{"id":3663,"date":"2015-12-02T12:12:36","date_gmt":"2015-12-02T18:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3663"},"modified":"2015-12-02T12:12:36","modified_gmt":"2015-12-02T18:12:36","slug":"graph-of-the-week-campaign-ad-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2015\/12\/02\/graph-of-the-week-campaign-ad-spending\/","title":{"rendered":"Graph of the Week &#8211; Campaign Ad Spending"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In case you missed Rachel Maddow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.com\/rachel-maddow\/watch\/jeb-bush-money-no-good-in-donald-trumps-game-577616963564\">last night<\/a>, they featured an excellent bar graph in the lead segment which quantifies all of the top presidential campaigns in terms of television ad spending, broken out by \u201chard-money\u201d campaign spending and \u201csoft-money\u201d spending by outside groups.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/files\/2015\/12\/2015-12-02T02-04-06-533Z-1280x720.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The main takeaway from the graph is that the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/epolls\/2016\/president\/us\/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html\">GOP primary polling numbers<\/a> have thus far proven highly resistant to monetary influence. Bush is currently polling below Trump, Carson, Rubio, and Cruz, despite having spent more than all of them <i>combined and doubled<\/i>. Trump is well ahead of the entire field, despite having spent the least of all. Three of the top polling frontrunners (Carson, Cruz, Trump) have spent $2 million or less, in a field where median spending is over twice that and average spending per candidate is over $7 million.<\/p>\n<p>Most of my friends are left-of-center, and they tend to support either Bernie Sanders\u2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2015\/05\/bernie-sanders-takes-dead-aim-on-citizens-united-ruling-117792\">stance against Citizens United<\/a> or Hillary Clinton\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/politics\/first-draft\/2015\/05\/19\/today-in-politics-clinton-says-citizens-united-would-guide-her-supreme-court-picks\/\">nearly identical stance<\/a>. As such, they also tend to believe that <i>Citizens United<\/i> functions to &#8220;protect the right of billionaires to buy elections&#8221; as Clinton says, because otherwise they would have no good argument to make against unlimited spending in support of political speech.<\/p>\n<p>As a skeptic, I require good evidence before I will believe that soft money actually buys elections. This presidential election cycle serves as a test case, and so far it is not going well for the dedicated opponents of paid political speech.<\/p>\n<p>Your thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you missed Rachel Maddow last night, they featured an excellent bar graph in the lead segment which quantifies&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":3664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,25,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-damned-lies-and-statistics","category-free-speech","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}