What happens to left over money campaign contributions in general election?

Answer 1

Campaign finance laws preclude candidates from taking home their leftover money, so the losers must return the money to contributors, transfer it to other campaigns or party committees or donate it to charity.

Answer 2

Right now, it’s all politics all the time in the U.S. You must be especially aware of the election news cycle if you live in a swing state. Most of the money being spent by the presidential candidates is going to pay for expensive ad buys in battleground states. In order to even contemplate doing so both major party candidates have to raise tons of cash. But what happens when the election is over? Win or lose, each candidate potentially has some money sitting around that wasn’t spent, but that was donated to the cause of getting them elected.

Federal lawmakers, upon retirement, used to be able to pocket their leftover campaign funds and put them to personal use. Thankfully, these rules have since changed. What about the big presidential election? What about those failed primary runs? What were those candidates allowed to do with their leftover cash?

First it should be pointed out that federal statutes expressly forbid a candidate using donated campaign money for personal purposes. The Federal Election Commission is very clear on this issue. The FEC, which is tasked with regulating federal elections and campaign finance issues sets forth a few options for a former candidate’s war chest.

They may contribute to another candidate’s campaign, but only to the tune of $2,000 per campaign. So a losing candidate in the primaries could give all his opponents 2k on the day he withdraws from the race.

Campaign committees can also convert themselves into a Political Action Committee (many other rules to follow in order to get to this point) and this ups the amount they can give to any one campaign to $5,000. If they wanted to unload a truckload of cash and do some good they could choose to give away an unlimited amount of money to a charity or a political party.

The truth is that most campaigns try to spend what they’ve got. There usually isn’t much left over, at least not as much as one might imagine.