[btown]

While I'm sympathetic to the sentiment here, it can be overly simplistic in some common cases. For instance, a newcomer might benefit disproportionately from the first X units of ad spending to "get their name out," relative to an incumbent or someone with a famous name spending the exact same price on the same X units, whose incremental effect might be less.

Alternately, a local candidate might not have funding for traditional media spots but might want to experiment with smaller ad buys, or might appeal to a demographic less likely to see traditional media spots. In all of these cases, this regulation disproportionately helps their opponent.

Of course, the incumbent often has funding for multiple times the ad spend of the newcomer, so the status quo wasn't necessarily a good situation either. Publicly funded campaigns, providing every candidate with an equal amount of money to be used across all types of advertising, could be highly effective here, but only in contexts where this can't be end-run by e.g. PACs in the U.S. post-Citizens United.