In the United States of America money represents free speech. A law defining money as free speech has never reached the door step of congress but instead came into fruition through the Supreme Court in 1976. In the case of Buckley v. Valeo the court upheld federal law that set limits to campaign donations. The Supreme Court had also ruled that donors could use their donations to influence elections. Now when donors donate money to influence a presidential election it isn’t considered bribery its considered free speech. This landmark case leads the way for the more recent Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. FEC. The Citizens United case gave birth to political action committees also known as super pacs. Super pacs can take an unlimited amount of donations from corporations or unions or any other large donor and do not have to disclose who is contributing the money. Super PACs then take that money and spend it on television advertisement and other …show more content…
The majority of the top ten donors have solidly backed the Democratic Party. In 2008 which was a historic election year for our country all but one of the top ten organizations that had considerably large donations all backed by the Democratic Party whose candidate Barack Obama ended up winning the election. I noticed a similar trend in the 2014 election cycle. Although the margin of supporters for each party was a lot smaller than previous elections the result was still the same. The Democratic Party took the larger sum of donations and once again winning the white house. This trend is particularly interesting because it is the common conscious that the candidate that either receives the most donations or spends the most money usually comes out on top. In the Case of these two election cycles that would seem to be the case. The exception to this would be in 2004 when George W. Bush beat