“You don’t tell your pappy how to court the electorate. We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re mass communicating.” – Charles Durning as Gov. Pappy O’Daniel in the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

One of the few advantages of living in a politically one-sided state is we usually avoid much of the unending political advertising as the November general election approaches. In most partisan races, the outcome is decided in the primaries.

Of course we lose this benefit when living in a county stuck in a Georgia broadcasting media market. Georgia currently is incredibly competitive between Republicans and Democrats.

If you break out in hives when you hear the names Jon Ossoff, Herschel Walker, David Perdue and Raphael Warnock, it might be less to do with any of their political positions and more about the seemingly nonstop commercials from their U.S. Senate campaigns in the past two election cycles.

Unfortunately, many more political commercials are headed our way as Georgia will again be a battleground state in this year’s general election.

The sheer amount of advertising makes many folks wonder from where all this advertising money comes and what rules should be in place to limit their influence over our elected officials and the public. Hand-wringing over these questions has long been a part of American politics.

Back in 1896, William McKinley’s presidential campaign may have received as much as $16 million, though the accuracy of this number has been disputed by historians.

This amount was so striking at the time that McKinley’s later vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, helped pass the Tillman Act to prohibit corporations and multistate banks from donating to candidates for federal office.

Various other laws and regulations to limit financial influence have been passed since the preceding century, but election spending only goes up and up.

The website Open Secrets reported $5.7 billion alone was spent on the 2020 presidential race. If you add in spending on U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives races from 2020, the amount grows to a whopping total of $14.4 billion. This figure does not even include money spent in state and local elections from that year.

In modern times campaign donors are usually divided into three broad categories – individual donors, businesses/labor unions, and special interest groups often represented by Political Action Committees or PACs.

PACs represent a variety of philosophical interests – such as gun rights, abortion, education and taxes – as well as private industries – such as insurance, healthcare, agriculture, energy, construction and many others.

State laws govern most of the rules and limitations for donations in that state’s elections while rules established by the federal government and enforced by the Federal Election Commission mostly govern the races for federal offices, such as president, U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives.

In Alabama there are no restrictions for contribution amounts to state and local candidates, but the contributions have to be reported to the Secretary of State’s Office which makes that information available to the public.

Federal rules actually limit contributions from individuals and PACs to candidates for federal offices to a few thousand dollars. Of course any time there is a rule, wily campaign professionals will find a way around the rule.

You may have heard the term super PAC thrown around from time to time. While a super PAC may sound like a heroic version of a regular PAC, these PACs get their name due to their capacity for nearly unlimited spending to advertise in support of or against a candidate as long as the message is not planned with a candidate’s campaign or a political party.

Remember the Tillman Act? It does not apply to super PACs thanks to a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, so corporations and labor unions can donate as much as they want to these entities.

Another rule bending trend in elections is the use of dark money. Nonprofit organizations that are civically focused but do not spend a majority of their money on elections and campaigns have become attractive vehicles to pay for campaign advertising because, unlike super PACs, these groups do not have to disclose who their donors are, according to a Washington Post explainer.

Recent rulings from the Federal Election Commission further muddy the waters when it comes to campaigns. The New York Times reported after years of deadlock the FEC has made several decisions over the last few years to loosen several rules including allowing super PACs and candidates’ campaign organizations to work together to campaign door-to-door. As the world’s methods to communicate become more complex so do the decisions that go into managing political communications and what is allowed.