Asklemmy

They have complete legal freedom to break with the party.

But if they go to far, they'll find the party is funding their primary opponent instead of them.

Nothing makes them vote with the party outside of money and the next election. We have far to many politicians who are not willing to not be politicians.

My rep has a 1 star review on Google, if that's any indication

Theoretically each candidate can vote however they like for each vote.

The leaders of each party in each house of Congress can do things with committee assignments that increase or decrease a senator/representatives influence. Buck the party line too often and you can be neutered as far as influence over writing laws. Leadership is elected by the lawmakers of their party though, so if they lean too hard or force too many unpopular votes they can be removed from leadership.

In practice they tend to want to work with each other and get along. Inter party fights are embarrassing. Some lawmakers from states outside the norm ideologically can get away with voting against the party by pointing to their constituents and usually leadership takes this into account before deciding whether to hold a vote.

Joe manchin was a Democrat from West Virginia. He famously voted against several of Bidens environmental bills to favor coal mining. John Tester was a Democrat from Montana who neutered parts of the ACA under Obama. In both cases the Democratic president needed every single democratic senator to agree or the vote wouldn't pass because their was no chance of Republicans crossing the isle.

Republicans allow much less ideological diversity through their primaries, so even a Republican like Scott Brown from Massachusetts was a solid conservative.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren't allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate's campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

Yes, but it's extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

That's illegal, which doesn't always stop them from doing it.

Keep in mind that if a candidate loses in their primary race, those same voters will be deciding the outcome of the general election, as well...but now the 'other side" will also now be voting against them. So, it's not likely that they will win after being defeated before.

Not sure what “fptp” means

But a legislator can vote how ever they want. There is no law that stops them but as another mentioned, if they don’t vote the party line then they can expect the party funds their opponent.

I’ll take a swing at a couple, rake with a grain of salt, because it’s a huge and complex topic and I’m by no means an expert.

Yes, there are party directed funds and they can be used discipline or shape acceptable candidates. Example would be corporate dems funneling money to try and block more progressive primary challengers, or funding really wild fringe republican primary runners hoping to trap the race with an unwinnable candidate (this has backfired multiple times, where the unelectable person got elected, so not a great strategy). A lot of donation money, both at the party level and per candidate gets funneled to a consultant caste that exists specifically to accept this money and tell them what they already want to hear.

Parties can also leverage access to committee positions and other items to try and bring candidates back Into the fold, but this probably isn’t the most major factor.

Since Citizens United Supreme Court descison, the normal campaign funding is less of the big picture though—it’s now possible to funnel nearly unlimited funding to things called Political Action Funds (PACS) that can buy ads, pay for consultants, pretty much anything a candidate could do. There are some loose rules, for example candidates and PACS are not supposed to “coordinate” but you can imagine how many ways that can be sidestepped.

Candidates dont have to give donations back—whatever they don’t spend, gets rolled into their future campaign funds, is often referred to as the “war chest”. One of the reasons they went with Harris as the dem candidate, even though it seemed like a fairly obviously bad idea, was because she had access to the campaign war chest, as she was on the ticket. It was a huge amount of money, money that likely could not have used if she had not run, and she was technically the only person who could use it. (Perhaps you could have her run, nominate her VP who is who you really want, then have her drop out, but this would probably be pretty borderline). I’m not sure what happens when you have a war chest but retire from politics—perhaps this is how they find presidential libraries, perhaps other types of politicians donate to charity or back into public financing systems, not sure. Campaigns do return money, but usually it’s because someone or something publically acceptable has donated. So like if a rich guy donated a to a campaign or PAC, and then it comes out that he’s a child molester, the candidate might return the money. Or not, as is frequently the case in current times, if you think about certain famous New Yorkers who definitely, absolutely suicide in prison.

Candidates do dip into campaign money, it’s illegal, but it happens all the time and sometimes they get caught. George Santos was prosecuted and sent to jail for exactly that, but was recently pardoned by Trump, because, corruption is good I guess.

Senate positions are longer and tend to be more career oriented (now at least, but wasn’t always this way) but in HOR a lot of them are there to serve a term or two, and then parlay that “experience/access” into high paying lobbying or consulting jobs, or corporate positions where they trade access to contacts for board positions and cushy stipends. This pipeline is super prevalent now and is one of the biggest things messing up basic congressional politics. The really unacceptable characters angle for media positions with fringe outlets, or start podcasts and supplement businesses.

Some reps are very focused on their local constituents and their needs, while many others are in it for fame, grift, exposure. Others want to springboard higher into more power. Campaigns have become very expensive to run, thanks to consultants, groupthink/echo chamber of political class and advertising so they all complain about having to constantly raise money. This means they’re more and more responsive to big donors. You see people like Ritchie Torres stumping for AIPAC, despite the fact that the Israel issue doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the concerns of many of his queens, NY constituents. Running afoul of some of these powerful donors, whether lobby groups or very wealthy people or corporations is not just you losing money, it’s also them funding your opponent, paying into PACS against you and funding things like attack ads, oppo, hit pieces etc. not defending the practice, just how the system has been warped to suit the needs of the powerful. If you are genuine, have no skeletons and have a very consistent ideology, you can avoid this kind of pressure, but these people are super rare. If you are personally wealthy, like very wealthy, you can also sort of avoid this pressure, which is part of why you see people constantly floating people like Mike Bloomberg and JB Pritzker as dem candidates all the time, because regardless of their character, they’re both so rich they could self-fund, and therefore would be less vulnerable to large donor pressure. You know the system is well designed when the only way avoid being compromised and corrupt is to be a robber-baron or a ideologically repetitive saint. And you ca guess how common they are compared to power-hungry / ambitious sociopaths.

Like I said, take this with a grain of salt, a lot of this is my opinion. But that said, passing reforms like only allowing a public funding option for all candidates, adding better checks against revolving door/conflict of interest stuff like becoming a consultant after, barring having stocks while in public office, ranked choice voting, total term limits and universal recall laws that can be brought to bear at any time could help return some of the responsiveness to a lot of our representation. Perhaps more controversially, establishing laws that allowed for more parties to be viable for voting (the two dominant parties have it so it’s very hard to establish new parties on a nationwide scale) might help make everyone more responsive as well, but parliamentary multi-party systems are also not without their problems there. It is possible to buck a party and run independent, but typically you have to already be well known and leaving an established party, and typically you’d have already have served for a while. So Bernie being a democrat, then switching to independent, etc. other people can and have run as independents (I think Ross Perot did this, or at least was third party) but I suspect it’s very hard for that to work if you aren’t already established (Perot made it pretty far for a third party at the time, but never won, and these types of positions are always used to say that you stole votes from the losing party that you were closest to positions)

Problem is, even if there are good ideas of how to reform this system, it would require a political body that had a will to do that and wasn’t already corrupt and compromised, so kinda a catch-22. They’re not all bad or corrupt and a lot probably start out with some ideals, but the system grinds them down pretty quick. The whole framework probably has to seriously bust before meaningful reform can happen given the amount of corporate/capital capture of government that is at play right now.