Generally Republicans at all levels of government received more money in campaign contributions than do any other parties. If the Republicans are so "business-wise" in the eyes of mainstream voters why don't they have the economic savvy to be elected successfully with similar funding levels as the Democrats? I know there are statistics that point out how much each vote cost an individual candidate to "earn", but have these cost per vote stats been broadly assigned? E.g. "In all Congressional races in the last 8 years Republicans have spent $9.20 per vote received while Democrats spent $5.25 per vote and Greens, etc. spent $1.01 per vote." Again this could be a real eye opener if properly advertised to mainstream America. One would get a clearer picture that Republicans need "affirmative action funding" more so than progressives in order to buy their seats.
The question:
Generally Republicans at all levels of government received more money in campaign contributions than do any other parties. If the Republicans are so "business-wise" in the eyes of mainstream voters why don't they have the economic savvy to be elected successfully with similar funding levels as the Democrats? I know there are statistics that point out how much each vote cost an individual candidate to "earn", but have these cost per vote stats been broadly assigned? E.g. "In all Congressional races in the last 8 years Republicans have spent $9.20 per vote received while Democrats spent $5.25 per vote and Greens, etc. spent $1.01 per vote." Again this could be a real eye opener if properly advertised to mainstream America. One would get a clearer picture that Republicans need "affirmative action funding" more so than progressives in order to buy their seats.
For the question about the cost-per-vote for
Republican candidates and Democratic candidates, I searched in several places, and was only able to find one existing study, which is for the 2002 Senate races.
What I then did was find the data that the Federal Elections Commission collects about House and Senate races, and did my own calculations. I found the data I used at these URLs:
2000 election
http://www.fec.gov/press/press2001/051501congfinact/gesenateandhouse.html
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2000/hseprty.htm
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2000/senparty.htm
2002 election
http://www.fec.gov/press/press2003/20030618canstat/04gen2002.pdf
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2002/hseparty.htm
http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2002/senparty.htm
When I divided "Net Disbursements" from the financial pages by "Total Votes" from the vote count pages, I got these results:
2000 House
Republicans $5.49 per vote
Democrats $5.34 per vote
2000 Senate
Democrats $5.47 per vote
Republicans $4.66 per vote
2002 House
Democrats $7.58 per vote
Republicans $7.04 per vote
2002 Senate
Democrats $6.72 per vote
Republicans $6.66 per vote
Because you have access to the data through the given URLs, you can of course feel free to check my calculations or to calculate the per vote
totals in a different way. (I'm not sure why my 2002 Senate numbers differed from those of the study given above -- I can only guess that the OpenSecrets data used by the other person differs from the FEC data somehow.)