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The Trump campaign as massively outspent by the Clinton campaign almost 2-1. It also received much less outside money - 60 million versus 190 million. [1] Acco

The Trump campaign as massively outspent by the Clinton campaign almost 2-1. It also received much less outside money - 60 million versus 190 million. [1] According to OpenSecrets, Trump spent 56 million on his own campaign. [2] In historical US election terms, that is quite the underdog story, even if it's still a lot of money. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864

andrepd 10y ago
For me, an underdog story would be a common citizen getting elected with little money, and 100% crowd funded money from the people, at that. A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions, and "only" 60 million from someone else, leaves absolutely no sense of being an underdog, even if he did spend less than his rival (100mil instead of 200mil. Big whoop)
- Amezarak 10y ago
  > A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions. The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them. Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians. If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.

andrepd 10y ago

For me, an underdog story would be a common citizen getting elected with little money, and 100% crowd funded money from the people, at that. A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions, and "only" 60 million from someone else, leaves absolutely no sense of being an underdog, even if he did spend less than his rival (100mil instead of 200mil. Big whoop)

Amezarak 10y ago
> A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions. The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them. Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians. If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.