Does Donor Money Still Have the Juice to Power Campaign Victories?

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

For the past several months, since the coup and subsequent coronation, Kamala’s handlers simply refused to shut the fuck up about how much campaign cash money their hooker was raking in for her donor blowjobs — believing that this achievement, apparently, would impress voters.

https://youtu.be/DXAIQ6DWf-k?si=cQnndyipyLR_sToT

Related: With Trump Victory, Democrat Election Denialism Commences: What to Expect

A lot of good it did her.

Democrats are, in 2024, undeniably the party of the elite — a fraction of the population, but one with deeper pockets by definition than the Trump rabble.

For instance, the counties in 2020 that (allegedly) went to Biden held 71% of American wealth, juxtaposed to 29% for flyover Trump counties. 

Via The Brookings Institution, November 10, 2020 (emphasis added):

“The stark economic rift that Brookings Metro documented after Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 victory has grown even wider. In 2016, we wrote that the 2,584 counties that Trump won generated just 36% of the country’s economic output, whereas the 472 counties Hillary Clinton carried equated to almost two-thirds of the nation’s aggregate economy.

A similar analysis for last week’s election shows these trends continuing, albeit with a different political outcome. This time, Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy. (Votes are still outstanding in 28 mostly low-output counties, and this piece will be updated as new data is reported.)”

71:29 is not a small ratio.

Money, of course, does and always will play a role in corrupting politics as long as morally compromised vermin become politicians and the incentive structure remains unchanged.

Related: Did Populist Rage at Big Pharma Fuel Trump Victory? Election Data Indicates Maybe

But how did winning the institutionalized corruption game pan out for the Karamel-uh entity?

This graph posted to X indicates a side-by-side comparison of Trump vs. Kamala campaign spending by swing state. In each case, Kamala outspent Trump, sometimes by huge margins, and in each case Trump won the vote, sometimes in landslides.

Hopefully the picture this paints is that we’ve entered a new era — in which trust in institutions, corporate media in particular, has precipitously declined and public corruption is more visible than ever before via alternative, free social media — in which the bastards’ dollars don’t go as far as they once did.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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