LOST….

Noo…it’s not the TV show…this is ‘the other’ reality show that we’ve seen a lot in the past months.

Aren’t you curious about what happen with the candidates who have lost the race? Well, here they are…living their happy life by buying an empty island and set up a “Dropped-Out-Candidates” club. Kinda pathetic, huh?

 

I got this funny political cartoon from TIME’s cartoon-of-the-week. And out of nowhere, a question suddenly came up to me. After they lost their candidacy, what will happen with the rest of the money? Can the candidates keep the rest of the campaign money? If it’s a yes, then buy an island and set up a club like the one in the picture is an option for them, isn’t it? Maybe they could run a travel agency together with the upcoming dropped-out, Hillary and the rest of the Republican candidates…*oops…I revealed my candidate…*

Enough the prologue…so, just out of curiosity, I tried to googled how much money left in the lost-candidates pocket now. You can also check it here.

The first former candidate is Mitt Romney. He raised almost $88.5 million in this race. But poor Romney got $35 million from his own pocket. So I think he’s out of our topic, he got no money left, in fact he’s in debt for $35 million.

What about Giuliani? He managed to raise almost $61 million and “only” spent $48 million before he dropped out of the race. His debt is about $1.2 million and no money from his own pocket. So we can assume that he now have $12 million left from his campaign. Same thing happen with Christopher Dodd (D), Fred Thompson (R) and Bill Richardson (D), although the amount of the money is far away from Giuliani’s cash-on-hand.

Now the remaining question would be: what will happen with this unused money? Can the candidates keep it? Or does it go into the party’s bank account?

After another Googling session, I found out that before 1993, candidates could and did keep unused campaign contributions. Unused campaign funds often transferred into candidate’s personal account. But they also have the freedom to spend it in other ways such as spend it as a contribution for their party or even support other candidate’s campaign.

They can also spend it by donating the money to a nonprofit charity, such as foundation headed by relatives or friends, forming a public agency and funnel the money to it, or even put the money to companies he controls.

Legally speaking, according to Federal Election Commission, there are three options for the candidates who still have unused campaign money. Here it is:

• The candidate is allowed to retain his money for a future election,
• The candidate can donate the money to a non-profit organization of his choosing as long as it has 501 (C) tax status,
• The candidate can donate his money to other campaign committees.

So, even though there is no hope of winning, why some of them keep stay in the race? Why go through all the trouble? I think now we know why….

With a fresh $12 million in your hand, losing an election is not that painful, huh?