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It is some consolation that campaign money does not directly correlate with success. The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone

It is some consolation that campaign money does not directly correlate with success. The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone. The Donald Trump campaign spent less than 280 megadollars from primary to president; where the Hillary Clinton campaign spent about 1.2 gigadollars (along with huge amounts of spending outside the direct purview of the campaign) and lost fair and square.

dragontamer 9y ago
> lost fair and square. Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course. In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance. The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.
- cderwin 9y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up. Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use. The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
    - grotsnot 9y ago
      Sounds like the problem is with having political parties, not the EC.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties. Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions. Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature. What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it. When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
        AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
        >can allow us to make progress As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        The optimal method for gaming the system is entirely dependent on the details of the system. In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.
  - zanny 9y ago
    I wouldn't call it the only one we ever had considering a few hundred years ago the electoral college was not elected by direct election (in every state, it was actually up to the states how they wanted to elect the college and the original states predominantly did it differently in the early 19th century) and if we were under the old rules pre-amendment Hillary would be the VP right now.
  - d33 9y ago
    When you weigh the loss by the sum of money spent, it IS fair and square. In other words, megadollars per percent of votes.
  - throwawayknecht 9y ago
    There's no real sense in which this is the only electoral system we've had. The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.
- throwaway30yo 9y ago
  No. Not of course. If the Electoral College did not exist, the campaign strategy would have been completely different for Trump. If it was by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned primarily in California even though he had no chance of winning the state (so spent very little resources there). I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    > completely different for Trump I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue. > I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
    - mi100hael 9y ago
      Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that the EC is a necessary evil. More than 25% of the population of the US lives in just CA + NY + TX. Without the EC, there would be absolutely no incentive for the President to even acknowledge the existence of a majority of the states.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        With the EC, there's no incentive for the candidates to acknowledge the existence of any "safe" state, and instead they focus on "Battleground" states. As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
        craftyguy 9y ago
        Well stated. The EC doesn't eliminate the problem that is often cited as justification for the EC, it merely moves the problem and arguably makes it worse by creating these unchangeable silos of states unwilling to listen to viewpoints from candidates of a different color than the one they prefer.
- MrZongle2 9y ago
  "Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course." I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate." One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote. That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    And the writers of the Constitution didn't believe in Political Parties. Things didn't work out as they expected however. The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner. Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
  - throwawayknecht 9y ago
    > That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
    - MrZongle2 9y ago
      Would Mrs. Clinton have won in an alternative universe where the aforementioned alternations did not take place?
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President. Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules. The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself. And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)
swivelmaster 9y ago
Given the unknowns around Russia's influence including the DNC and Podesta hacks and coordinated release via Wikileaks, buying campaign ads on Facebook, and other potential money-related shenanigans, "fair and square" might be up for debate.
- diggernet 9y ago
  How many people do you know who changed their votes due to those things?
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    A non-trivial number -- perhaps a few percent of my friends seem to have changed their behavior in response to what, in retrospect, look like Russian PSYOPs. Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
    - diggernet 9y ago
      I was curious what the experience of others was on this. In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        I didn't watch anyone switch camps, but I watched a lot of people get motivated or demotivated to vote, which has the same effect on the election -- so I saw a lot of people go from "party candidate" to "none" or "none" to "party-candidate". Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
- sremani 9y ago
  Outside of hacking the voting machines (which does not seem to be the centerpiece of investigations), anything that would make up for 1.1 billion worth of expenditure of "influence", I would love to know it.
delecti 9y ago
Trump is a big outlier though, in both the primaries and the general. More spending usually does correlate with success. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-more-campaign-money-actually-buy-more-votes-investigation/355154/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Why should we care about the correlation? It's apparent that an election isn't an auction.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    For what it's worth, I did say "correlate", I think delecti is responding to that.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    what an odd response. We care because it suggests very strongly that money is important in winning elections. What is your point here? That it doesn't guarantee success?
    - alexanderstears 9y ago
      My point is 'how much can money matter when a 3x-10x spending advantage doesn't translate into victory'? One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements. the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment. I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.
mtgx 9y ago
I think the overwhelming evidence points to the contrary, at least so far. We only have a few very recent examples that may very well be exceptions to the rule, or perhaps the very beginning of a very long term trend. It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that. In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.
BoorishBears 9y ago
Are megadollars and gigadollars common units of measurement of money in some field?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  No, but I wish they were! I prefer to use SI magnitude prefixes when speaking analytically, so I thought I'd try them out for money.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  I sincerely doubt it.
lazyant 9y ago
"lost fair and square" let's just say "lost" and leave it at that (just in case: she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and a case can be made that a foreign country ran adversarial campaign and the empty allegations by the director of the FBI days before voting day may have tipped the scale)
- cwkoss 9y ago
  She had every advantage: more money, more favorable media coverage, more experience, more endorsements, more support from big money. Still fucked it up, few million in Russian spending would not have been able to destabilize a strong campaign. It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost". In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”

dragontamer 9y ago

> lost fair and square. Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course. In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance. The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.

