• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Koch Brothers Influencing Elections - Give Me A Break!

Lord of Planar said:
I like this:


If the Kochs are the poster children for the supposedly corrupting role of money in politics in a post–Citizens United world, Trump demonstrates that money isn’t everything. Running on a shoestring budget, he vanquished Koch-friendly candidates like Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio by railing against immigration, free trade, and pretty much everything else the Kochs hold dear. To two brothers who think long and hard about the effectiveness of every dollar they spend, spending money on electoral politics is no longer looking like such a great investment.
​
Click to expand...

IMO, the article misses the point. Where does it indicate that Republicans have never, or at least not in a century or more, controlled more state governors and state legislatures? Any analysis of what the Koch money does that ignores those results is incomplete and completely misleading. Unless something changes by 2020, republicans will again control redistricting, which locks in GOP gains at the state level and therefore at the House of Rep level. And for the Koch brothers, a Federal government that is in gridlock (as it was post 2010 with Obama because of the House and Senate filibusters) and states that do their bidding on a variety of issues, is just a HUGE win.
 
poweRob said:
I don't have any totals for this election but here's what they spent just four years ago...

In 2012, the Kochs’ network spent just under $400 million, an astonishing sum at the time. The $889 million spending goal for 2016 would put it on track to spend nearly as much as the campaigns of each party’s presidential nominee.

link...​


The kind of money they are pumping into politics pretty much makes them an unaccountible shadow government.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the hard work but it still doesn't show what he spent this election cycle. When Trump started doing well the Koch's stopped donating and may have even spent money trying to dump Trump.
 
JasperL said:
IMO, the article misses the point. Where does it indicate that Republicans have never, or at least not in a century or more, controlled more state governors and state legislatures? Any analysis of what the Koch money does that ignores those results is incomplete and completely misleading. Unless something changes by 2020, republicans will again control redistricting, which locks in GOP gains at the state level and therefore at the House of Rep level. And for the Koch brothers, a Federal government that is in gridlock (as it was post 2010 with Obama because of the House and Senate filibusters) and states that do their bidding on a variety of issues, is just a HUGE win.
Click to expand...

The republicans are elected to more of the smaller states. The larger states tend to go democrat because of the nanny state mentality of how the larger a population gets, the more (place derogatory word here) it gets. I think someone pointed out the 10 largest states have half the population. Just the way human nature works.
 
Lord of Planar said:
The republicans are elected to more of the smaller states. The larger states tend to go democrat because of the nanny state mentality of how the larger a population gets, the more (place derogatory word here) it gets. I think someone pointed out the 10 largest states have half the population. Just the way human nature works.
Click to expand...

There are very few states that actually have more blue counties than red counties.
 
Lord of Planar said:
The republicans are elected to more of the smaller states. The larger states tend to go democrat because of the nanny state mentality of how the larger a population gets, the more (place derogatory word here) it gets. I think someone pointed out the 10 largest states have half the population. Just the way human nature works.
Click to expand...

I'm having a hard time connecting that comment to anything in my post..... :confused:
 
poweRob said:
it's not like people are evenly dispersed among all counties.
Click to expand...

The fact is Donald Trump won the popular vote. He won it in red states. He won it in every battleground state, and he even won it in a few blue states. Hillary could did not win the popular vote in any of these states, 32 all totaled. Trump won 64% of the states. I've got a deal for you. We get rid of the electoral college. We give DC statehood for a total of 51 states and whatever candidate wins the majority of the states becomes president and this can factor in third parties.
 
Moderate Right said:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/...s-in-the-presidential-election-205735432.html

The one percenters are in Hillary's and the Democrat's back pocket. Voters said "F You" to the big money in politics and elected the very person that big money did not want to win. Hillary's war chest far exceeded Trump's. This voting cycle has clearly shown that big money gets far too much credit for making a difference in politics. Voters can't be bought anymore.
Click to expand...


Not influenced by Koch? Ok then.

How about influenced by fake news deliberately targeting Trump supporters? The following is quoted from Paul Horner, who "publishes a series of fake URLS that cloak themselves to appear to be being coming from major media companies, such as ABC and CNN, and then disseminates fake news stories across Facebook", relying on people to send the articles on without checking (he also mentions that he simply does it for the money, not to deliberately influence politics):



"Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it. . . . My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist. . . . I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters—they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad]."

Purveyor of fake news says he targeted Trump supporters, influenced election.

