[scoofy]

Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections. If it really did, Hillary Clinton would have been president twice. It's just that candidates with a ton of support tend to raise a ton of money.

Low-information elections are where money seems to help. I think we can throw that on the pile of 'your democracy is only as good as your electorate', and we have an electorate where most people can't even name their US House rep, much less their representatives in state and local politics.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections.

Politics does not start and end with elections.

[whattheheckheck]

Yeah if money didn't matter what's up with the $2billion price tags

[scoofy]

Obviously campaigns need money to operate. The question is whether a random firehose of money will win an election, or if the reason we see that money is because the campaign already has a lot of supporters who want to contribute.

The underlying effects of where the money comes from seems to matter a lot more that that the money exists. If a campaign does not have money, they likely that that campaign does not have supporters. However the opposite is not true. If a campaign has money, it is still not certain whether or not that campaign has any supporters, because that money could all be coming from narrow interest groups.

[johnea]

This is total bullshit.

Or maybe a statement of just how much the US population is uninformed/misinformed.

If the later is true, the US 'electorate' really is dumb as dirt...

[scoofy]

From 1994: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764

From 2024: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659

Consistent results indicate that, yes, money tends to matter, but it's the source of that money that tends to be doing the heavy lifting.

[ohbleek]

“Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections“

Your earlier statement, in which you claim that “money doesn’t effect result” followed by a useless distinction of high or low info elections. You’re really trying to dance a fine line of nonsense here.

“ We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between campaign expenditure, campaign contributions and winning probability.”

From the same article you posted and the first academic journal result if you Google “studies on how money influences elections”.

[scoofy]

>Our finding is in line with existing results in the literature regarding the US House elections that incumbent candidates gain less from spending, compared to their contender counterparts. This is due to diminishing returns that occur at a certain point, after which incumbent candidates can increase the winning probability only marginally (Green & Krasno, 1988). However, this finding is in contrast with other studies considering electoral systems in Brazil, Japan, or India, where spending effectiveness is equally applicable for both incumbents and contenders (Johnson, 2013; Lee, 2020; Samuels, 2001).

So yea, sorry for providing two scholarly journal articles from two different political eras that support my thesis.

I didn’t realize that this was a bad faith discussion. Now I know.

[johnnyanmac]

These studies fail to consider the nature of US politics the last 30 years or so. We had a breakneck election tie broken by the Supreme court in 2000 for some reason. We've had 2 out of 3 times in the hist of the US where the electoral college defied the popular vote.

You don't need to win most states in the US, nor most people. Just target 5-6 swing states and throw billions into the most wishy-washy voters in the country.

[TFYS]

It's not enough to only look at elections. The topics that the media discusses, and therefore the options that people are aware of and the issues people base their vote on are decided by mostly privately owned and increasingly consolidated media companies. Nobody will know about candidates that are not approved by some part of the elite in this media landscape. Any opinions that go against the interests of the media owning elite will not see much coverage. Sure, maybe money during elections does not matter that much, but elections are the very last step of the process of picking leaders, and the preceding steps matter as well.

Also, if money did not matter during elections, I doubt we'd see so much spending on them. Studies are being funded by companies and the wealthy as well, so a study or two saying money doesn't matter is not definitive proof.