The News & Record of Greensboro

Increasingly to be a candidate for public office — particularly nationally — grabbing dollars has become more imperative than grabbing hands of voters or headlines to sell positive ideas.

That was apparent in 2016, when newcomer candidate Ted Budd emerged from a Kentucky Derby-sized field to be elected in North Carolina’s then-new 13th Congressional District, largely because a national political action committee liked his ideas and his smile and gave him a large donation that went far in introducing him to voters in the five counties of that district.

You may also recall that the same year the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Richard Burr and Deborah Ross was one of the most expensive Senate races in the country, as special influencers sought to drop their dollars to ensure a purple state continued to tilt red.

Now that trend appears to be the norm. Taft Wireback reported Sunday in the News & Record that the two congressional races affecting Guilford County — the Sixth District is the other — have generated more than $4.2 million for the top candidates, and Wireback quotes election strategist Sheila Krumholz as saying that the 13th District candidates typically could expect another 50 percent before election day on Nov. 6.

Budd’s primary challenger is Democrat Kathy Manning, another political newcomer, who dominates the dollars race with more than $1.93 million, less than 10 percent of which came from PACs. Budd also has surpassed his total from 2016, collecting more than $1.16 million, and nearly half of that is from PACs. That is no small change to be spent in the nation’s No. 50 TV market.

But that’s not necessarily a good thing. You could make an argument that the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2010 — yes, retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote, perhaps his most influential — in the Citizens United case, which established that dollars in political donations equaled free speech, has been the deciding factor in many elections since.

You may recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gloated about the court’s decision because of how it connected with the First Amendment and allowed aggressive fundraising that could bring to Congress more friends than foes.

But the Citizens United ruling had much more significant impact than putting pretty faces in incessant campaign ads. It brought influence from extremes in our political philosophies and underwrote a megaphone for voices and ideas that sometimes do not match what the greater public wants to consider.

You expect that on the national scale. The presidential election is a forum for all ideas, and those who have the deepest pockets control the message. And, let’s face it, most candidates since Abraham Lincoln didn’t rise from the poverty of a dirt-floor cabin in central Kentucky. They had the dollars and education to gain purchase in races that often separated the haves from the have-nots.

But the time of Honest Abe, when the great debates truly were what we now know metaphorically as stump speeches, consisted of ideas and arguments delivered from the heart and lungs of the candidate.

Shouldn’t that be the way that it is? Don’t you want to know what each candidate in these two congressional races thinks about so many critical issues facing all of us? And don’t you want them to tell you without someone else’s dollars and influence flavoring the words in their mouths?