Of course, he may have made the mistake of assuming that Trump supporters in general cared about what the candidate said or about policy at all. That is, instead of simply being mad at government and therefore wanting to break stuff.


I do recall a certain group of users regularly starting threads with such links, which threads would be shut down as relying on fake news by the third, or at worst sixth, post; of course once they were shot down there was an 80% probability that they would shift course to a discussion of why liberals are doodooheads or something similarly enlightening....
 
Mr Person said:
Not influenced by Koch? Ok then.

How about influenced by fake news deliberately targeting Trump supporters? The following is quoted from Paul Horner, who "publishes a series of fake URLS that cloak themselves to appear to be being coming from major media companies, such as ABC and CNN, and then disseminates fake news stories across Facebook", relying on people to send the articles on without checking (he also mentions that he simply does it for the money, not to deliberately influence politics):



"Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it. . . . My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything—they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist. . . . I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters—they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad]."

Purveyor of fake news says he targeted Trump supporters, influenced election.

Of course, he may have made the mistake of assuming that Trump supporters in general cared about what the candidate said or about policy at all. That is, instead of simply being mad at government and therefore wanting to break stuff.


I do recall a certain group of users regularly starting threads with such links, which threads would be shut down as relying on fake news by the third, or at worst sixth, post; of course once they were shot down there was an 80% probability that they would shift course to a discussion of why liberals are doodooheads or something similarly enlightening....
Click to expand...

What on Earth does any of that have to do with me? Nothing. However, you are guilty of blindly believing the liberal news media and all of the lies and exaggerations coming from the left. I'm not even a Trump supporter! I didn't even vote for him! I'm not influenced by the Koch's either but I can see the BS, lies, and exaggerations spewed by the liberal megadonors who try their best to brainswah this into being a liberal country but you guys are perfectly fine with that.
 
Moderate Right said:
What on Earth does any of that have to do with me? Nothing. However, you are guilty of blindly believing the liberal news media and all of the lies and exaggerations coming from the left. I'm not even a Trump supporter! I didn't even vote for him! I'm not influenced by the Koch's either but I can see the BS, lies, and exaggerations spewed by the liberal megadonors who try their best to brainswah this into being a liberal country but you guys are perfectly fine with that.
Click to expand...

WTF? I didn't say it had anything to do with YOU. It had to do with your OP, and unless I missed something, you didn't make your OP about yourself personally.

Namely: if you are CORRECT that the Koch Brothers were not influencing the elections, perhaps there might be other influences, like deliberately manufactured falsehoods designed to look like news.
 
late said:
1) Koch wants to run the country, Soros wants to level the playing field. I laughed when the second item turned out to be defunct. Another item, here in Maine everyone gets to keep their inalienable rights. Which means prisoners can vote. Keeping prisoners and ex cons from voting is Jim Crow, always was. It's always, and only, a way to improperly disenfranchise people to steal their rights, and hold onto power.

2) Nope.
Click to expand...

In other words you are perfectly fine with big money as long as it's on your side.

The fact that you don't see that shows just how thick your blinders are.
 
late said:
Of course.

Koch's dad was a Bircher, and so are the kids, although they don't admit it. They were shoved out of the Republican party, ridiculed on national tv as crazy extremists by William F Buckley.

Koch tried the direct route to power and got precisely nowhere. So he tried propaganda, and spent hundreds of millions building propaganda machines in the 80s. That dragged the country to the Right, and he then built on that success. You are talking about elections, Koch does that, but it's a tiny fraction of what he does.

Btw, Pence is a Koch employee.

This is entirely different from what Soros does. Soros simply doesn't want run the country.
Click to expand...

This isn't the conspiracy theory section. That's where your nonsense belongs.
 
late said:
You are still comparing protesters, who aren't even good at protesting... to an attempt to take over the country.

Face it, that's worse than equating ants and elephants.

It's also something real conservatives rejected emphatically, back when there were real conservatives.
Click to expand...

You simply saying the Koch brothers are trying to take over the world doesn't make it fact.
 
Moderate Right said:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/...s-in-the-presidential-election-205735432.html


The one percenters are in Hillary's and the Democrat's back pocket. Voters said "F You" to the big money in politics and elected the very person that big money did not want to win. Hillary's war chest far exceeded Trump's. This voting cycle has clearly shown that big money gets far too much credit for making a difference in politics. Voters can't be bought anymore.
Click to expand...

