Republican donors are saddened: “buy elections” more and more difficult

The ratio of funds spent on the presidential campaign of a candidate in the United States, and his final result for the election (or even in the struggle for the nomination) is extremely rarely comparable.

The Republican Party's biggest donors are reportedly extremely upset that the presidential election is so difficult to "buy" through a PR campaign.

Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone was among the many wealthy Republicans who backed Karl Rove's American Crossroads fund in 2012, which raised money for Mitt Romney's re-election campaign. As a result, Barack Obama won a second term.

“I gave $500 to Rove,” laments businessman Langone, “And what did I get for it? Nothing".

The lesson that donors have learned for themselves after the failure of Rove and his foundation led to the fact that they now create their own fundraising funds, and the political advisers who lead them report directly to the donors.

However, the statistics of the current election race of Republicans in the struggle for the nomination suggests that it’s not the costs of PR that decide the fate of the candidates.

According to Vox.com (see chart below), Jeb Bush's team spent twice as much money on advertising ($32,5 million) as the top four candidates in polls combined (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson). It is noteworthy that billionaire businessman Trump spent only $216 thousand and remains in the lead, while Bush does not gain even 5% of support across the country.

Does this mean that big spending is dragging down candidate ratings? Of course not. Simply lagging candidates traditionally allocate more funds to reduce their backlog.

Anyway, the fact that the PR component has practically no effect on the results of the election race and is not so actively used by the favorites is good news for those who do not believe in the effectiveness of political advertising.

The main lesson is that elections are really hard to buy. The reward for a millionaire or billionaire who decides to invest his money in order to influence the results of an election is that he - in most cases - throws his money down the drain.