Show me the money
Delving into the allocation of these gargantuan sums, it should come as a shock to no-one who turned on their TV, logged into social media, or just wasn’t living under a rock during the presidential cycle that nearly $9bn of campaign money went toward media expenses. That was far and away the biggest expense, as candidates paid up to get their names, faces, and key policies on radios, televisions, and social media feeds across the US.
The ballot budget breakdown
Following media expenses, the next most substantial chunk of election budgets was swallowed up by fundraising efforts — think pamphlets, telemarketing calls, extravagant events, and, of course, those high-priced consultants — totaling some $1.6bn in the 2020 cycle. While spending over a billion dollars on fundraising may seem a little paradoxical at first, it helps to think of electoral campaigns as businesses: fundraising expenditure is effectively a marketing cost that, in theory, enables the business to circulate more funds elsewhere in the long term.
It often pays off to pump time and money into fundraising at the start of electoral proceedings too: research has highlighted that early fundraising can be a remarkably accurate predictor of the ultimate victor in primary races, though it has been less meaningful in general elections.
