He hasn’t had to file a financial report yet, but by most accounts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has $110 million to spend on his 2024 presidential campaign, not counting the more than $8 million he raised in the first 24 hours of his campaign last week.
So what has all that money bought him so far? Glitchy audio announcing his campaign on Twitter, which drew more attention for its technical difficulties and Elon Musk than anything DeSantis said.
You might say Sen. Tim Scott got more bang for his buck. He’s raised $22 million, and the only wrinkle at his rollout at Charleston Southern University was a microphone that went dead for a few minutes.
These announcement stumbles are minor problems, but they illustrate what money can and can’t buy in political campaigns. It’s said that money is the mother’s milk of politics, usually by those who are first in line for the milk. In fact, money isn’t nearly that dependable a source of nourishment for political campaigns. The reality is closer to something Mark Cuban, the Shark Tank billionaire, said recently: “Raising money isn’t an accomplishment. It’s an obligation.”
Imagine founding a company, establishing a brand, making a profit and shutting down the operation within the span of two or three years. That’s what it’s like to run a major political campaign. Small wonder those big campaign war chests aren’t always spent so wisely.
The task of spending campaign money effectively has been rendered even more complicated by rapid changes in the technology of politicking. There’s a longstanding maxim that the presidential candidate who commands the latest form of media — think FDR and radio, JFK and television — has the advantage. That had to be on the minds of DeSantis strategists when they were given the chance to launch the governor’s campaign on Twitter, with Musk no less as the master of ceremonies.
This didn’t turn out to look so visionary. Even without the technical problems, Twitter probably doesn’t qualify as new media anymore, and getting cozy with Musk generates its own set of liabilities. Nevertheless, Team DeSantis has shown that it’s willing to try new things, and it has the money to experiment.
Donald Trump has a demonstrated ability to look richer than he really is, which may be why more hasn’t been made of the gap between his war chest and DeSantis’. Trump reported $13.9 million in cash on hand in his filing to the Federal Election Commission at the end of March, and his campaign says that since his New York indictment he’s raised another $15.4 million. That still leaves him well behind DeSantis, by about $30 million if you count the super PAC funds each of the candidates control.
DeSantis has an even greater dollar lead over President Joe Biden, who started his race with about $2.2 million total. But this is another example of what political dollars can’t buy. DeSantis has to throw those big bucks into the uphill battle to win the Republican nomination from Trump, while Biden can expect an avalanche of Democratic money by the time we reach the general election campaign.
Jimmy Carter spent about $10 million in 1976 to win the White House. That’s how much of his own money Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate you’ve probably never heard of, has put into his campaign so far. Nikki Haley, a relative pauper in this field, has raised $8.3 million.
Looking down a notch, the 2024 Senate campaigns are also starting fat, with the unlikely trio of Bernie Sanders, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema topping the list of 2024 incumbents with war chests of $8 million and up.
With all that easy money floating around in politics and diminishing clarity over the best way to spend it, political strategists are bound to start thinking about what an expensive dose of artificial intelligence, the new panacea for everything, might do for their campaigns.
Researchers at Stanford have published research claiming that AI can be at least as persuasive as humans in changing people’s minds about issues, and the Republican National Committee has used AI to generate a video criticizing Biden. There already are startups using AI to micro-target voters and find where they hand out online.
Know what else they’ll be using AI to do? Raise money.
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