This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Organic Valley, the farmer-owned cooperative dedicated to providing ethically sourced food from small organic family farms.

Discover how you can support local organic farmers at o v. coop slash ethically sourced. You're listening to the 1A Podcast and it's another installment of our weekly

series if you can keep it. I'm Jen White. Joining me in studio is one ace Todd Zwyllic.

In this weekly election series as always, we're leaving the horse race to decide and instead

we're focused on the stakes in this election for the people, for the country, and especially for our democracy.

And today we start in Maryland.

It's one of three states holding primaries tomorrow, but it's attracting outsized national

attention because of the outsized amount of money being spent.

Maryland Senate race is the third most expensive nationwide behind California and Texas.

That's thanks largely to the self-financed campaign of wealthy Democrat David Trone.

He currently serves in the House.

He's part of a rise in self-funded candidates nationwide, which is part of the ever-surging

cost to fund a campaign.

Political ad spending in the 2024 election cycle is expected to exceed $16 billion.

Here's a message we got from one of you about campaign spending.

I just want to say I am strongly opposed to any private financing of political campaigns and I feel that if we move to entirely public financing of all political campaigns, it would be a good

step toward restoring democracy.

Thanks for that message.

So have campaigns gotten too expensive? What campaign finance reforms would you like to see?

We get into it after the break. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that

makes managing your money in different currencies easy. With Wise you can

send and spend money internationally at the mid-market exchange rate.

...