Issue 24.16
It is estimated that the current election process for the office of President of the United States may cost as much as five billion dollars or more before it is complete. Most Senate races cost millions of dollars and even the races for the House of Representatives cost at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sadly, in most cases, it seems the candidate with the most money wins.
That is a concerning reflection on the willingness of the average American voter to become informed and independent when considering who they want to represent them in Washington D.C. Rather than just voting for whomever spends the most money, if voters actually cared enough to spend the kind of time and effort researching and considering candidates that they would spend before hiring someone to work for them in a responsible position, we would be a whole lot better off as a country. Would you hire someone who consistently put their company in deeper and deeper debt, encouraged conflict with other companies that require massive resources to manage and are ultimately ineffective in solving the problems? Yet that is exactly what we have been doing for many years when electing representatives.
The numbers mentioned above are generally required to win in federal campaigns. The amounts are raised by promising donors that you will care for their interests and reflect their ideologies or markets when decisions are made. Often corporations and special interests contribute to more than one candidate in the same race to cover their bets and be sure they have a friendly face in power.
Many of you that know me personally know that I have run for US Senate and the US House of Representatives in recent years. I knew going in that it would be unlikely for me to win as an alternative party candidate. I knew that, without major party backing and without selling my services to those willing to pay, there was little if any chance of winning the election. However, my goal was not to win (though that would have been nice for our country). It was to inform, educate, inspire and give choice to the voters.
To do that still requires money, time and effort, but can be much less expensive than running to win. For example, a post-election evaluation we did four years ago indicated that, for each vote I received, I spent 14 cents. That still came out to over $4,000, but it pales beside the $17.50 per vote Senator Hatch spent, and he had the advantage of name recognition and incumbency. The final total for Senator Hatch was over $13 million.
As you consider who to support with your time, effort and money in the upcoming elections, consider how much good your support will actually create. Will giving a few dollars or even a few hundred to a major party candidate create anything different than what we have experienced, or will the massive contributions from special interests be what determines the outcome? Would your time and money be better used supporting candidates that actually stand for what you believe in and will make the effort to help the people they talk to understand the principles of freedom? We need to return to those principles that made our country morally great, prosperous and free.
Just take a moment to think how much good your $400 would do in a $13 million dollar campaign compared with how much good it could do in a $4000 campaign. Doing 10% more in an effort to promote good principles and policies is probably more effective than adding .00003 to a campaign that is trying to maintain the status quo. I can encourage you in this since I am not running this year. Just consider how much good you can actually do in getting people to think and maybe encourage better government.
Lynn West is a thinker, a teacher and a patriot. You can reach him through email at forgingthefuture2021@gmail.com or through this newspaper. Liberty is a state of being which must be continually created. These articles can help all of us discover the ways we can contribute to that outcome.