Six reasons so many Republicans are running for president

The Republican presidential field could wind up with close to 20 candidates. Here's our list of reasons why.

6. Citizens United

Nati Harnik/AP
Presidential candidate and Sen. Ted Cruz (r.) of Texas speaks in Sioux City, Iowa, on April 1, 2015. Senator Cruz raised an unprecedented $31 million in a single week in April through a series of super-PAC.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission rocked the world of campaign finance. Suddenly, mega-donors could pump unlimited, undisclosed money into outside groups that advocate for a preferred candidate and/or against another.

In the 2012 cycle, big-money super political action committees, or super PACs, kept former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the game far longer than they would otherwise have been able. This time, some candidates have already lined up their big-money patrons, and others are still jockeying for such donors. But the potential of big-money support is enough for many candidates to hold out hope that they can catch on and watch the money roll in.  

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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