Travel, campaign staff and regular campaign activities may be severely limited, even when the "pro-specific-candidate" PACs are flush with money.
The qualified articulate middle-class people (not multimillionaires who could finance their own campaigns) could be tapped as candidates and adequately financed by others who are rich enough but have no political talents, time or interest in running for political office themselves.
Yeah - that's an equalizer that would significantly broaden qualified political talent pool running for all kinds of elective offices, and may reduce the time the candidates / politicians spend on fund-raising.
Very true. As you say, these things are illegal - “for conservatives.”
The Democrats have routinely broken all sorts of campaign finance rules with impunity. Look at Obama’s illegal gathering of unidentified and foreign online contributions during his presidential runs - no conservative or even GOPer in general could have gotten away with this.
One of the problems caused by the current laws for local GOP groups is that they are paralyzed by fear of making some innocent mistake that will destroy the organization or land them in court. These people are all volunteers, and do the best they can - but the Dems hire attorneys and accountants to comb through the records of these organizations looking for some violation or ambiguity (for example, at a fundraiser, when one little old lady put all 8 tickets for her table on her credit card because it was easier for her to do it this way and collect from her friends later - thereby incurring a campaign finance violation).
It has a paralyzing effect on GOP groups. Also, every year, each one of us who registered to work with the organization would receive a “legal letter” from Democratic Party lawyers telling us we were being watched and implying that we could end up in jail at any moment.