Beneath the sterile language of “coordination limits” lies a brutal, simple question: will politics stay a shared civic space or harden into a marketplace where influence is just another asset to be traded? If parties become seamless money conduits, campaigns will no longer compete primarily on ideas, but on how precisely they can be financed and targeted. The most powerful voices will be those that can afford to drown out all others, long before ordinary voters realize which options were silently priced out of existence.
Yet the outcome is not inevitable. Even as super PACs and dark money warp the landscape, public outrage, reform movements, and state-level experiments in small-donor systems show another path. The Court’s decision will either accelerate the slide toward oligarchy or buy time for a different model to take root—one where elections are not bought, but genuinely fought for.
