the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 7, 2022
Everyone’s sick of being inundated by political advertisements, whether on TV or through the mail. It’s frustrating being bombarded with ads filled with vicious personal accusations and deliberate misinformation. If it seems worse than ever, it might be because the politicians have more money than ever to spend.
Politicians will have spent 16.7 billion dollars on their 2022 campaigns. That will set a record for the most spent on a midterm election, compared with the previous record of 14 billion dollars. That was set, not surprisingly, in the last midterm election in 2018.
To look at where campaign money comes from, it’s easiest to look at money spent on federal campaigns, which will reach a total of 8.9 billion dollars, according to the New York Times. Billionaires will have contributed over 15% of that, and the wealthiest one percent of donors will have donated 38%.
While it’s true that Republicans have more billionaire donors, the Democrats have their share as well. Billionaires gave 20% of total donations to Republicans, compared with 14.5% of donations to Democrats.
While it’s certainly understandable that people want to hold on to the voting rights that those before them fought and died for, we need to keep in mind that we don’t have real democracy in this country, we have the most democracy money (mostly from the wealthy) can buy.