Are campaigns and donors fooling themselves?

By Dylan Matthews

Thanks to Ezra for having me. It's good to be back posting, and yes, I will graph things if you ask nicely. 

Brian Palmer has a useful explainer over at Slate looking at academic studies evaluating the effectiveness of campaign spending. The studies he cites seem to suggest that spending has pretty low bang-for-bunk, with studies putting the cost of a vote anywhere from $50 to $175. Combined with the fact that 95 percent of House races since 2004 have been won by the bigger spender, this seems to suggest that campaigns spend a lot because donors perceive them as winners and give more, not that spending more makes campaigns win.

That win percentage figure is especially unpersuasive when you consider that 94 percent of House incumbents won reelection in 2006 and 2008. A lot of those races were uncontested, in which case the incumbent would obviously raise more, and even in closely fought ones, the incumbent is presumably a more experienced and connected fundraiser than the challenger.

Given as there's a large political science literature showing that incumbency advantage is real (see this paper by Andrew Gelman for a recent example), whereas there's substantial dispute about the effectiveness of campaign spending, I'm inclined to believe that the reelection rate of big spenders is more an effect of incumbency advantage than anything else.

But this does raise the question of why donors give to campaigns that are going to win anyway. The obvious answer with big donors is that they want to influence policy, but if their money is not helping win campaigns, and many of the incumbents being subsidized are safe anyway, then it seems odd that politicians would feel a need to satisfy them. If donor money is irrelevant, why cater to donors?

The simple answer would be that politicians and donors believe donor money is important, even if there is no proof for that. This is distressing insofar as it suggests that wealthy interests are only influential due to a misperception, but it also suggests that correcting that misperception could reduce those interests' power. Obviously, getting politicians to read studies on campaign spending isn't going to make campaign money unimportant, but spreading some doubt couldn't hurt.

Dylan Matthews is a student at Harvard and a researcher at The Washington Post.