> But even that doesn't work. In 2016 for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton's campaign had $790M USD versus Donald Trump's $408M USD. She had double the money

> But even that doesn't work. In 2016 for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton's campaign had $790M USD versus Donald Trump's $408M USD. She had double the money 'to buy the presidency' and she still lost. In addition, we can look at state-level races to get more data on the effect of campaign spending. It turns out that, after a certain point[0], campaign spending does not correlate very well with campaign success, and in self-funded candidates in particular actually tend to underperform: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sometimes-money-cant-buy-you-votes/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sometimes-money-cant-bu... [0] ie, obviously your gubernatorial campaign won't get very far if you only have $1000, total. But the difference between $40MM (what Brown spent in his 2010 campaign for governor) and $200MM (what Meg Whitman spent in that same race) is a lot less than people think.