Just my humble opinion that the answer is kind of simple. Lots of people react negatively to shrill anger in a politician. They want at the very least a calm, positive daddy. Even better if generally sunny, but if they are angry, it needs to be an alpha type of expression. Women with high voices cannot effect this. I know, it happens to me dealing with authority figures, I sound shrill and ready to freak out when I'm not. Part of the problem is cultural, part maybe even innate from the way women talk to babies and children. It's just the way it is and it will take a long time to change. If you think about it, a lot of successful female politicians worldwide have calm demeanor and steady if not deep voices, they even might do the male thing and lower their voice when angry.

The first part of the question is, "like duh". If people didn't feel they got something for their money, they likely wouldn't give. If they give more, they likely expect something more. In the case of this past election (if I may), there was a bargain basement/cut-rate special going, so price of admission appeared to super low for same access. However, Black Sunday specials can't be run every week or typically the venue goes out of business. Typically someone who gives up to the max $2700 or whatever it is doesn't really feel much more entitled than someone paying $100, but if someone's helping bundle $100K or more, yeah, they think at some level they'll be heard as needed.

There were several similar issues re: preferences, as relates to people who work for the party, including the superdelegates as well as party pecking order, along with a more elitist but exciting & dynamic caucus system of voting.  And then there's the imbalance of whether you live in a swing state or early Iowa/NH/NC state that get a lot of love, vs a New York or California that get are too in the bag to get more than hit up for cash. There's of course usually some pecking order for who gets invites to the convention & what happens there....

Then there's the question of how you feel about money and influence. In the IT world, there are a lot of conferences with various levels of suck-up-ness; a company like HP can pay a million bucks to rent out say a nice venue in Paris, or another company will hire a once-trendy band like Duran Duran for a private gig. Few I'd guess would regard this kind of spending as payola, even though it is trying to buy some loyalty at some kind of price. The same thing happens with pharmaceutical conferences, open houses & launches, etc.

So what are major donors buying with their much larger contributions? *Is* it an issue that Soros might have an agenda related to the money he gives, and is that bad? In that particular case, I'm rather a fan of him stepping up when no one else will - helping rebuild East Europe and helping Democrats win key races. His rhetoric and ideals largely fit the party message as well, so I think of it as a win-win. 

Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook ponied up $20 mill in this last election round just cause he's a nice guy and as he notes:

"This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections," Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, wrote in a post on Medium. "We hope these efforts make it a little more likely that Secretary Clinton is able to pursue the agenda she's outlined, and serve as a signal to the Republican Party that by running this kind of campaign — one built on fear and hostility — and supporting this kind of candidate, they compel people to act in response."

Moskovitz said $5 million would go to a super PAC run by the League of Conservation Voters, an environmentalist group running advertising and canvassing campaigns; and another $5 million to For Our Future PAC, an effort by organized labor and environmentalists to run a consolidated, high-powered field program.

Other donations will be split between a joint fundraising committee for Hillary Clinton; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; a political arm of MoveOn.Org; Color of Change PAC; and "several nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV efforts."

So part of it gets heavily into *how* it's spent, transparency, and values that people can understand. But that $20 million is roughly 800,000 voters giving $27. That's a huge support for stuff that needs to be done. Much has been made about the difference in spending last year, but 1 candidate largely didn't need to buy TV advertising because he had free TV publicity 24x7. Another candidate complained that he wasn't given any TV publicity and that the media basically ignored him. So money is the equalizer, a sometimes enabler of democracy, but not always.

Obviously tacky, over-the-line or just cringeworthy buying of influence is going to be a turnoff, as should be blatantly illegal stuff (a quaint nostalgic hat-tip to the naive past). But this continual self-flagellation over money is self-defeating, and it's only 1 side that plays this game. If JK Rowling came around offering a billion bucks for some ear-time, she'd have it in a flash - she's cool, she has values, and the money can help. If the head of Whole Foods did, I'd beg off (even though I have no problem him speaking out on his thoughts about healthcare & what not - I'm pretty open on First Amendment ideals). 

Frankly, I think the hush-hush, scandal approach to money *HURTS* us - we're so goddamned panicky about it that we always feel like we're doing something wrong and sneaky, and then half of the party like famed lobsters keeps reaching up to grab tail of anyone that has a nickel more (or a better seat at the table). I don't rightly care about all that. I'm much more interested in making sure a concerted effort is made to give people what they need to survive and the opportunity to do much more. Part of that is money - money is great. It's hard to paint money as evil and then turn around and want $500 billion of it to do something heroic like fix education, healthcare or police abuse..

Be consistent. Our party spends so much of its time looking for businesses and wealthy people to attack, and it's missing the point. De Niro and Beyonce and Rowling and Moskowitz and Soros and Bloomberg and Oprah are all great, but also all very wealthy business people with mixed motives at times, mixed behavior at times... But it's most important that the ones we embrace, the heavy hitters, largely have the heart and message of what we want to deliver.

Regularly we get these news blips that oh, the finance industry is supporting X to the tune of $100K or something trivial, and then people clutch pearls and faint and we go through another round of squeamishness. There's seldom any perspective on any of it, which is why a $300 haircut or a $600 pair of shoes turn into equivalents of a $20 million piece of fraud. We set ourselves up for it, and then wonder why we never seem to talk about issues, only stuff about money and corruption. 

Stuff costs money. As I noted before, one of the alternative candidates blew a lot of his contributions on traditional media - there wasn't much time or availability to do much else, so despite the message of something new, that part was business as usual. Am I critical? Hardly - a bit amused, but realistic - there are only so many ways to skin a cat, most illegal, so you're stuck with a few tried-and-true options unless really creative.

