Some Facts about Campaign Finance

Presidential race is not just about CNN/Youtube Debate and public speeches in Iowa. Top on the agendas of every candidate, I bet, is to extract as much as possible from fundraisers to pay for the growing cost of campaign operation that ranges from secretary wages to fax machines.

This is why a good way to understand the race to White House comes from looking at how presidential hopefuls manage to raise money and how they spend it.

As the latest third quarter campaign finance report came out two weeks ago, we again have the chance to discover how candidates deal with greenbacks that allow them to stay afloat.

The first interesting finding is that contributions from students declined in summer vacations from the second quarter. According to Open secrets, an NGO, students gave candidates a total of $802000 in the third quarter, down from $1.1 million in the second quarter. People may find these figures confusing as students are expected to have more leisure hours during summer break and therefore could spend more of their pocket money on political campaigns, a ritual that helps you better understand how a democracy works.

A deeper study of the issue, however, may prompt us to suspect whether these students, most of whom care more about facebook or iPhone than retirement planning, are making the donation out of their own pocket, or on behalf of their parents. It does seem a clever and legal way to bypass the limit of $2000 an adult could give his favorite candidate.

This is might be of particular reference for Senator Hillary, who has been plagued with dubious contribution from people with criminal records.

But however embarrassing Ms. Hillary may appear, she is luckier than Sam Brownback, the Republican presidential candidate, who announced last week he would pull out of the race. Mr. Brownback frankly admitted that “money matters enough to make or break a campaign.” While he has managed to raise $4.2 million since this year, he found only $94700 in his account by September, almost 150 times less than Ms. Hillary did.

A pity on Mr. Brownback. He relied too much on residents from Kansas, his home state, to finance his campaign. But what will happen, if Mr. Brownback starts to emulate Ms. Hillary, swallowing money from whoever he could approach?

That I have no idea. What I can make sure, however, is that despite losing face, Senator Hillary stayed on and continued to lead in the race.