So, you want to run for office

The first lesson of Campaign Finance 101: elections cost money. Over the 2020 cycle, Congressional candidates spent a record $3.68 billion running for office. An additional $5 billion was spent by outside groups, and the 2022 midterms are expected to cost even more – so where does all this money come from?

☝️ First things first: Campaign financing can be broken down into two categories: “hard money” and “soft money.”

1. Hard money refers to money given directly to a political candidate, and is highly regulated by federal law. Under current rules, each American is limited to donating $2,900 per election to each federal candidate, and can’t give more than $36,500 per year to any national party commit­tee.
2. Soft money refers to campaign contributions that aren’t regulated by federal law, since they’re donated to organizations working independently of any candidate. These orgs, typically called “Super PACs,” first originated in 2010 after the Supreme Court ruled that previous laws limiting how much money corporations can independently spend on politics violated the First Amendment. (More on Super PACs here.)

📅 That brings us to the midterms… Candidates running for Congress this election cycle have received ~$2.5 billion in hard money donations so far, split roughly equally along party lines, per data from OpenSecrets.

• On the soft money side of things, more than 2,250 Super PACs have received a total of $1.49 billion in donations, spending $428 million. Of the money spent to date, OpenSecrets reports 70% went towards conservative causes, 20% went towards liberal causes, and 10% went towards “other.”

+In recent news: Last week, federal regulators approved a new proposal from Google that would make all political campaign emails exempt from GMail’s spam filter, after a study found the company’s filters disproportionately flagged Republican emails compared to Dems’.