The Price of Democracy

When I was four or five years old, I learned about John F. Kennedy and told my mother I wanted to be President someday. She laughed and said, “I hope you’re rich, because only rich people get to be President.”

As a child, I was confused and didn’t want to believe her. I’ve spent much of my life waiting to see her proven wrong, to know that democracy is real, and that anyone can serve. But the older I got, and the closer I look, the more I see my mother’s depressing honesty. We have built a system where money doesn’t just influence politics, it selects the politicians. It drafts the legislation. It sets the agenda.

This is the final, fatal symptom of the disease. When economic inequality reaches a boiling point and when wealth concentrates into the hands of a few, government is reduced to auctioning off the levers of power. It makes a mockery of “one person, one vote” and transforms the grand, collective project of self-government into a private bidding war.

Citizens United: The Legal Earthquake

In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision drastically changed the nature of American citizenship. By ruling that corporations could spend unlimited sums on elections, equating money with “speech,” the Court handed a megaphone to the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations. In a crowded town square of public debate, it gave a whisper to most citizens and a deafening roar to a select few.

The floodgates opened. So-called “Super PACs” and dark money networks, where donors can be hidden, now spend billions every election cycle. In the 2020 federal elections, outside spending by Super PACs and other groups exceeded $3.2 billion, more than triple the amount spent in 2010. In the 2024 elections, Super PACs raised over $4.29 billion and spent $2.73 billion, part of an overall surge in outside spending that continues to reshape federal campaigns. As Senator Dick Durbin would later say, “The Supreme Court has given the green light to a new system of writing large checks in return for political access and influence.”

This legal shift created a new political physics: influence is proportional to donations. If you cannot afford to buy a megaphone, you are functionally silent on the issues that shape your life, your family’s security, and your community’s future. The democratic process, meant to be our shared tool for negotiating our common life and building foundations for happiness, was corrupted at its core.

The Golden Rule: He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules

Wealthy donors and corporate lobbies don’t spend billions on political campaigns for fun. They do it for a return on investment. Their policy preferences are translated into law with chilling efficiency, often against overwhelming public opinion.

Consider tax policy. The consistent, decades-long drive to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations continues, even in the face of massive public opposition. In 2023, 66% of Americans said corporations pay too little in taxes, and 65% said the wealthy pay too little. Yet, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, delivering an estimated $1.3 trillion windfall to corporations and the top 1%. It is a direct translation of donor priorities into law.

Or look at the stalled fight against climate change. Legislation fails under the weight of fossil fuel lobbying, despite clear scientific urgency, sacrificing our shared environment for quarterly profits. The fossil fuel industry spent over $2.4 billion on federal lobbying from 2000 to 2023, while renewable energy spent less than one-tenth that amount.

Perhaps the clearest example is cannabis legalization. For over a decade, national polls have consistently shown support from two-thirds of Americans, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. The public will is unambiguous. Yet, at the federal level, it remains a Schedule I drug alongside heroin. Why? Follow the money. The alcohol, pharmaceutical, and tobacco industries, along with the private prison and prison guard unions that profit from incarceration, spend millions on lobbying to maintain prohibition. So, despite overwhelming public consensus, a well-funded coalition of special interests can veto the people's will.

Study after study confirms this shocking disconnect. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed decades of policy decisions and concluded: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Major economic elites and organized interest groups, however, have substantial influence.

In other words, if you're not a major donor, you're not a constituent in the eyes of the system. You're part of the audience. The elites have manipulated the goal of the political system into preservation of capital.

The Silencing of Counterweights

This shift didn’t happen in a vacuum. For most of the 20th-century, there was a powerful counterweight to corporate political power: organized labor. Unions gave working people a collective voice, a shared political megaphone, and a seat at the table where the rules of the economy were written. But as union membership has been deliberately weakened by “right-to-work” laws and court decisions like Janus v. AFSCME (2018), which crippled public-sector unions, that balance has collapsed. Union membership in the U.S. has fallen from over 30% in the 1950s to just 10% today. 

The Auction House, Not the Town Hall

The practical cost is measured in who can even run. A competitive race for a U.S. House seat now costs millions, a Senate seat, tens of millions. The average winning candidate for the U.S. House spent over $2 million in 2022. For the Senate, it was over $20 million. Candidates spend up to 70 percent of their time not talking to voters, but calling wealthy donors.

This filters out anyone without a network of wealth or a willingness to become permanently indebted to one. The working-class candidate, the nurse, the teacher, the small business owner, the person who knows what it’s like to struggle for the foundations of a good life, are priced out before the race even begins. As the old saying goes, “The first thing to be bought in a campaign is the candidate.”

