Right to Rise, the super PAC backing Jeb Bush, raised a total of $118 million in 2015, the Washington Post reports.
We’ll see how Bush fares tonight, but it sure seems like this was a massive waste of money by the donors. Would Bush be polling any better if he had raised a trillion dollars? Kind of doubt it!
I tend to think that the impact of runaway campaign finance is overstated in high-profile elections. But let me make a separate point, which is just that it’s really too bad that rich people with massive amounts of disposable income waste their money on presidential campaigns.
For context, the 2015 annual report from Heifer International shows that the group received $113 million in the previous fiscal year. They could have doubled that if the Bush donors hadn’t lit their money on fire to run useless advertisements. In other words, the opportunity cost of that stupid ad accusing Marco Rubio of wearing boots was that more impoverished people in the third world went hungry.