So you want to compare all the money both candidates have raised in their lifetime even though this is Hilary's second presidential campaign to increase Hilary's individual contribution. While at the same time ignoring the elephant in the room that is Hilary's giant super pac. Let me guess, your argument is going to be that Hillary has nothing to do with the super pac, I wonder why giant corporate contributions roll into if they in no way influences the candidate.
I was going to debate dramatis's misleading statistics he/she got from a random dailykos poster, but i see werks already took care of it. Thanks.
Fact of the matter is, Bernie has never been paid by large corporations and wall street to secure their support, neither has he pandered to them through private fundraisers. Hillary has, and is in this very race, while Bernie isn't.
Its unfortunate that people try to twist logic into pretzels to make it look like she's somehow more respectable than he is, but that's literally impossible.
Lol. It doesn't matter if Hillary is in her second presidential campaign or not. You don't have to look at raw numbers; you can look at percentages. On OpenSecrets, it specifies that they have roughly similar-looking percentages when it comes to campaign contributions: majority from individuals, a percentage from PACs, some self-finance. In fact, if you account that this is Hillary's second presidential campaign and individuals still remain the highest percentage of donors, it looks even better considering that she's had two chances to eat a lot of corporate money. That's quite against the "she's a corporate puppet" narrative you shill.
This is the truth: Hillary's official campaign fundraising is better than Bernie's official campaign fundraising. In terms of raw numbers, Hillary has raised more than Bernieand that is how she is better. There is no twisted logic. The maximum individual contribution for official campaigns is $2700. She can't break that, so if she's raising more money then either more of her donors are willing to shell out the max amount or she has a lot of donors shelling out various amounts. If Hillary's overall fundraising is greater than Bernie's, it means that she raised more out of individuals.
So dailykos is overwhelmingly in favor of Bernie until it apparently posts 'misleading statistics' from the Federal Election Commission? Then let's not use that link, and let's use the graphic that Bernie Sanders supporters find great and popular:
This is data from OpenSecrets covering the whole of their careers, so it's not specific to the 2016 election cycle. Everyone who crows about this image is essentially crowing about the 'Contributor' column. Yet the numbers columns show something interesting: majority of Hillary's donations from those 'Contributors' come largely from individuals, presumably capped at a certain amount for each election. Those individuals are listed by employer or association.
From Bernie's side, the individuals column looks paltry; the majority of his donations come from PACs.
So the dailykos post was not wrong, even according to the graphic so lauded by Bernie supporters. Is it a wonder that someone
trying to make the charts look a little more in favor of Bernie would make another graphic that chops the pesky "Individuals" and "PACs" columns out, because it doesn't fit the narrative of Hillary being a corporate puppet?
There is no attack on Bernie here. PACs have been around for ages and are allowed to donate properly to campaigns. But those who clamber on about 'corporate agenda' seemingly ignore how Bernie could be influenced by agenda too, given that majority of his donations over his career come from union PACs.
I didn't discount that there are SuperPACs out there that support Hillary. I also won't discount that there is probably 'cooperation' between campaigns and SuperPACs that support those campaigns' causes. I stated bluntly that official campaign funding, PACs, and SuperPACs are three different things; are you saying that's wrong, werks?
Here is what you said, Inuhanyou:
Bernie has raised his entire campaign funding(last i heard at 15 million) from grassroots supporters averaging 35 dollars and 22 cents a donation. This is not a battle for winning the Presidency. This is a battle for whether or not the citizen actually controls their elected leaders or not and whether those leaders are even for the citizen and not the people who fund their campaigns.
Ironically, if we go by the OpenSecrets graphic, Bernie has raised much of his entire campaign funding not from grassroots supporters but from PACs. So can a citizen actually control him if he's elected leader, or is it the unions?
Overall I don't consider the OpenSecret numbers entirely accurate. I think what OpenSecrets probably gets closest to right is the ratio of individual/PAC/other donations for the campaigns. With the majority coming from individuals, for both candidates.
This is what I posit: contrary to any narrative, neither Hillary nor Bernie are as beholden to money as we assume. Trump could give a Hillary SuperPAC 5 million dollars and then tell her to go on tv and say that women should go back to the kitchen, but Hillary would never do that. Unions can give a Bernie SuperPAC 5 million dollars, and then tell him to make minimum wage legislation that exempts union workers from the higher minimum wage, but I don't think Bernie would do that. There's a money influence, but humans are weird individuals that don't always operate by dollar signs. A Democrat can donate millions to Rick Perry now, but that doesn't mean the Democrat has changed Rick Perry's heart. Obama raised a lot of money from corporate donors, but are Bernie supporters calling him a corporate puppet?
You're welcome to stand on principle and crow your moral and supposed logical superiority. But the best candidate is not only 'best' determined solely but his issues. The best candidate is the one that has the stances for a broad base, the strategy, and the skill to navigate the primaries and the general election. And if you need corporate money to do it, so what? Obama was the best candidate in 2008 because he ran a tight ship, he sold his appeal to a diverse electorate, he gathered a lot of resources, and those resources included corporate money. Obama got into office, and he's been able to do quite a lot even if some things were possibly contrary to the interests of his donors.
'The battle for whether or not the citizen actually controls their elected leaders' is lost from the start; representative democracy means you are picking another person to represent your views, but you are not picking a person to control them. There will never be another person who matches you 1 for 1. You are not picking Bernie because you can control him; you're picking him because you trust he is the candidate who best espouses your views and will likely act in the interests of those views. But he may differ from you on gun control or immigration reform. And you can't control him on that, regardless of whether or not you as a citizen donated or if a corporation donated.
