There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics. Political campaigns are entirely ineffective.
The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments [0]
"First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments’ average effect is also zero."
Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008 [1]
"The apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: the best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. [...] self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results"
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1
> There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics.
That's simply nonsense.
"We find no evidence that corporations benefit from electing their favored candidate, and we can statistically reject effect sizes greater than 0.4 percent of firm value. Contrary to the concerns of many observers, corporate campaign contributions do not appear to buy significant political favors."
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/researc...
I find that kind of honesty refreshing in a politician, when they can set aside their own personal beliefs and actually represent the people who elected them.
So by logical extension, a highly virtuous person would ... donate money to racist causes? Because that is the exact opposite of taking their donations.
There is always going to be one politician who has policies that are more racist-friendly than the other. Targeting specific groups for exclusion from the political process, even at the social level, is a recipe for disaster. We want less of that, not more.
At most, ask for transparency about where the donations are sourced from so the polity can talk about it.
Trump is a good example of this sort of thing - a reporter just has to look at him sideways to get told that black unemployment is at a record low, and over the last 2 years he's pulled a couple of pro-black political stunts. About half the media will still call him a racist, because he has _no_ control over who he gets associated with.
I expect this point would come up in a debate so I'll address it - a 'Muslim travel ban' is only racist to someone who is very confused about what 'race' means. Given the pain Bush & Obama have delivered to the Middle East in particular, and the Muslim world in general, this is a distasteful but certainly not inconsistent choice for US foreign policy.
> politicians who accept donations from racist organizations are the racist politicians.
Maybe in the abstract, but who are there "racist organizations" that are making political donations to influence politicans? Assuming we are still talking US politics, the last scandal [0] involving the KKK (only racist organisation I know of) was in 1991! Everything since is literally throwaway one-line comments of no real significance.
I don't think racist organisations are active in politics, they'd make candidates unelectable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_United_States_politi...
The issue is that such a model is based purely on economic grounds rather than on messaging and rhetoric. Accepting money usually implies a form of condonation of the donor because the implication is that you want their assistance. If I take money from the US Nazi party and sue them back (for... something) with said money that’d be complicated but this has happened rarely enough that popular media appears to never show it. This isn’t like a corporate entity like Burger King donating money to a candidate. But it would sure be funny if Burger King donated money to PETA right?
On the flip side, refusing money is usually assumed as a form of demonstration of principle that is even stronger the lesser your wealth; that even if you are poor and destitute (as if our politicians are, yeah I know) you would rather not accept money from someone you disagree with. If a homeless person returns a large sum of money, that makes news (and an ironically higher-compensation Kickstarter / gofundme for the refuser but historically not so). Politicians and powerful people in general work off networks and money as their careers so taking money from someone when you have so much wealth / fame already carries a lot of weight there as well.
Come to think of it, I think I saw someone accept a donation and immediately donate the money to a diametrically opposed organization. But that’s rare enough that it becomes a headline is my point.
This is especially important because clever politicians can say things that seem reasonable on the surface, but aren't really.
What I'm talking about here is really an application of the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. Support of nutjobs is 80% likely to be evidence of nutty ideas.
It doesn’t really work well for politics - it’s clear nutjobs support both major parties here in the US.
I honestly think ideas like this are one of the most problematic beliefs in the current political discourse. This type of thinking only means we look less and less at the merits of someone's arguments and more and more at the tribe they associate with, or even worse the tribe that chooses to associate with them.
We have absolutely no control over these associations. If some nutjob chooses to support my cause does that somehow means my arguments are less valid?