State of Washington sues Facebook and Google over failure to disclose spending

Ah, of course, you have the minimum funding to get your message out, I do not doubt that for a minute. There's a minimum level beyond which you can not mount a successful campaign. But beyond that level, the link between dollars and votes becomes much less direct and obvious.

> general consensus is that the difference in funding was largely erased by media time

Yeah, of course, Trump used this trick. But the next one might use another trick. The common thread is that there are many ways to conduct the campaign, and dollars alone do not mean victory.

> we're in an era where we actually don't know how much "money with intent of political influence" is being spent.

Not exactly, but organizations with influence on national scale are not exactly invisible, and their ad spending is not secret too. I mean, you can't exactly hide a public electoral ad, right? And knowing how much ads were run (public info) and what is a typical spot price for an ad (public info), and the same for rallies, etc. one can estimate the spending if not entirely accurately, then with enough accuracy to be able to reason about it, I think. Of course, this does not account for things like free airtime given by networks to a popular entertaining personality or other ways to buy exposure for cheap, but this only underlines the point that dollars is not everything.

I suppose my counterpoint would come from the outsized effect "national level" money can have when it randomly falls on local elections (e.g. $50M on the GA-6 [1] for a special term that only ran until this year).

It seems like there's a certain "supported by people outside of our community" distaste to mega-funding, but I'm not going to kid myself and imagine it's irrelevant either.

I think I'd agree with you more if there were greater voter turnout.

But then, my ideal democracy is a minimal, voter-defense-esque test to register to vote + voting days as holidays + tax rebate for voting. Essentially, everything you could do to increase turnout of informed voters.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressiona...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligence

Political speech, on the other hand, is exactly what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. You cannot have a participatory democratic republic without it, any more than you can defend one without arms.

Disagree? Great, there's a process in place for amending the Constitution. We should either follow the process or follow the document. Those are the only legitimate options.

Past that, voter engagement is a tricky thing. It's easy to know what things we want to vote for, but it's hard to know whether or not those things are economically feasible unless we're economists. Trump's tax cuts, for example, had experts saying that through economic growth would pay for itself, while other experts have said there's no way that's possible. Similarly so with Bernie Sanders' health care proposals. See the recent pension crisis affecting Detroit, and may still cause strife in municipalities all over. Employee pensions are exactly the sort of thing I might vote for, only to find out 30 years down the road that it literally destroyed my town's government.

It's harder and harder to be informed without being a multi-doctorate + JD, and we keep voting ourselves favors from the public largesse without knowing if they'll work or not. Tax too little, and infrastructure and services fall off. Tax too much, you experience capital flight, and infrastructure and services fall off.

The wisdom of the masses isn't always, or even usually wise.