And though they were pretty tight lipped about who they ultimately voted for, I'm pretty sure the Koch Brothers did not endorse or contribute to Donald Trump's campaign. It was widely publicized that they did not want him to be the nominee. He was not invited to their usual 'beg-a-thon' as Trump called it.

But Trump was the nominee and the ultimate victor just the same.

Which just goes to show that money doesn't have as much influence on the perception of the voters as the 'campaign finance reform' crowd wants us to believe.
 
late said:
Of course.

Read the thread.

Hardly, I've talked about Soros, and the difference, a number of times in this thead.

That would be best if you looked into it yourself. You want to get the full impact.

No, I don't.
Click to expand...
And that difference can be summed up with left big money good right big money bad. Nothing more nothing less.
 
AlbqOwl said:
And though they were pretty tight lipped about who they ultimately voted for, I'm pretty sure the Koch Brothers did not endorse or contribute to Donald Trump's campaign. It was widely publicized that they did not want him to be the nominee. He was not invited to their usual 'beg-a-thon' as Trump called it.

But Trump was the nominee and the ultimate victor just the same.

Which just goes to show that money doesn't have as much influence on the perception of the voters as the 'campaign finance reform' crowd wants us to believe.
Click to expand...

What it tells us is money isn't the ONLY thing that matters, but no one actually argues that it is. The argument really is over time the corrosive effect of big money in every race tends to tilt policy across the board in ways that benefit the big donors, in both parties. Even in a loss, the money has an effect.

Furthermore, even with Trump, he needs the House and Senate to make a lot of things happen, and a lot of THOSE guys are absolutely influenced by the big money they spend half of every working hour trying to raise. It's just the whole package that matters, not an individual race, and especially not the POTUS race which is perhaps the least affected of all by donors and spending.
 
JasperL said:
What it tells us is money isn't the ONLY thing that matters, but no one actually argues that it is. The argument really is over time the corrosive effect of big money in every race tends to tilt policy across the board in ways that benefit the big donors, in both parties. Even in a loss, the money has an effect.

Furthermore, even with Trump, he needs the House and Senate to make a lot of things happen, and a lot of THOSE guys are absolutely influenced by the big money they spend half of every working hour trying to raise. It's just the whole package that matters, not an individual race, and especially not the POTUS race which is perhaps the least affected of all by donors and spending.
Click to expand...

No quarrel with that, and the solution is so simple. But nobody wants to hear it. So oh well.
 
AlbqOwl said:
And though they were pretty tight lipped about who they ultimately voted for, I'm pretty sure the Koch Brothers did not endorse or contribute to Donald Trump's campaign. It was widely publicized that they did not want him to be the nominee. He was not invited to their usual 'beg-a-thon' as Trump called it.

But Trump was the nominee and the ultimate victor just the same.

Which just goes to show that money doesn't have as much influence on the perception of the voters as the 'campaign finance reform' crowd wants us to believe.
Click to expand...

True, but I'm actually still for campaign finance reform myself. The amount of money spent on getting people elected all the way from dog catcher to president is so mindboggling it would be like trying to count the national debt one dollar at a time. What a complete waste of money.
 
Moderate Right said:
True, but I'm actually still for campaign finance reform myself. The amount of money spent on getting people elected all the way from dog catcher to president is so mindboggling it would be like trying to count the national debt one dollar at a time. What a complete waste of money.
Click to expand...

The thing is, no campaign finance reform has ever worked or will work. And there is too much temptation to rig it so the other guy is handicapped but you still get yours. The McCain Feingold campaign finance reform was a joke because it left so many holes, especially for those two, that it accomplished little or nothing. And even if you limit how much money changes hands, there are oh so many other ways to reward those you owe.

Want the money out of campaigns?

All we have to do is an iron clad law or preferably a constitutional amendment that government at any level cannot give benefit any individual, group, entity, demographic etc. unless everybody else is also benefitted. And also those in government in any capacity except the military will be paid a reasonable salary but will fund their own health care plan and 401K or whatever that goes with them when they leave, but otherwise they receive nothing from the government once they leave office. A requirement for stand alone bills other than basic allocations to fund the necessary functions of government would also help as favors and pork could not be buried inside other legislation.

Do that and people and corporations etc. can put any amount of money they want into federal campaigns and it won't buy them a thing. So that would naturally take most of the money out of it. And those who are now in government to increase their own personal wealth would probably start term limiting themselves out and we would have real public servants instead of career politicians and bureaucrats in government again.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom