Paul Waldman asks just how much the unprecedented amount of corporate money poured into ad buys this election will matter.
What’s different this election season is the sheer volume of ads, driven higher than ever by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision issued earlier this year. In striking down the McCain–Feingold campaign-finance reform law (and other precedents), the Court said that corporations and individuals are free to spend as much as they want to influence elections — after all, as Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in his decision, “On certain topics corporations may possess valuable expertise, leaving them the best equipped to point out errors or fallacies in speech of all sorts, including the speech of candidates and elected officials.” Watch the ads this year to see how that “valuable expertise” is being deployed.