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"If there's anything left over after all the bills are paid, the candidate has a few options," explains Richard Briffault.
When presidential campaigns end, what happens to the leftover money?
Briffault is a professor at Columbia Law School.
Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet are the latest Democrats who have ended their campaigns for president.
What happens to the money they have raised, but not yet spent?
"The American public deserves to know whose money is bankrolling political advertisements," argues Neal Simon.
A reminder of how democracy dies in dark money
Simon is a Maryland business executive who ran for the Senate as an independent in 2018. He is the author of "Contract to Unite America: Ten Reforms to Reclaim Our Republic" (RealClear Publishing).
Party bosses on Capitol Hill once kept envelopes of cash to dispense to loyal party hacks. This kind of corruption was mostly swept away by the reforms that followed the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. But in some ways, what has replaced it is worse.
In 2012, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana was in a dead heat with his Republican challenger in the last week of the campaign. Then, an ad from a faceless, secretive sponsor flooded the airwaves, encouraging viewers to vote for a Libertarian candidate named Dan Cox. Was the ad made by people trying to help Cox? Nope. Not only did Cox not know "Montana Hunters and Anglers," which turned out to be financing the ads, but the spots lied about him being "the real conservative" in the race in an effort to siphon off Republican voters. It worked: Polling at 1 percent before the ad, Cox got almost 7 percent in the election. The ad's sponsor, who wasn't even in Montana, got what they wanted: the dark-money election of Tester, who won by less than 4 points.
In 2018, Tester was again in a close race, this time against Republican state Auditor Matt Rosendale. Suddenly, voters got hit with a televised blitzkrieg of attacks against Rosendale. One painted him as a greedy newcomer to Big Sky Country who didn't know a cow from a cow pie and who planned to turn his rural ranch into a housing development. Again, the sponsor was faceless and very difficult to trace. (They were later found to be from out of state.) But without such accountability, they're free to lie.
We've seen this on Facebook, and it'll get worse in the 2020 election.
Partisan accord on modernizing Indiana's campaign finance reporting
Indiana legislators are finding unusual, if narrow, bipartisan agreement on money-in-politics regulation: allowing all Hoosier candidates to file their fundraising and spending reports online.
It sounds like a minor bookkeeping matter, but campaign finance watchdogs say such electronic filings produce more accurate and timely disclosures by politicians than when they're compelled to use pen and paper.
Record $6.9 billion in political ad spending projected
It's always the case that as campaign season heats up, the sight of political advertisements increases ever more rapidly. But this year may be different, and not in a relaxing way. A new report projects that spending on 2020 political ads will reach $6.9 billion by Election Day, shattering the previous records.
The figure is an astonishing 63 percent more than what was spent ($4.2 billion) to promote all the candidates and causes in the last presidential election year, the digital marketing research firm eMarketer said in a study out Wednesday.
The booming business of campaign advertising is just the latest reflection of how the influence of money on politics has seen unbridled growth — especially in the decade since the Supreme Court largely deregulated the world of campaign finance, allowing donors to start spending billions in often unlimited and undisclosed amounts to pay for all the ads.