“The Campaign Wackness” by Matthew Killen

Guest contribution from Matthew Killen

The 2016 Presidential election price tag was just under seven billion dollars and all I got were these stupid selfies.

Naturally, I have some questions on our ROI as a country. Can you help me answer these?

A rule to note: The FEC basically allows you to do anything you want with campaign money barring personal use.

Keeping that in mind, wouldn’t it be interesting to see politicians simply use that money to improve the areas they visit? What’s the re-pipe cost in Detroit, schools everywhere don’t have enough damn desks, music programs or after school care? Wouldn’t helping out these programs earn some votes?

Wouldn’t it be great to see these politicos on the move racing to fix a problem? Bless their little opportunist hearts, the world would get better a little bit every day and immensely more so with every election.

Doesn’t that do the most good? Isn’t that better than taking a “power photo” and slapping it on a flyer with almost zero substance on the issues, with bullet points at best, shotgunned to 80,000 people who are your suitable demographic?

Wouldn’t it be a better campaign if you could take the people’s money, the corporate donor money, and give them a taste of what you can actually do with collaborative funding?

Isn’t that what having power is all about?

What would we do around the country with seven billion extra dollars every four years? What if all elections started running this way? Seven billion is nothing compared to the cost of all the small elections. It adds up and it never stops.

To put this into perspective, Jacksonville’s yearly budget is around one billion dollars. We could do a lot of noticeable good, that would earn ample press for genuine reasons, rather than just saying crazy things to get attention.

Seven billion split between all 64 US states and territories comes out to one hundred nine million three hundred seventy-five thousand. I’m going to write that out to shock you. $109,375,000.

How will your state party spend $54,687,500 or more in 2020 to win votes?

Can we please do better?