2014 the First True Post-Citizens United Election

[Hissyspit]

Yes, the original decision was made in January of 2010, and so affected the elections that year and in 2012, etc., however, many subsequent Citizens United-related decisions came later. It wasn't until this year that the Supreme Court reversed a ruling of the DC District Court's dismissal of McCutcheon v. FEC, striking down aggregate limits.

And it has taken a few years of the learning curve to figure the most effective ways to take advantage of the changes.

Study: Citizens United elected more Republicans

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/28/study-citizens-united-elected-more-republicans/

By Reid Wilson August 28
The 2010 Supreme Court decision that helped usher in a new era of political spending gave Republicans a measurable advantage on Election Day, according to a new study.

The advantage isn’t large, but it is statistically significant: The researchers found the ruling, in Citizens United v. FEC, was associated with a six percentage-point increase in the likelihood that a Republican candidate would win a state legislative race.

And in six of the most affected states — Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee — the probability that a Republican would be elected to a state legislative seat increased by 10 percentage points or more.

In five other states — Colorado, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming — Republican candidates were seven percentage points more likely to win.

The SCOTUS minority dissent, read from the bench, in part, by Justice Stevens back in 2010, argued that the Court's ruling "threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution... A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."

Citizens United, voter ID laws, election law re-engineering, gerrymandering, these are all policy tactics being used by a right-wing that long ago figured out that they could not win on a level playing field overall.

Discuss...

[Overseas]

1. K&R. We need to overturn Citizens' United and protect voting rights.

The GOP has been conducting a mad rush to decrease the numbers of voters.

They've been cleverly working on several fronts so that while we're chasing down voter ID laws they're conducting broad brush voter purges and allocating too few machines to Democratic districts and making misleading robocalls in another place.

It is hard to keep up with all of their nefarious activities.