The latter isn't free speech solely because there is no financial sale. It's free speech also because there's no entity that can really regulate the speech. And for politics, I think it's also fair for a party to come out with whatever views it wants. People should not be restricted in what kind of politics they are allowed to choose to run the country.

As far as political ads go, if something is a 'strategic lie'^, it's down to other campaigns to expose it as a lie. This comes down to point (1) of what I mentioned in my previous response; if we want to ban campaigns from spreading 'lies' there has to be a regulatory to decide what speech is and is not allowed on the basis of truth.

One possible solution is to have an incredibly independent branch of Congress do it, and any decision to reject an ad should be in public record with reasoning. But if this decision to reject was 'incorrect', exposure to the political content has been lost (the record of this branch won't nearly be as popular in access). There's too much subjectivity in the process by nature.

^: It's easier to censor blatant lies vs strategic lies. e.g. if you pull a figure out of thin air it's easier for any regulator to get away with saying it's a blatant lie and dishonest (eg: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49701027). But many political ads are not such 'blatant lies', they're 'strategic lies'. They bend a fact (eg Vote Leave's bending of UK financial contributions to EU), or have a 'strategic' interpretation of something (deliberate misinterpretation to your advantage of a possibly vague statement of another politician), and they're usually worded 'strategically' to stay in a gray area. To regulate stuff like this is incredibly controversial because you're in a gray area of free speech.

The idea is that any person should be able to say anything and get their idea across to people, then it's up for people to determine whether they agree, disagree, or if they find it true or false.

If politics worked perfectly this would work without regulation. Other parties would expose it as a lie (or better yet, people do their research themselves) and people should care that a party is lying and hence it would count against the lying party. But since politics today sucks and people would stick with party through lies and deceit it doesn't seem to be working as well in practice.