Tales from the Trail

Expectations for massive fund-raising in the 2012 election may obscure one point — big bucks don’t always lead to victory. And in fact, too much spending — especially in the form of too many advertisements — can turn off voters.

There have been several notable examples of heavy, but ultimately fruitless, outspending in recent elections.

In the 2010 midterms, Republican Meg Whitman, the billionaire former chief executive of eBay, spent $140 million of her own money, or about $43 per vote,to campaign for governor against Democrat Jerry Brown.  Brown spent $7.50 per vote to defeat her by 12 percentage points, in a race that was a rare bright spot for Democrats in elections that saw most Republicans sweep to victory.

Another Republican, wrestling executive Linda McMahon, also spent lots of her own money last year — lending her campaign about $50 million — or about $100 per vote — in losing by 12 percentage points to her Democratic rival Richard Blumenthal.

But big spenders don’t always lose. Jon Corzine, a liberal Democrat who made a fortune as a Wall Street executive, spent $60 million of his own money as he won his U.S. Senate race in 2000, his first run for public office.   That race broke the previous record, set by Republican Michael Huffington as he lost his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in California in 1994.

If new campaign dollars were votes, Democrats would be leading Republicans in the early returns for the 2010 congressional elections by about 7 percentage points overall. But that’s with Republicans closing the gap and eight months to go before Election Day.

A report by the Federal Election Commission says the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee pulled in $183 million in new donations during 2009, the first half of the 2009-2010 congressional election cycle.

That put Democrats about 9 percent ahead of their Republican counterparts – the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee – which raised $168.6 million together.