Ramtin Arablui and Randa Abdelfattah

And I think that's really where you see this cat and mouse game start up in earnest.

Kang says it wasn't easy for wealthy people to spend their money on their own megaphone during elections.

They needed help from political groups or the parties themselves.

And that money was restricted.

Yet through the 1980s and into the 1990s, campaign costs were rising and people were finding ways around the FICA laws.

Enter soft money, a loophole that allowed parties to collect big sums of money for generic party-building activities.

Things like voter registration and get out the vote.

And so you had this creep of ultra-wealthy people spending more and more money in politics from the 90s into the 2000s.

Which meant that candidates were focusing more and more on the money.

So now...

You have kind of this unlimited appetite for money because you want to be able to be sure you're not going to get outspent in a dramatic way.

And advertisements and marketing and media can make up a majority of the campaign costs.

And what we've seen, obviously, over the FICA era is the money keeps going up.

I don't remember a time where a candidate is not immediately getting elected and then turning around and beginning to fundraise again for their reelection campaign.

It's just like a constant fundraising machine, it seems like.

Exactly right.

And that has lots of effects on politics.

The politicians are spending less time doing their actual job and more time raising money.

It distracts them from kind of what we consider like what's important about their job, which is making policy and thinking about what's good for the country.

There's lots of reasons to think that's not a great development in campaign finance.