In the Iowa Republican caucuses, which were held in January of this year, only about 110,000 voters caucused. That turnout represented less than 15% of the total number of registered Republicans in the state.
Four candidates spent more than $123 million on primary campaign ads in Iowa, in an effort to sway those 110,000 caucus voters. That translates to $1,118 per vote.
Candidates could have saved money by just buying a big screen TV for each voter.
It is amazing that four candidates spent so much money to woo so few voters, and that those few voters had so much impact in a presidential election process.
But those costs are peanuts compared to where we are headed. In 2000, the presidential campaigns ran up costs of $1.4 billion spent by candidates Bush and Gore, according to OpenSecrets.org (a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks money in politics). These figures include all money spent by presidential candidates, not limited to advertising and marketing, but also including all personnel, travel, administrative and other costs.
In 2004, those costs edged past $2 billion, and in 2008 the number increased to more than $3 billion. Fast forward to 2020 and that number was $5.7 billion. Those trends are starting to emulate the national debt.
If you take $5.7 billion of expenses and divide it by the total number of presidential votes generated (a record 158.5 million total votes for all candidates in 2020), you get a calculated cost of $36 per vote, which doesn’t sound too bad until you apply that to 158 million voters. CNN pegged the 2020 total cost at $6.6 billion.
And keep in mind, candidates spent $6 billion to win a job that pays $400,000 per year, meaning that the cost to get elected one time could pay the president’s salary for 15,000 years (of course, that salary may go up by then).
All this money becomes a backdrop to an election that takes more than a year of campaigning, and takes multiple turns, based upon the last stupid thing either candidate has said, or because gas went up a dime yesterday.
What could the 2024 election, which will run more than a year, already has both nominees in place, and appears to be more contentious than any in memory, cost?
Unlike most rants, this time I have a fix, if anyone is listening. Let’s start the campaign on August 7, 2024. Let’s suspend it all now and start again 90 days prior to election day. And let’s adopt the Mac 90-day rule for every election.
Four hundred and forty-four days prior to the 2024 presidential election, Americans tuned into the first Republican primary debate. Aren’t we all exhausted by election day? I’m exhausted today.
Canadian election campaigns average just 50 days. Mexico allows ninety. French candidates have less than a month to campaign, and Japanese law restricts campaigns to just 12 days. Couldn’t we do less than 444?
The benefits? Costs, obviously, would be much less. Electorate enthusiasm might replace electorate exhaustion. Partisan divides might become a bit less partisan, and maybe Congress and the President could work on the country’s problems rather than calculating every move’s impact on the campaigns. The collective mood of the country could be boosted, at least for a while.
Almost half of Americans do not vote at all, and of those that do, many have little interest or knowledge of pertinent issues. Some decide their preference based on a personal need rather than considering what’s best for the country, and some arrive at the voting site without yet knowing their preference. So, 15 months of campaigning seems like overkill.
Having reviewed the issues and probably consuming too much news from multiple sources, I have a presidential preference. Although circumstances could alter my decision, my vote will not be influenced by the price of eggs during election week, or by partisan social media posts that may or may not be truthful.
I hope we will all do the research, investigate more than a single news source, and consider the big picture. We could do that in 90 days.
And a closing note: The best campaign in U.S. history? George Washington, who ran unopposed and spent his entire campaign budget on 160 gallons of liquor for potential voters.
Curt MacRae is a resident of Coldwater, MI, and publishes opinion columns regularly.
Tweets @curtmacrae — comments to rantsbymac@gmail.com
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