Funny Math

Reader comment on: Walker's Spending

Submitted by ben (United States), Jun 8, 2012 11:16

Well - do you believe the mainstream media or right wing blogs? That is the question. In tracing the source back to the link at MacIver institute (a free market Wisonsin think tank), they have a hand little chart that purports to show where the democratic dollars went. Without a huge amount of time to sort through this, I did notice a couple of problems. First, the assumption in that graph is that all dollars raised during the recount process went towards defeating republicans. Of course, the Democrats themselves had a primary to decide who would square off against Walker and the various State Senators. For example, it has Falk's campaign spending every dollar trying to defeat Walker, but she didn't even run against him! She only ran against Barrett. Now surely many of her adds were negative towards Walker, but many weren't. Also, whatever she spent targeting voters in the primary with phone banking etc was money not spent against Walker.

I wholeheartedly disagree with you on the saturation argument. Everyone knows what Coca-Cola is, yet they continue advertising. Why, because the more someone sees something the more they think it is true. Case study - the denial of Global Warming (also a right wing blog favorite). The more people hear that global warming is a hoax the more they think it is true. Never mind that the science continues to build that it is very real. I would agree that there are diminishing marginal returns on advertising, but never does it come close to approaching no impact.

Having said all of this, it is possible that Walker would have won had the campaigns spent the same amount. But this still doesn't get at the more important point that special interests have outsized influence in our political campaigns, to the detriment of our democracy.

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