General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Party Loyalty [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)Even Oregon, who used increased voter turnout from vote by mail, etc. was helped heavily by big money at the last minute when billionaires Bloomberg and Steyer really helped my current senator Chuck Riley and Sarah Gelser gain seats from the Republicans to tip the balance of the State Senate from evenly divided to clearly a Democratic majority.
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/11/oregon_democrats_billionaire_f.html
Note that this editorial from conservative Oregonian newspaper that also supported prop 90, which went down worse than even the prop that was looking to give undocumented workers driving licenses, was trying to make it sound that the Democrats were hypocritical in supporting money for their own candidates for the Senate but against what was proposed in measure 90 (Top Two Primary).
I'm sure that the Oregonian just loves the added revenue they'd get from increased campaign spending through ads that would have been a lot more had measure 90 passed, which would have sought to destroy political parties for big money, but of course that sentiment won't be reflected in their editorial opinions such as this one. Oil billionaires and Bloomberg both contributed to that measure that went down heavily. I participated a lot in the online dialogues on this prop and I think collectively many of us who did comment from both major parties and third parties all spoke in a hopeful and united voice against this attempt to put in to law the ability to buy our elections here that much more, that has already screwed up California and state of Washington elections, where many are unhappy with the results of what was originally sold falsely as primarily trying to help independents get the right to vote in the primary elections.
I'm glad that Bloomberg's money worked in the state senate elections, but not in measure 90, but the message we can take from this is that we really shouldn't count on money being spent by "nice billionaires" to always work in our favor and be any kind of balancing factor to those that use their campaign spending against us. The bottom line is that we really need public campaign financing and instant runoff voting to get money out of our system.
I think how measure 90 was ultimately debated and shut down despite a lot of campaign spending on it, that it represents a lot of hope for us that at some point we can even work with many independents and Republicans on certain fundamental issues like overturning Citizens United and other fundamental issues that can fix our democracy, so that we can have a more democratic process down the road to sort out our differences in an honest fashion that represents all of our opinions and wishes, rather than just those of the few with a lot of money.