The Republican National Committee and its affiliates dropped $103 million more than Democrats on the 2022 midterms. Democrats lead in the polls. Somebody explain how money works to the RNC.
This is the political equivalent of buying premium gas for a rental car. You paid extra. You feel sophisticated. You're still driving a Kia Forte to the same disappointing destination as everyone else.
The Republican party committees raised all that cash and spent it on consultants who convinced them that direct mail still matters and that Facebook ads targeting Boomers with misspelled memes about inflation would move the needle. The Democrats spent less and let the Republicans do something catastrophically stupid instead. Free advertising.
Six weeks out from the election and the party with more money trails in the surveys that actually predict who wins. It's the financial news equivalent of a hedge fund manager bragging about his vintage wine collection while his fund posts negative returns for the eighth consecutive quarter. The money existed. It moved around. Nothing changed.
Picture the finance intern at the RNC staring at the bank statement. All those zeroes. All that donor enthusiasm. All those retired dentists in Arizona writing checks because they saw a scary ad about caravans. The cash sits there like a pile of chips at a casino after you've already lost the hand but before you realize you're not getting it back.
Democrats will probably win with a checking account that looks like a college sophomore's in late November. Republicans will lose with enough cash to buy a small media company. The lesson here is that spending money on politics is exactly as effective as spending money on lottery tickets, except lottery tickets occasionally pay out and don't send you fundraising emails afterward.
Turns out you can't buy competence, but you can definitely rent it for long enough to lose an election expensively.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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