United States

In 2010 the contribution limits imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act were partly invalidated by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that contributions made for independent electioneering communications were a form of constitutionally protected free speech that could not be limited by law. The controversial decision was hailed by some as a resounding victory for freedom of speech, whereas others criticized it as an overreaching attempt to rewrite campaign finance law. The judgment led to the growth of so-called Super PACs, organizations allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money to support or defeat a candidate or an issue so long as those expenditures were made independently from the official campaign.

There are no federal limits on how much an individual may spend on his or her own candidacy. In 1992, for example, Ross Perot spent more than $60 million of his fortune on his unsuccessful bid to become president of the United States, and Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City in 2001 after spending nearly $70 million of his own funds.

Perot, Ross: campaign buttonButton from Ross Perot's 1996 presidential campaign.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Political parties

The United States has two major national political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Although the parties contest presidential elections every four years and have national party organizations, between elections they are often little more than loose alliances of state and local party organizations. Other parties have occasionally challenged the Democrats and Republicans. Since the Republican Party’s rise to major party status in the 1850s, however, minor parties have had only limited electoral success, generally restricted either to influencing the platforms of the major parties or to siphoning off enough votes from a major party to deprive that party of victory in a presidential election. In the 1912 election, for example, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt challenged Republican President William Howard Taft, splitting the votes of Republicans and allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency with only 42 percent of the vote, and the 2.7 percent of the vote won by Green Party nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 may have tipped the presidency toward Republican George W. Bush by attracting votes that otherwise would have been cast for Democrat Al Gore.

Nixon, Richard M.Richard M. Nixon during a campaign stop in 1968, saluting the crowd with his iconic “V-is-for-Victory” gesture. Oliver F. Atkins—White House Photo/Nixon Presidential Library and Museum/NARA