{"id":7606,"date":"2010-11-03T20:16:36","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T00:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7606"},"modified":"2010-11-05T09:00:58","modified_gmt":"2010-11-05T13:00:58","slug":"note-to-the-hand-wringers-money-doesnt-buy-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7606\/note-to-the-hand-wringers-money-doesnt-buy-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Note to the Hand-Wringers: Money Doesn’t Buy Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politico usefully rebukes<\/a> the conventional wisdom about money in politics with a look at this year’s self-financing candidates:<\/p>\n

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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. \u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Johnson\u2019s 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.<\/div>\n
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Jennifer Steen, an expert on self-financers at Arizona State University, said, \u201cThe common thread among losing self-funders is inexperience, and they all started their campaign with serious deficiencies and some na\u00efvet\u00e9 about their deficiencies. Others might call that arrogance or hubris.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

…<\/p>\n

The one winner in the group is Republican businessman Ron Johnson, who beat Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the Senate\u2019s most ardent champions of campaign finance reforms that would limit the role of big money in federal races.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For the professional fretters who rent their garments in support of McCain-Feingold and gnashed their teeth over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0 Johnson\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2030,972,100,1434,1436,2031,1059,1498,1499,92],"class_list":["post-7606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-campaign-finance-reform","tag-carly-fiorina","tag-citizens-united","tag-jeff-greene","tag-linda-mcmahon","tag-mccain-feingold","tag-meg-whitman","tag-ron-johnson","tag-russ-feingold","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7606"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7608,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7606\/revisions\/7608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}