Seattle’s city council elections early this November sheds some light on the ways money can effect electoral outcomes. Three weeks before elections day a Chamber of Commerce poll showed wide-spread discontent with the weirdo-controlled city council. Although the coalition of businessmen and moderate Democrats had out-spent the weirdo coalition four to one, the Amazon corporation figured another million dollars to support the Chamber’s campaign would ensure victory. This donation had the opposite effect. It nationalized the election, made it about corporate greed, and brought Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren into the battle, blathering about “corporate greed.”
That did the trick for the weirdlings, who won control and moved immediately to propose ordinances for rent control, drug-consumption sites, decriminalization of prostitution, legalization of homeless encampments, defunding critical police programs, free public transit, and an array of new taxes, including a “mansion tax,” “excess compensation tax,” and an “Amazon tax” three times larger than the original levy repealed last year.
First lesson: a huge cash advantage does not guarantee victory. Second lesson: voters resent conspicuous interventions by Big Money individuals and institutions. Third lesson: a big advantage in money doesn’t invariably translate into a big advantage in votes. Maine has seen Paul LePage win the Republican primary election for his first term despite being outspent by wide margins. We’ve all seen Trump winning the primary and general elections despite being outspent in both cases. These examples and many others brings us to a regularly neglected question: How are those big bucks actually spent and what do they buy?
First and most obviously they buy name recognition. Yard signs, bumper stickers, banners, and a variety of visual props are about name recognition. They convey little information or none at all. Opinion researchers have no reliable data on how many voters know nothing about the candidates other than their names, but veteran campaigners know that there’s a significant percentage who make their decision in sight of the voting booth and not before and sometimes make their decision when the look at the ballot and see a familiar name.
It’s accepted wisdom among professional political hacks that a name recognition advantage is the most important asset a potential candidate can offer. Sports stars, popular singers and actors, military heroes and any else who has been exposed to the public’s view are always prime campaign properties. Dwight Eisenhower was sought by both Democratic and Republican talent scouts. This was because he was a universally recognized national military hero who had never registered. I remember a time when Frank Purdue was being considered for one of Maryland’s senate seats. For you young folks, Frank was constantly seen advertising his own products, as in “It Takes a Tough Man to Raise a Tender Chicken.” or words to that effect. Intelligence, knowledge, experience, convictions? Those were often unknown or indefinite. Recognition was enough. First-time candidates without prior fame need to spend a lot of money to create name recognition they hadn’t already acquired from earlier careers.
This brings us to advantages carried by incumbency. Senator Collins has a huge advantage because she has held office for so long and been so often in the news as the media’s favorite moderate bucking the Republican party consensus. Sarah Gideon has been in the news as the Speaker in Maine’s House of Representatives, but not nearly as prominently as Collins so she’ll have to spend more to achieve parity in name recognition.
The next money magnet is polling. It has to be constant and accurate so the candidate can find out what he or she believes today and how to pitch it to the voters. Expert polling is not cheap. Hacks called “political strategists” receive large salaries or fees to interpret the polling data and distill appropriate strategies adapted to their interpretations. I’ve read “insider” accounts about the last three by prominent journalists. None of them discussed “strategies” that seemed to me to be a combination of tricks from familiar bags and intuitions that were hard to test. A classic example was the story in a best seller about the Hillary vs. Barack and McCain contest. Hillary burst into tears at a public event. Her strategists argued whether this was a plus because she showed she was human after all, or a minus because it contradicted the image of determination and toughness.
Candidates have to hire speech writers, actual teams of speech writers in some cases. And there are “issues advisers” who produce issue proposals designed to excite the general public or specific special interest groups. I once met a retired Yale professor who wrote witticisms for John Kerry when he was sniffing around for a trail to the Oval Office. He was a funny guy. He didn’t find Kerry at all witty. I can only guess which other candidates retained joke-smiths and what, if anything, they paid them. Communication experts are another essential component. Spin-doctors must be ready on a day’s, or an hour’s notice, to explain what their candidate really meant to say, or things he never meant to say. This is skilled labor crucial for handling free coverage (news reports of all kinds), but not itself free. Opposition research can make all the difference so first class dirt-tracking is worth a nice sum of cash.
This brings us to television and radio spots, advertisements of all sorts, personal telephone calls, robocalls, door to door visits, pizzas for volunteers, buses, constant mailings, and entourages that make the candidate look important.
Here we have think about the problem of saturation. How many mailings, how many TV spots, how many visits, who many speeches can the average voter endure before they get hostile? A candidate with unlimited funds has to learn the limits of the voters’ patience.

John Frary of Farmington is a former candidate for U.S. Congress, a retired history professor, an emeritus Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United, a Maine Citizen’s Coalition Board member, and publisher of FraryHomeCompanion.com. He can be reached at jfrary8070@aol,com

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