Are presidential campaigns too cheap?
Enough with the fundraising e-mails already.
(Alexander Gardner)
Over at Mother Jones, Dave Gilson has a neat set of charts comparing the sticker price for presidential campaigns over time. Barack Obama raised and spent $730 million getting elected in 2008. Abraham Lincoln, by contrast, spent just $2.8 million (in today’s dollars) becoming president in 1860.
One notable point, though, is that the price of presidential campaigns has actually grown more slowly than inflation over the past century. In real terms, John F. Kennedy spent less in his 1960 campaign against Nixon than William McKinley did in his (expensive) 1896 bout against William Jennings Bryan. Indeed, 2008 was the first campaign to be about as pricey as you’d expect given the growth in GDP since 1908.
Also, see this paper, which finds that “campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years — if anything, they have probably fallen.” Though it’s possible that the Super-PAC-heavy 2012 election could overturn that trend ...
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