LogFAQs > #965094851

The comically corrupt, but now legal, example would be loaning your campaign an unnecessarily large amount of money like the day before the election despite your campaign actually having cash on hand. Then winking that you'd very much like to recoup your "losses" there and having wealthy donors/corps contribute after the election now that you've actually won the seat and they're contributing to a Senator/Congressperson-elect and that money just repays the candidate while they then recategorize their campaign as "[Person] for [Office] 2026" or whatever so not only did they get themselves paid, the money they already had before they pulled this stunt was untouched during this whole charade and immediately sets them up with a massive war chest for their re-election campaign that could also scare off potential challengers as not being worth trying to mount a challenge. Just compounds incumbent advantage on top of all the other things, I think. Hell, repeat the scheme every cycle and you'd have basically an insurmountable money advantage that continues to grow.

You could, of course, do this more subtly by estimating the cost of a campaign at the start and loaning yourself that much at the start and then, despite having self-funded yourself in a manner that you wouldn't actually need to solicit donations, still do so and basically use other people's donations to repay yourself and use that initial loan as basically a persistent war chest to ward off challengers in the event you win. And if you lose, well you already paid yourself back with other people's donations.

I mean, end of the day it's still Citizens United causing most of the problems here for allowing unlimited money to flood into politics and basically establishing increasingly steep price barriers to running a major campaign. But this decision helps those with the money or ability to just secure substantial loans to do so at no risk to themselves and have others bear the cost, whether it be grassroots donors or just taking bribes from wealthy donors and corporations who I would assume are the far more likely group to donate to someone who already had their election.