Beto O’Rourke raised $6.1m in a day – proof there’s too much money in US politics

Beto O’Rourke is a man with a very fuzzy plan. He doesn’t seem to have much idea where he sits on the political spectrum, or what his policies are. He does, on the other hand, have an awful lot of money. The US Democratic challenger raised a record-breaking $6.1m during the first 24 hours of his campaign. This beats the $5.9m Bernie Sanders raised in his first 24 hours, and makes the other candidate hauls look somewhat pathetic. While Kamala Harris reportedly brought in more than $1.5m in her first day, it took Amy Klobuchar 48 hours to get to a measly million. I won’t bore you by listing what the other Democratic candidates have raised; suffice it to say, there is a lot invested in making sure Donald Trump doesn’t get another term.

On the one hand, all this fundraising is great. As far as I’m concerned, unseating Trump is priceless. On the other hand, it’s hard not to look at the enormous amounts being raised without feeling a little queasy. There is so much good this money could be doing, it feels like a colossal waste to have it go towards political campaigning; it seems a shame to be investing in rhetoric rather than real change. It also feels incredibly corrupt to have such obscene amounts of money influencing the election process.

O’Rourke, naturally, has another view of the matter. He is touting his fundraising haul as a beautiful example of people power. “In just 24 hours, Americans across this country came together to prove that it is possible to run a true grassroots campaign for president – a campaign by all of us for all of us that answers not to the PACs [political action committees], corporations and special interests, but to the people,” he said in a statement.

While it is true that O’Rourke didn’t take PAC donations, it’s not entirely clear how grassroots his fundraising really was: the presidential hopeful has not disclosed the number of donors who contributed, or the average size of the contributions. Sanders’ campaign (which raised money from 223,000 donors) was quick to point this out; a fundraising email sent on Monday acknowledged that, while O’Rourke had raised more money, “the good news is, we more than likely had a lot more individual donations than he did”.

A lot of energy is being devoted to confronting the role of big money in the US elections, and it is cheering to see this crop of Democratic candidates focus on small individual donations rather than corporate funding. Nevertheless, money continues to have an outsized role in US politics and elections get more expensive every year. Candidate spending in the 2010 midterms was $3.6bn; in 2014 it was $3.8bn; in 2018 it was a massive $5.7bn.

While elections grow more extravagant, the US grows increasingly unequal. One in every 10 kids in a New York City public school is homeless. Flint, Michigan, still doesn’t have clean drinking water. Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. We are constantly told that there isn’t enough money to fund social programmes, such as universal healthcare or free education. But there always seems to be more money for elections.