Can you use presidential campaign donations to pay off delinquent child support obligations and unpaid back taxes?
By 
I’m Just Asking Questions!
Progressive activist and independent presidential candidate Cornel West received a maximum campaign donation from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, West’s latest fundraising report shows.
Crow made the $3,300 donation in August, weeks before West abandoned his bid for the Green Party nomination to run as an independent. Crow has called West, a self-proclaimed “non-Marxist socialist” and longtime professor at Princeton University, “a good friend.”
West has defended his campaign from questions about whether it would draw support from President Joe Biden, calling the two-party system an “impediment for the flower of American democracy” during an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press Now.” . . .
Almost 15% of registered voters said they would vote for a third party or independent candidate when given the explicit choice in an NBC News poll last month. By comparison, less than 2% of voters in 2020 cast a ballot for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Polls usually overstate the amount of third-party support available compared to actual election results — but interest in third-party candidates is also higher than usual heading into the 2024 election.
Crow’s close ties to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have come under scrutiny in recent months after a ProPublica report in April detailed gifts, travel, and other items of value provided by the Texas billionaire to Thomas and his family.
On a cheerier note:
In the months leading up to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that he would drop his Democratic presidential campaign and instead mount an independent bid for the White House, the polling suggested that Kennedy’s candidacy appealed more to Republicans. Indeed, Kennedy had been embraced by MAGA-flavored media venues not just because his candidacy represented an explicit critique of Joe Biden’s presidency but because he articulated a level of paranoid hostility toward established wisdom and polite convention that even Donald Trump could not achieve. Now, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, the suspicion that Kennedy might draw more from Trump’s pool of voters than Biden’s has some substantiating evidence.
In a head-to-head matchup, that poll found that Biden edges out Trump by just three points at 49 to 46 percent. But in a three-way contest, RFK Jr. wins the support of 16 percent of the registered voters surveyed. Biden loses five points in that hypothetical situation, but his 44 percent of the vote dramatically surpasses Donald Trump’s meager 37 percent.
Insert Nelson Muntz gif here