cderwin 9y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to call winning via the only electoral system we've ever had not "fair and square."
- dragontamer 9y ago
  But the design of the electoral college was to deadlock the states and provide Representatives in the US Congress the final say in the matter. In effect, our country's founders were AGAINST the founding of political parties, in part because they knew it'd break the system that they worked so hard to set up. Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use. The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
  - grotsnot 9y ago
    Sounds like the problem is with having political parties, not the EC.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      It seems far more likely that we design our system to actually work with Political Parties (instead of being corrupted by Political parties), rather than trying to ban political parties. Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions. Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature. What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it. When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
      - AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
        >can allow us to make progress As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      The optimal method for gaming the system is entirely dependent on the details of the system. In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.
- zanny 9y ago
  I wouldn't call it the only one we ever had considering a few hundred years ago the electoral college was not elected by direct election (in every state, it was actually up to the states how they wanted to elect the college and the original states predominantly did it differently in the early 19th century) and if we were under the old rules pre-amendment Hillary would be the VP right now.
- d33 9y ago
  When you weigh the loss by the sum of money spent, it IS fair and square. In other words, megadollars per percent of votes.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago
  There's no real sense in which this is the only electoral system we've had. The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.
throwaway30yo 9y ago
No. Not of course. If the Electoral College did not exist, the campaign strategy would have been completely different for Trump. If it was by popular vote, Trump would have campaigned primarily in California even though he had no chance of winning the state (so spent very little resources there). I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  > completely different for Trump I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue. > I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    Just to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that the EC is a necessary evil. More than 25% of the population of the US lives in just CA + NY + TX. Without the EC, there would be absolutely no incentive for the President to even acknowledge the existence of a majority of the states.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      With the EC, there's no incentive for the candidates to acknowledge the existence of any "safe" state, and instead they focus on "Battleground" states. As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
      - craftyguy 9y ago
        Well stated. The EC doesn't eliminate the problem that is often cited as justification for the EC, it merely moves the problem and arguably makes it worse by creating these unchangeable silos of states unwilling to listen to viewpoints from candidates of a different color than the one they prefer.
MrZongle2 9y ago
"Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course." I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate." One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote. That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  And the writers of the Constitution didn't believe in Political Parties. Things didn't work out as they expected however. The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner. Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago
  > That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change. How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
  - MrZongle2 9y ago
    Would Mrs. Clinton have won in an alternative universe where the aforementioned alternations did not take place?
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      Yes. She would have won the Vice Presidency, as Trump became President. Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules. The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself. And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)

swivelmaster 9y ago

Given the unknowns around Russia's influence including the DNC and Podesta hacks and coordinated release via Wikileaks, buying campaign ads on Facebook, and other potential money-related shenanigans, "fair and square" might be up for debate.

diggernet 9y ago
How many people do you know who changed their votes due to those things?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  A non-trivial number -- perhaps a few percent of my friends seem to have changed their behavior in response to what, in retrospect, look like Russian PSYOPs. Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
  - diggernet 9y ago
    I was curious what the experience of others was on this. In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
    - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
      I didn't watch anyone switch camps, but I watched a lot of people get motivated or demotivated to vote, which has the same effect on the election -- so I saw a lot of people go from "party candidate" to "none" or "none" to "party-candidate". Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
sremani 9y ago
Outside of hacking the voting machines (which does not seem to be the centerpiece of investigations), anything that would make up for 1.1 billion worth of expenditure of "influence", I would love to know it.

delecti 9y ago

Trump is a big outlier though, in both the primaries and the general. More spending usually does correlate with success. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-more-campaign-money-actually-buy-more-votes-investigation/355154/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...

alexanderstears 9y ago
Why should we care about the correlation? It's apparent that an election isn't an auction.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  For what it's worth, I did say "correlate", I think delecti is responding to that.
- bllguo 9y ago
  what an odd response. We care because it suggests very strongly that money is important in winning elections. What is your point here? That it doesn't guarantee success?
  - alexanderstears 9y ago
    My point is 'how much can money matter when a 3x-10x spending advantage doesn't translate into victory'? One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements. the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment. I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.

mtgx 9y ago

I think the overwhelming evidence points to the contrary, at least so far. We only have a few very recent examples that may very well be exceptions to the rule, or perhaps the very beginning of a very long term trend. It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.

microcolonel 9y ago
> By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that. In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.

BoorishBears 9y ago

Are megadollars and gigadollars common units of measurement of money in some field?

microcolonel 9y ago
No, but I wish they were! I prefer to use SI magnitude prefixes when speaking analytically, so I thought I'd try them out for money.
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
I sincerely doubt it.

lazyant 9y ago

"lost fair and square" let's just say "lost" and leave it at that (just in case: she won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and a case can be made that a foreign country ran adversarial campaign and the empty allegations by the director of the FBI days before voting day may have tipped the scale)

cwkoss 9y ago
She had every advantage: more money, more favorable media coverage, more experience, more endorsements, more support from big money. Still fucked it up, few million in Russian spending would not have been able to destabilize a strong campaign. It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost". In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”