I don't think "Oooh. Scary muslims!" works any less well if it's required to say "Elon Musk" rather than "American Apple Pie Goodness PAC" or whatever.
It might make a difference for smaller donors, especially if they're more sensitive about their personal PR.
A major reason it isn't working for now is because Donald Trump is, in addition to being a corrupt autocrat, incredibly incompetent. We shouldn't have to rely on that next time.
He did screw up Twitter/X enough that a new competitor managed to make a blip on the map, though. So that leads some credence.
Tesla is the only EV company in the US making a good product. People also like the techieness. Foreign manufactures like Hyundai (what I drive, preferred less tech and real buttons) have tariffs and such applied to them. BYD would wreck them all if allowed.
I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.
>funny business
This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.
Must win by 50% plus 1 of all valid votes on Round 1. If not, 1st and 2nd most voted go for Round 2 a few weeks later. Then, 50%+1 again of all valid votes.
Everything else you mentioned also matters. I can't tell you the amount of times that the state of Georgia, suddenly out of the blue, invalidated a lot of registered voters. And if people don't check, like my friend in a minority town outside of Atlanta, they won't realize until election day. Red states are more likely to play this trick. Your conclusion is something I disagree with, though. Voters have lost so much over the last decade, and they don't fight back until it really starts to affect them personally. I think the surge that we might see this election is only due to economics. If the economics were good, it's not out of the question that Trump would be doing fairly decent this election cycle. This is why Iran is playing things very well to try to enact maximum economic pain in the days before the election. But it's all about economics, and that shows you that people truly don't really care.
Well it does change which voters decide the results. A lot of electoral systems seek to constantly redress imbalance by having impartial bodies redraw district lines as populations shift. It is a shame the US does not. Gerrymandering is fundamentally undemocratic.
Need I say more?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Elon+Musk%2CAl...
Make of that what you will.
If you have a lot of money and you've managed to stay out of prison, people are generally ready to believe good things about you and want to be in your good graces. If you pay people to continually say good things about you and manage your media appearances for you, there will generally be a lot of impact to that. You're just telling people what they're primed to believe. A lot of people will fluff up your image for free just because they're hoping for patronage.
Musk has a BA in physics that was awarded a couple years after he says he says he completed his studies. Unlike CPSC, leaving a physics program early robs you of some pretty crucial stuff. You generally don't see a lot of rockstar physicists leaving university early to join startups. Despite Musk posing as a rocket scientist, engineering guru, etc., there's no evidence he's one of the scientific or engineering minds behind Tesla or SpaceX's work. He's just a money guy.
The general rule for money guys is that the closer you are to the money, the more of it you can get. This is why CEO's are paid outrageous sums. Musk is the closest guy to the money at his companies, and his one true gift seems to be "getting close" to politicians in order to get the public's money, which Tesla and SpaceX have received gob-smacking amounts of.
If you want a laugh, go look up the episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History addendum where he brought Musk on. Carlin typically interviews authors of history books, so why Musk? Why indeed! During this episode, it comes out that Musk used to have models of WWII planes but clearly knows absolutely nothing about history. Despite this, he makes every effort to sound like he does. This is the sort of exposure $$$ gets you but, sometimes, you miss the mark.