My mother was right about the America we’ve allowed to evolve. The path to power is paved with gold, not with good ideas or community trust. This means the lived experience of most people, their anxieties about housing, healthcare, and their children’s future, is often absent from the rooms where decisions are made.

A Historical Precedent: The Gilded Age & Progressive Fightback

This is not America’s first brush with plutocracy. The late 1800s, the Gilded Age, saw a similar fusion of massive corporate wealth (the “robber barons”) and political corruption. Senators were sometimes chosen by state legislatures dominated by railroad money. The public reaction was not passive.

This corruption became so brazen that it sparked a powerful, bipartisan backlash. The result was the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor, Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. For the first time in American history, it banned all corporate contributions to federal political campaigns.

The law was a direct response to public outrage over corporations like Standard Oil buying influence. It was an imperfect first step, but its principle was revolutionary: a corporation, a creature of the state granted special privileges like limited liability, should not be allowed to use its treasury to control the state that created it. For a time, the Tillman Act stood as a guardrail, acknowledging that corporate money and democratic integrity were fundamentally at odds.

Citizens United didn’t just tweak campaign finance; it took a sledgehammer to that century-old guardrail, declaring the dangerous fusion of corporate money and political power to be ‘speech.’ We are now living with the consequences of that shattered principle.

Out of that muck rose the Progressive Era. A generation of reformers, journalists (“muckrakers”), and activists fought for, and won, landmark changes: the direct election of Senators, antitrust laws, the first campaign finance disclosures, and the federal income tax.

They proved that when democracy is stolen, it can be taken back. They understood that you could not have a republic dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if it was governed by private monopolies.

We stand at a similar crossroads. Citizens United is our era’s version of those corrupt Gilded Age practices, a systemic error so profound it demands a political correction.

A Community First Prescription: Reclaiming the Republic

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is the system we use to build our shared world. Community First Economics demands pro-democracy reforms that are as bold as the threat. We must reclaim the tool of self-government to serve its true purpose: securing the conditions for widespread human prosperity.

Overturn Citizens United & Amplify Real Speech: New Hampshire should join states across the nation in calling for a federal constitutional amendment to clarify that corporations are not people and money is not speech. 

Publicly Funded Elections to Empower Constituents, Not Donors: Implement a “democracy dollars” or small-donor matching system that amplifies the power of everyday contributions. Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program quadrupled the number of small donors and increased candidate diversity. If every voter had a “civic credit” to donate to candidates of their choice, politicians would spend their time listening to thousands of constituents, not courting a handful of donors.

Protect and Expand the Right to Vote & Participate: Automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and making Election Day a state holiday. Make voting easy, secure, and a celebrated civic duty.

Strengthen Countervailing Power: Make it easier, not harder, for workers to organize into unions. A strong labor movement is democracy’s best friend, providing the collective voice and power necessary to balance concentrated capital.

The goal is not to eliminate private interests from politics, that’s impossible. The goal is to restore the balance, so that the public interest, the community’s interest in safe homes, good schools, clean air, and economic security, can be heard above the interests of elites and corporations they own.

My Experience Running for Governor

When I began running for governor, the first issue we ran into was fundraising. I had done a bit of fundraising before, but nothing on the scale this campaign required. I sent out emails, and text messages, soliciting donations, held private dinners in my restaurant and contributed as much of my own money as I could. 

Along the process, a thought occurred to me: the way to get money out of politics was to do politics with as little money as possible. This became my mantra. The way to remove the donor class’s power, was to show campaigns could be run without them. 

After the election was over, we had spent about $60,000, most of that going to my campaign manager in the form of a paycheck. At the end of the day we only spent $20,000 on advertising, signs, literature, and stickers. While I lost the primary, I was able to prove that you can have an impact with limited funds. I spent about $4 to $5 per vote. My two competitors each spent $2 million in the same timeframe. That equates to roughly $30 to $35 per vote. 

I was able to achieve this by using all the free resources available, mainly social media. Ultimately, people told me that they voted for me because I came across as a normal person, able to speak in a normal fashion. People are tired of the programmed speech most politicians are trained in. I sounded like a human, they sounded like robots. 

The Bridge to the Future: Choosing the America We Build

My mother was right about the America we’ve allowed to exist. But she doesn’t have to be right about the America we can build.

Thomas Jefferson warned that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time,” because democracy is a living thing. In America, the health of our democracy should be measured by the strength of our communities and our liberty to pursue happiness.

This corruption of our political system didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the result of a society that has measured success by the wrong scorecard for decades. A system that prioritized the growth of capital over the growth of community. To rebuild a democracy that serves our pursuit of happiness, we must first change what we value and what we measure. We must shift our focus from the abstract metrics of financial extraction to the concrete outcomes of human well-being.