A billion here, a billion there, and you could be in the White House
Donald Trump is raising money like crazy. Joe Biden just got a pledge of more than $1 billion from progressive groups. Almost every day news outlets report more money flowing to the two candidates.
Here’s some advice: Don’t panic about an autumn ad barrage that might prompt you to smash your television or rip your car radio from the dashboard.
Money may be the mother’s milk of politics — that insight came from Jesse Unruh, who was the speaker of the California Assembly from 1961 to 1968. But more than a half-century later, campaign money is more like 3.2 beer: lacking the punch that it once had.
Money doesn’t talk so much
“This may be a money horserace but the fact that one may have $2 billion more than the other won’t be all that important,” Daniel Weiner, director of the Elections and Government Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “Political money has diminishing returns, and it’s often over-emphasized. The candidates need a lot of money but they only need enough money.”
These two candidates can spend their largesse in huge quantities every day for the next 226 days, and maybe they will. But they likely won’t persuade more than a handful of voters to change their minds, Biden to Trump or Trump to Biden.
Combine the support of the two major-party finalists in the three important polls that came out last week and you get 86%, 88% and 92%. That’s the percentage of people who told the surveys that they knew how they would vote in November. The remaining 8 to 14 points can be attributed to one or more of the alternative candidates, to people who aren’t going to vote at all, or to people who know how they’ll vote but are reluctant to disclose it to a pollster.
If you’re undecided in this election cycle, you are either in enforced seclusion in some kind of bizarre social experiment or aren’t paying attention to the barrage of news stories crowding into your phone, television set or laptop. In fact, I would like to meet an undecided voter; I’ve been trying to find one for months.
And before we explore what these two campaigns are going to do with all that money that the good-government commentators deplore in our politics, let’s get some perspective.
The Biden campaign recently reported that it raised $53 million last month. Let’s say that by the time the election rolls around, the Biden team will have spent $3 billion. The marketing budget for the Coca-Cola Corporation for this year is more than $4 billion.
Which isn’t to say that campaign money isn’t growing like mad. Within living memory, the Ronald Reagan campaign spent around $40 million — maybe $50 million if you include various other money accounts — in defeating former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984. The next year, Coca-Cola spent four times that much promoting the New Coke, and you remember what a great triumph of marketing that was.
The one use for their money
Even so, political commentators pay a lot of attention to money because, in House races at least, the candidate who raises and spends the most money usually wins; in recent years, the only exception came in 2010. But Biden-Trump is not a House race, and is not like a House race, in part because both are household names.
That’s not the case in House races, even though the contestants are local and it’s possible to run into one or both of them at the dry cleaner’s or the grocery store. Everybody knows Mr. Biden; he’s been in politics almost as long as the median American voter has been alive. And there can’t be anyone in the country who doesn’t have a sense of what Mr. Trump thinks or what he is like.
“A lot of candidates are not in essentially what we have now — a re-election campaign on both sides — and they have to spend their money on getting known,” said Michael Malbin, an emeritus political scientist at the University at Albany and the co-founder of the Campaign Finance Institute. “But these two are already known. The bulk of their money has to be in energizing their base and persuading the unpersuaded to move, and so many of the unpersuaded are people who don’t like either one.”
Money can do what good NFL quarterbacks do: extend the play.
Everyone knows which states are pivotal in the fall campaign and which ones (Massachusetts for the Democrats, the Dakotas for the Republicans) are all but decided now. But extra money could allow Mr. Trump to devote money and time to New Jersey, which hasn’t gone Republican since 1988, or Mr. Biden to do so in Texas, which has been Republican for the past 40 years.
It’s not that they think they can win in those places. It’s that their involvement there would force their rival to divert time and money from swing states so as to assure that they preserve their advantage in states they are counting on falling into their column.
Their different advantages
Mr. Biden has the advantage of the presidency — the visual effect of Air Force One at a local airport, the power of images from the White House, a factor that worries the Trump team. Mr. Trump has the advantage of being Velcro for attention, a factor that worries the Biden team.
“Donald Trump has the ability to attract an exceptional amount of free press coverage,” said Alan Solomont, former national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “He uses outrageousness as a way of being noticed. You cannot ignore him. He doesn’t have to pay for that attention.”
This free media may have been worth $2 billion in his first race, in 2016. Former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas had more money than Mr. Trump. But Mr. Trump had more attention.
The operative word when it comes to the money race is “enough.” It applies in two dimensions. The public may have had enough of both candidates. And both candidates have enough money.