Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Tufts, write in their 2015 book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail”:
The public intensely dislikes how campaigns are financed in the United States. We can understand why. The system of private financing seems rigged to favor special interests and wealthy donors. Much of the reform community has responded by calling for tighter restrictions on private financing of elections to push the system toward “small donor democracy” and various forms of public financing. These strategies seem to make sense and, in principle, we are not opposed to them.
(New York Times, 8/30/23)