Cite as: 528 U. S. 377 (2000)
Syllabus
corrupt contributions and the suspicion that large contributions are corrupt are neither novel nor implausible. See 424 U. S., at 27, and n. 28. Respondents are wrong in arguing that this Court has "supplemented" its Buckley holding with a new requirement that governments enacting contribution limits must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, a contention for which respondents rely principally on Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Comm. v. Federal Election Comm'n, 518 U. S. 604. This Court has never accepted mere conjecture as adequate to carry a First Amendment burden, and Colorado Republican deals not with a government's burden to justify contribution limits, but with limits on independent expenditures by political parties, which the principal opinion expressly distinguished from contribution limits. Id., at 615-618. In any event, this case does not present a close call requiring further definition of whatever the State's evidentiary obligation may be. Although the record does not show that the Missouri Legislature relied on the evidence and findings accepted in Buckley, the evidence introduced by petitioners or cited by the lower courts in this action and a prior case involving a related ballot initiative is enough to show that the substantiation of the congressional concerns reflected in Buckley has its counterpart in support of the Missouri law. Moreover, although majority votes do not, as such, defeat First Amendment protections, the statewide vote adopting the initiative attested to the public perception that contribution limits are necessary to combat corruption and the appearance thereof. A more extensive evidentiary documentation might be necessary if respondents had made any showing of their own to cast doubt on the apparent implications of Buckley's evidence and the record here. However, the nearest they come to challenging these conclusions is their invocation of academic studies that are contradicted by other studies. Pp. 390-395.
(d) There is no support for respondents' various arguments that the Missouri limitations are so different in kind from those sustained in Buckley as to raise essentially a new issue about the adequacy of the Missouri statute's tailoring to serve its purposes. Here, as in Buckley, supra, at 21, there is no indication that those limits have had any dramatic adverse effect on the funding of campaigns and political associations, and thus there is no showing that the limitations prevented candidates from amassing the resources necessary for effective advocacy. Indeed, the District Court found that since the Missouri limits became effective, candidates for state office have been able to raise funds sufficient to run effective campaigns, and that candidates are still able to amass impressive campaign war chests. The plausibility of these conclusions is buttressed by petitioners' evidence that in the last election before the contributions became effective, 97.62 percent of all contribu-
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