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November 3rd, 2010 8:16 pm
Note to the Hand-Wringers: Money Doesn’t Buy Elections
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Politico usefully rebukes the conventional wisdom about money in politics with a look at this year’s self-financing candidates:

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, only one of the eight candidates running for Congress who contributed more than $3.5 million to their own campaigns stood amid the confetti and balloons on Election Night.  
Johnson’s victory, however, could well be attributed to the fact that he ran a hybrid fundraising operation. He put in $8 million but still raised another $4 million, which helped to generate volunteers for his campaign and created a path for supporters to feel invested in it.

Jennifer Steen, an expert on self-financers at Arizona State University, said, “The common thread among losing self-funders is inexperience, and they all started their campaign with serious deficiencies and some naïveté about their deficiencies. Others might call that arrogance or hubris.”

…

The one winner in the group is Republican businessman Ron Johnson, who beat Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the Senate’s most ardent champions of campaign finance reforms that would limit the role of big money in federal races.

In Connecticut, Republican Senate nominee Linda McMahon spent $47 million of her own money. In Florida, Jeff Greene dropped $24 billion attempting to get the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. In California, Carly Fiorina invested $5.5 million out of her own accounts for a shot at the upper chamber, though that number paled in comparison to the $143 million ponied up by the GOP gubernatorial nominee, Meg Whitman. What do they all have in common? They all lost.

For the professional fretters who rent their garments in support of McCain-Feingold and gnashed their teeth over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, there’s a valuable lesson here: money buys you the means to make your case, not the right to have that case accepted by the voters. Big money in political races can be just as much a drawback as an advantage. And if you don’t believe that, just ask the organized labor establishment, whose investment in this year’s races turned out to be a toxic asset.

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