Anyway: people like money, we all want to be rich or at least self-sufficient and without fear. Make money a positive message. Class warfare isn't about who has more money - it's about who uses wealth and position and other power advantages to oppress the rest. Also, accept that many of the conflicts are unresolvable, that it's always a case of trying to balance the 2 ends or multiple points of interest, and some of the "obvious" solutions can do more harm than good. I saw earlier today on LinkedIn that Google had lost much of its workforce dedicated to cars. Why? They paid them too much. People found it too easy - they could roughly retire or choose other options. So much for trying to pay your workers a good wage (not that this case happens often).

Government costs money - take it away, and it shrivels up till you can drown it in a bathtub. Campaigns are just 1 part of government, but arguably the most important - where there's the most review, the most discussion of ideas, the most vetting of candidates, or perhaps better, where we push our candidate to the hilt in the hope they'll beat their flawed awful candidate. Lose the election, it's years in the wilderness. There's not a lot of upside to losing. If you can guarantee you can keep winning elections by running against money, well, I might be convinced. So far the argument's not resonating. And if you're going to run a bunch of programs like a hundred billion dollar health initiative among hundreds of activities, getting bent out of shape over a million or less is largely illusory, especially since the other side will never-ever-ever express remorse in the way we'd like them to. Scratch that, they'll never express remorse period.

Build the dream up, not down. Yes, it's great  to engage people, to provide your followers a real platform to have a voice in, to make government responsive not just to the millionaires and well-dressed, to get real things done that affect people on issues that they understand. But we get so wrapped up with symbolism, we often confuse it with what it stands in the way of. Half of the criticisms last year were things like "the appearance of", "what could be", "potentially a problem with", etc. Now we're faced with a losing proposition where *OUR* coulda-should-wouldas became *THEIR* without-a-doubts and just-grin-and-bear-it. Cold shower time. A little imperfection is okay - better than a gross disaster.

Well said.

I honestly don't think your average voter spends alot of time worrying about how much money a party raises/spends and how/why they do it.  They're more interested in the money in their pocket.  Do you really believe that Trump voters chose him because he said he didn't need Wall Street, etc. money?  If they did it was only because it made him seem richer and less tied to the "establishment" - not because they were concerned about money in politics.  That's a liberal thing.  It's a talking heads and progressive wing thing.  The ordinary people that both sides claim to love couldn't care less who pays for the politician that promises to get them what they need as long as they get it.

The bigger question is Why? What are our real objectives based on what scenarios? 1900 populism arose out of a specific set of circumstances. The current situation may or may not be similar - though I don't recall the results for populism that attractive, at least not in Europe. What are the outcomes we'd like in 40 years, the positioning of the party, the priorities in terms of jobs, health, environment, etc, and what are possible ways to get there and keep up the excitement and buy-in along the way.

I was thinking yesterday that our traditional model of work is broken and will stay broke. Economics from Marx and Ford and the rest has been based on capital, work, materials. The leverage workers had was their value in that production, and the Marxist value-add was to seize the material resources to up the workers' margin - unions could leverage demand for farm hands and factory workers. That makes sense with coal and farmland. It no longer flies so well with a few computers in a building with a Google or Twitter business model - the beauty of cloud software is its scalable without resources, and investors desperately want new models that don't require people and resources - it's like shoveling gold. I just sat down with a guy who started a new food chain that needs 1/4 the resources of KFC - lean and mean. Sure, there will be some jobs that have to pay well, but many more will be commodity, as the labor element will continue to be a smaller and smaller part of the service value. We cannot pretend that workers should be paid more than their value, the worth of their contribution, and have a logical economic system. But as humans we need a system that grows the sustainability and comfort of humans amidst this progress. Which means probably we need 2 systems working side by side with different *but not completely opposite* goals. There will be less and less a link between work and profits, but those profits need to fund the human side along with personal profit. We *want* big and lean successful companies, but we need them structurally set up to fund the other stuff that's falling behind, and we need the demands for the humanitarian side defined coherently and scalable as well. It's not a free lunch - it's an even more precarious transition onto redistribution than we've ever witnessed.

I have 1 idea I'm working on that would destroy the economic activity of a good chunk of humanity but save a huge amount of daily effort as well. Someone else will likely manage it before me, but my biggest concerns revolve around not the development of the tech, but who will get the profits and what happens to the rest. Our basic services as humans are no longer very valuable to this economic machine we've built, and we likely shouldn't just hobble the machine, but instead figure out how to use it for the greater good. And that includes how to deal with the money "vultures" or traders or whatever their new term shall be.

If you look on his site today, you'll note projections of the Rust Belt losing *6* electoral votes in 2020 - MN, MI, IL, Ohio, PA, WVa. So gearing up to fight last year's demographics next time is probably a bit insane.

Elsewhere, he analyzes internet memes from Reddit, and notes that "I'm With Her" hugely outpaced "Stronger Together" for mentions. The latter might be more pleasant and inclusive, but the former slides off the lips, is more memorable, etc.

Third is their evaluation of Bernie's faction's view of where the party is going - no time to read it at the moment, but I was struck by the line "not beholden to special interests". I"m not sure that's good. We used to be beholden to union interests, minority interests, etc. Maybe I'm quibbling, but a level playing field is a bit unexciting and inexpressive - people who can't set priorities or tell the better from the worse or not-quite-as-good.