Kasz216 said:
You'd be surprised. Money in politics seems to have a LOT less influence then you would think. In political research there are essentially two prevailing theories.
1) Money has virtualy no effect on elections once you hit a cutoff point that gives you enough money. Podcast talking about it http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/does-money-really-buy-elections-a-new-marketplace-podcast/ if you don't have time for the Podcast:
2) Money can help, but only the challenger. http://www.rochester.edu/college/psc/clarke/204/Jacobsen90.pdf
Our understanding of the effects of campaign spending in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives remains at a curious impasse. In one sense re- search findings are clear and remarkably consistent over the eight elections since 1972, when usable spending data first became available: campaign expenditures appear to have sharply different electoral consequences for officeholders and their opponents. In campaigns against incumbents, the more challengers spend, the more votes they receive, and the more likely they are to win. The more incumbents spend, on the other hand, the lower their vote, and the greater their chances of losing. No one has taken this to mean that incumbents routinely lose votes and elec- tions by spending money. They merely spend more money the more strongly they are challenged, and the stronger the challenge, the worse the incumbent does. Taking the challenger's level of campaign spending into account, the incumbent's level of spending shows a quite small but positive relationship to the incumbent's number of votes and probability of winning, although the coefficients achieve statistical significance only when data from several years are combined to pro- duce a very large number of cases (Jacobson 1989). The challenger's level of spending, by contrast, remains strongly and significantly related to both the vote and to the probability of victory without combining election years no matter what controls are introduced and no matter what functional forms are analyzed (Glantz, Abramowitz, and Burkhart 1976; Jacobson 1976, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1987a
Of course, research in number 2, could also be interpreted as reasearch in number 1. Candidates who spend more are more likely to win because they are more serious candidates who are more charming and appealing so they get more money. The Republican primarys were a GREAT example of this in fact. Look at Herman Cain. He didn't have the proverbial "Pot to piss in" when he was running his campaign. Then he got really popular by copying Sim City and suddenly.... Herman Cain's popularity shoots up. Weeks later he starts collecting huge campaign funds. Newt Gingrich had Sheldon Adleson singlehandidly keeping him in the race, as he failed, and failed, and failed some more. Only gaining some traction after every other non Romney option had been expended.
The real issue for Obama is that he isn't getting the same amount of money he did last time. He's killed is popularity, espiecally among his small time donars. |
I'd be more concerned with what a candidate's donors demand of him post-election than how those funds influence the actual election. Cabinate seats, tax subsidies, and so on. Of course, this problem is compounded post-election through lobbying.
And the amount of time candidate's waste pandering to donors in general is also an issue. This article discusses that somewhat:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/27/120827fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all&mobify=0
