Who's paying to elect the president?
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
All of that costs money.
And it seems like every successive presidential election ends up being the most expensive election in history.
Open Secrets, a group that tracks election spending, estimates the 2024 federal election cycle will cost nearly $16 billion. It was around $15 billion in 2020.
Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign raised a record billion dollars in just three months.
And, according to Open Secrets, tech billionaire Elon Musk has poured more than $118-million into his America PAC in support of former President Donald Trump.
As we publish this episode Tuesday afternoon, we don't know who will win this election. But we do know that outside money has played a bigger role than ever before.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Mary Louise Kelly. Real quick, before the show, it has been a wild election season, |
| 0:06.1 | and in the home stretch, as you continue to follow every development here on Consider This, |
| 0:11.8 | we want you to know there are two other ways to make sure you do not miss any developments. |
| 0:16.5 | There's NPR's morning news podcast up first. It is recorded before dawn. It is out by 7 a.m. Eastern each weekday. |
| 0:24.5 | Later in the day, you can find a new episode of the NPR Politics Podcast, with context and analysis on the big stories whenever they happen. |
| 0:33.3 | So you get an alert, big breaking news. You can look for the NPR Politics Podcast a few hours later. |
| 0:38.6 | So again, you've got up first in the morning, consider this in the evening, and the NPR Politics |
| 0:43.6 | podcast, anytime big stuff happens, an around-the-clock election news survival kit. |
| 0:49.7 | Thank you for listening. Here's the show. |
| 0:52.7 | The home stretch of the presidential campaign means huge rallies, a final barrage of campaign ads, |
| 0:59.4 | and massive multi-state get-out-the-vote efforts. All of that costs money. |
| 1:04.9 | That is why, in addition to asking for your vote, the campaigns have been asking for your cash. In social media |
| 1:12.1 | ads like these, in support of the Democratic ticket, this is it, folks, we need you to send a |
| 1:17.5 | donation. And look, $5 may not seem like much, but our path to victory relies on all of us |
| 1:23.2 | chipping in together. That way, you and I can both wake up on November 6th knowing that we did |
| 1:28.4 | everything we could. They are asking in emails with jump scare subject lines and in untold |
| 1:35.4 | numbers of unsolicited text messages. Those asks have paid off for the Harris campaign, which |
| 1:41.7 | raised a record billion dollars in the span of three months. |
| 1:45.6 | Former President Trump nodded to that hall in his own pitch. |
| 1:49.2 | The one thing her campaign has is money. |
| 1:52.3 | They get it from a lot of people that you don't want to hear about. |
| 1:55.7 | These are not the people that you agree with. |
... |
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