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Kasz216 on 22 January 2010
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SamuelRSmith said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
But we can still vote for the candidate we want right?

Yes, but realistically people want whatever is marketed to them. A candidate that is on every TV screen, and on every radio every ten minutes is going to beat the candidate that can only afford to give speeches at a town hall once a week, no matter how good that candidate is. We'd like to think we pick the candidate we want, and we do, but we pick them from a small pool that is decided by the people who have enough money to put them in the limelight.

I would just like to pull a quote from one of my favourite books, Freakonomics:

 

"Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that one his votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money?

That's a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter appeal, after all, isn't easy to quantify. How can it be measured?

It can't, really - except in one special case. The key is to measure the candidate against... himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A in two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates' appeal more or less constant, we could measure the money's impact.

As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time - indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases?

Here's the surprise: the amount of money spent by candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of his vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can shift the vote in his favour by only that same 1 percent. What really matters about a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are."

I totally don't remember that.  I've got to read freakanomics again.

You get a chance to check out the new Freakanomics book?

Superfreakanomics I think it's called?