Cite as: 572 U. S. ____ (2014) 3 Syllabus separately addressed by the parties. Appellants here, by contrast, have directly challenged the aggregate limits in place under BCRA, a different statutory regime whose limits operate against a distinct legal backdrop. Most notably, statutory safeguards against circumvention have been considerably strengthened since Buckley. The 1976 FECA Amendments added another layer of base limits—capping contributions from individuals to political committees—and an antiproliferation rule prohibiting donors from creating or controlling multiple affiliated political committees. Since Buckley, the Federal Election Commission has also enacted an intricate regulatory scheme that further limits the opportunities for circumvention of the base limits through “unearmarked contributions to political committees likely to contribute” to a particular candidate. 424 U. S., at 38. In addition to accounting for such statutory and regulatory changes, appellants raise distinct legal arguments not considered in Buckley, including an overbreadth challenge to the aggregate limit. Pp. 10–14. (b) Significant First Amendment interests are implicated here. Contributing money to a candidate is an exercise of an individual’s right to participate in the electoral process through both political expression and political association. A restriction on how many candidates and committees an individual may support is hardly a “modest restraint” on those rights. The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse. In its simplest terms, the aggregate limits prohibit an individual from fully contributing to the primary and general election campaigns of ten or more candidates, even if all contributions fall within the base limits. And it is no response to say that the individual can simply contribute less than the base limits permit: To require one person to contribute at lower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causes is to penalize that individual for “robustly exercis[ing]” his First Amendment rights. Davis v. Federal Election Comm’n, 554 U. S. 724, 739. In assessing the First Amendment interests at stake, the proper focus is on an individual’s right to engage in political speech, not a collective conception of the public good. The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect individual speech that the majority might prefer to restrict, or that legislators or judges might not view as useful to the democratic process. Pp. 14–18. (c) The aggregate limits do not further the permissible governmental interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. Pp. 18–36. (1) This Court has identified only one legitimate governmental interest for restricting campaign finances: preventing corruption or