revisiting impact of money in politics

For people who like to gamble, a system that promises to deliver winners nine out of 10 times would be worth its weight in gold.

That would hold true whether you were playing the ponies or putting a few dollars down on your favorite professional football team on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone today that such a "system" exists in American politics - and not just because President-elect Barack Obama obliterated all previous campaign finance records by outraising and outspending Republican opponent John McCain by nearly a 2-to-1 margin on his way to the White House.

The system is simply this: Make a list of every congressional race for the House of Representatives and Senate and bet on the candidate who spent the most money.

If you had done that during the 2008 campaign, you would have been correct better than 90 percent of the time, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C., that tracks money in U.S. politics.

Based on an examination of all congressional races decided by midday Nov. 5, the candidates who spent the most money won 93 percent of the contests for the House and 94 percent of the races for the Senate.

In raw numbers, that means the big spenders triumphed 397 of 426 times in the House and 30 of 32 times in the Senate based on candidate spending through Oct. 15.

And in case you're thinking that may be an aberration this year, think again. In 2006, candidates who spent the most money won 94 percent of the time in the House and 73 percent of the time in the Senate; two years earlier, the figures were 98 percent and 88 percent, respectively.

"The 2008 election will go down in U.S. history as an election of firsts, but this was far from the first time that money was overwhelmingly victorious on Election Day," says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "The best-funded candidates won nine out of 10 contests, and all but a few members of Congress will be returning to Washington."

In fact, incumbent top spenders did even better than the universe of candidates as a whole. Top-spending incumbents prevailed 95 percent of the time in the House and 93 percent of the time in the Senate.

Talk about the advantages of incumbency.

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