[rayiner]

Right. And that means the return must be shit, because Colgate-Palmolive finds it worth its while to spend twice as much moneg advertising toothpaste and dish soap as all the wealthy individuals and companies in the country find it worth their while to invest in political advertising.

Put differently, corporate political advertising amounts to about 0.5% of advertising in the US. That tells you a lot about how unimportant it is to companies’ bottom lines. It’s basic arithmetic. These political decisions are worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If corporations invest only a billion influencing them, that means the influence is very attenuated: it only affects votes at the margins.