I'm sure it's not an accident. Party establishment wants congresspeople who will stay in line, there's selection pressure for people who run in Epstein circles and have some big skeletons in their closets

This has been documented in Nature, I believe it's the Luigi effect.

In my probably unpopular opiniom, Democracy dies as soon as someone mentioned a representative democracy would be better.

Feel it's why there was so much brought up in 2024 about a lot of people not being educated enough to vote or make decisions for themselves. People were afraid these backlashes against a toxic 2 party system could devolve into many people thinking it is innatly easier to corrupt 1 individual representing many than it is to corrupt more than 50% of those people.

An easy example is if we had a pure democracy I believe more than enough people would vote to make the piggy backing of unrelated items onto other bills unconstitutional.

It would require massive changes to our government structure but both parties and the rich would fight any such thing because it would strip power from their private entities.

Advertising is expensive. From the article: "filings show the super PAC immediately plugged the Musk money into an entity called Texas PAC, which took to the air with advertisements praising Paxton and attacking Democratic rival James Talarico.

“Musk’s donations armed Senate Republicans to take over the airwaves in Texas,” the Texas Tribune noted. “Using Texas PAC as the vessel to book airtime, SLF has thus far spent over $159 million on TV, radio, and digital advertising, double the outlay from Talarico’s campaign, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.”"

There was an AMA years ago with an author who spent time tracking this. Candidates had died, but people were still eating out on the campaign coffers.

Funneled into the grift to grow and grow