even make it onto the Fortune 500 (No. 500, Robert Half International, makes $7.2 billion per year). Walmart, the No. 1 company, makes $5.7 billion, on average, roughly every three and a half days. Americans spend more than six times as much on candy in a year as they did on the 2020 presidential election. We spend nearly ten times as much on gambling — and that’s pretty close to just flushing money down the toilet.

Only 1.44 percent of American adults gave more than $200 to candidates, PACs, parties, or outside groups during the 2020 cycle. Only about 8 percent donated any money to campaigns, and that was a record high.

Most people simply don’t care about donating to political campaigns. They have families to take care of and charities to donate to, not to mention movies to watch and baseball tickets to buy. They have their priorities in order. No politician scrounging around for “just one dollar to save America” is worth your hard-earned money — especially when he could be funding his campaign on his own.