Specifically, how do the Koch Bros buy elections?

Their super PACS produce TV commercials with which they flood the markets with, well, not very honest ads. I.e., deceitful trash.

In great anguish, I saw and charted how this worked in the 2016 senatorial elections in Missouri, Indiana and Wisconsin.

But until some soft n’ fuzzy Gorsuch diaper ads appeared on TV in my market — New York — I really could not know how TV advertising could brainwash viewers into voting against their best interests, because the TV market I live in is extremely expensive and resolutely blue. We don’t get the kind of full-time political TV ad assaults that other states do.

Indeed, I got the feeling the Koch Bros’s Gorsuch ads were testing whether it was worth it to buy time against Koch political opponents in New York. (Those diaper ads for Gorsuch were radically creepy and awfully offensive, since we voters don’t get to vote for Supreme Court seats. Why were they selling Gorsuch’s candidacy in the New York market?)

Today, Daily Kos Elections gives us a sort of clip of Koch Bros political TV advertising and I find it hugely instructive. I think you will, too. I’ve bolded the crucial fact:

NV-Gov: The Koch-aligned Freedom Partners has launched a $1.5 million buy to air two TV ads (here and here) in Nevada’s open gubernatorial race. Their first spot praises Republican Adam Laxalt for supposedly cutting waste and inefficiency in government.

The second accuses Democrat Steve Sisolak of corruption by implying he doled out government contracts in exchange for campaign donations. The ad relies on a Nevada Independent story from February that reported Sisolak had received $660,000 in campaign contributions during, or immediately before or after, county commission meetings, including one instance where a paving company secured a $1.9 million contract and gave Sisolak a $10,000 contribution the next day. Left out of the ad is the fact that the company submitted the lowest of three bids and that the vote of the seven-member commission was unanimous.

P.S. Translation: “…cutting waste and inefficiency in government” means cutting government services to all Nevadans who are not very, very rich. Let me once again tell you about the Cato Institute’s Credo, i.e., the Koch Bros Final Solution for Democracy.

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