If Clinton raises a lot more money than Trump, will she send cash downballot?

[RaphaelDLG]

It would be smart, but I think it's more likely that she'll either 1) pile cash on thick in the form of a bombardment of ads, or most likely 2) stash it away until the very end of the campaign in case something catastrophic happens.

If this happens it'll happen in, like, October.  It's pretty much human nature to be illogically risk-averse here.

[RaphaelDLG]

ffs jfern just go away. Seriously, I'd rather swim through the East River with a dirty diaper strapped to my head than solicit your opinion on anything related to Clinton.

You're in luck, because that's actually the third event in Fear Factor: Atlas Edition. 

The other two events are taking a bath with Lavenous Marco and some other Florida politicians, and something that I won't say, because I don't want to gross you out/spoil the surprise.  I will say that it involves Ted Cruz.

[RaphaelDLG]

ffs jfern just go away. Seriously, I'd rather swim through the East River with a dirty diaper strapped to my head than solicit your opinion on anything related to Clinton.

You're in luck, because that's actually the third event in Fear Factor: Atlas Edition. 

The other two events are taking a bath with Lavenous Marco and some other Florida politicians, and something that I won't say, because I don't want to gross you out/spoil the surprise.  I will say that it involves Ted Cruz.

Netflix maybe?

GOD NO.  I mean, even NBC has some standards.

[RaphaelDLG]

No. The Victory Fund shenanigans are an indicator of how this is going to be handled. Using struggling state parties as a vehicle to legally launder 99% of the money into the national party while giving them virtually nothing in return is completely at odds with what the DNC, the Clinton campaign and Clinton herself have been saying. Supposedly, Clinton plans to pursue a 50-state strategy. You can't do that without proper funding of state parties, and you certainly can't do it by pouring money into them a month or two before the election; too damn late. At first I thought they might redistribute some of the Victory Fund money back to select states in ways that made sense (since the way in which it is raised is uniform from state to state; Vermont doesn't need $1m to the same degree that Arizona does), but there is no evidence of that happening.

At best, she'll pump money into a few battleground states that won't necessarily need it but might be lagging her national poll numbers in internal polling. Coattails are not how you rebuild state parties and if things are as dire for the GOP as it is in this scenario, then there is going to be a large amount of redundancy in trying to max out her margins. All of these states that might not seem to matter in Senate contests and for the Presidency...yeah, they don't matter if you don't care about both federal and party policy being viable nationally. Medicaid expansion, unions, abortions...the list goes on and on. The President is a literal figurehead with a state-level situation like the one we have today.

This seems so incompetent of them, though. It's undeniable how badly Democrats have been blown out in the states, so how could they not be investing to increase their numbers? This is like a person getting into a car crash that totals their car, then having it towed home and never fixing it because they need money for a new big screen TV. It just doesn't make sense.

Politicians are, predictably,  concerned with getting elected and reelected first, then being effective as a distant second.  It's like, an almost darwinian axiom.

[RaphaelDLG]

I understand the argument for redistributing campaign funds, but I feel it's somewhat sketchy.  The people who donated to Hillary Clinton's campaign, did that because they want her to use it to help become president, not so she could redistribute the cash to Jim Gray in Kentucky.  I don't have much spare cash to give right now, but I made a small donation to a candidate that I care about (who shall remain nameless!)  I'd be kinda pissed if I found out she gave my donation to Hillary.

Obviously campaign finance reform would fix this, but this is the system we have right now.

You have it the other way round.  The Hillary-controlled Victory Fund is something people donate to knowing that their donation will be split between Hillary and local democrats.

The scandal is that the directors were funneling the local half of the money back to Hillary.