Investing in America: How Unregulated Campaign Contributions Determine Elections

An American citizen cannot be elected to Congress or the White House without carrying out a multi-million dollar campaign; to get the money, he or she has to either be very rich to begin with, or solicit funds from contributors which will yield political dividends afterwards, Gevorg Mirzayan, a senior fellow at the Moscow-based Institute for US and Canadian Studies, was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying.

Despite the fact that a presidential candidate is forbidden from directly turning to corporations for financial assistance, there is an array of legitimate mechanisms which can be relied upon to obtain the money, Mirzayan said. 

For example, a company can give money to a candidate in the form of private donations from their employees, given that the law allows every American citizen to donate up to 2,700 dollars to a presidential candidate. In addition, businessmen can conduct parallel election campaigns, Mirzayan explained.

In the United States, he went on to say, there are so-called super political action committees (Super-PACs), which are not restricted by law when it comes to attracting money from corporations or spending assets to support a certain candidate.

Additionally, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the companies and trade unions have the right to freely spend money to support or criticize presidential candidates, and that they are not obliged to publish data on the amount spent.

Right now, Hillary Clinton remains an absolute leader in terms of the money she's collected in the course of the ongoing presidential campaign. According to the New York Times, she collected a total of 334 million dollars by June 20, including 238 million obtained by her headquarters and another 96 million received with the help of the Super PACs.

Insurance and investment companies remain among the largest sponsors of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Mirzayan said, citing a whopping 40 million dollars they have already allocated for the purpose.

"A budget analysis of Clinton's campaign confirms the conventional wisdom that Hillary is an absolute creature of Wall Street and large corporations," Mirzayan underscored.

In contrast, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump managed to collect just 67 million dollars by June 20, with only 2.5 million coming from his Super PACs.

Mirzayan said that this financial failure can be explained by the billionaire not being in line with traditional conservative values, a conflict which has alienated much of the party establishment and is reflected in his relatively low chances of winning the presidential race.

"Such modest financial indicators allow Trump to position himself as an independent candidate, while Hillary, on the contrary, can be seen as a candidate of the anti-popular establishment," he noted.

Meanwhile, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has revealed that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is widening the lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump in the battleground states of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado.

Clinton officially accepted the Democratic nomination at the convention last month and will face Trump in the national US presidential elections, scheduled for November 2016.