A year before the midterms, quarterly fundraising reports are already reshuffling expectations and causing some candidates to drop out. And candidates are spending almost as much raising money as they collect. That’s because in congressional primaries and general elections, the top fundraiser still wins 92 percent of the time. Danielle Thomsen finds that candidates are raising money earlier and in larger amounts than ever. And everything from who runs for office to who rules in Congress is now governed by money, even though most of the value is in signaling rather than actually using it to communicate with voters.
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A year before the midterms, quarterly fundraising reports are already reshuffling expectations and causing some candidates to drop out. And candidates are spending almost as much raising money as they collect. That’s because in congressional primaries and general elections, the top fundraiser still wins 92 percent of the time. Danielle Thomsen finds that candidates are raising money earlier and in larger amounts than ever. And everything from who runs for office to who rules in Congress is now governed by money, even though most of the value is in signaling rather than actually using it to communicate with voters.
President Trump is claiming power over independent agencies and trying to redirect the administrative state, saying he is its unitary executive. But this is not the first time presidents have invoked broad authority. John Dearborn finds that President Reagan sought to gain power over civil rights agencies, saying they had gone too far in promoting affirmative action, restricting their activity and disciplining their leadership. Multiple current Supreme Court justices were involved in the saga, which helped build the unitary executive theory. David Hausman researches attempts to control the immigration courts under the first Trump administration, finding that both adding judges and setting precedent with Attorney General opinions were influential. But it mostly worked by building the bureaucracy, rather than restraining it.
The Science of Politics
A year before the midterms, quarterly fundraising reports are already reshuffling expectations and causing some candidates to drop out. And candidates are spending almost as much raising money as they collect. That’s because in congressional primaries and general elections, the top fundraiser still wins 92 percent of the time. Danielle Thomsen finds that candidates are raising money earlier and in larger amounts than ever. And everything from who runs for office to who rules in Congress is now governed by money, even though most of the value is in signaling rather than actually using it to communicate with voters.
