{"id":19,"date":"2006-09-26T00:13:01","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T04:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/archives\/19"},"modified":"2006-09-26T00:14:12","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T04:14:12","slug":"dollars-per-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/2006\/09\/dollars-per-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Dollars Per Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I reviewed Gabrieli&#8217;s campaign spending on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mass.gov\/ocpf\/homepage_data.htm\">OCPF<\/a> website.  It looks like he spent $9.4 million in his primary campaign.  He got <a title=\"boston.com\" href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/special\/politics\/2006_elections\/primary_results\/\">248,000 votes<\/a>.  That works out to $37.93 per vote.  Winning, of course, makes you look good: Patrick spent $4.9 million to get 452,000 votes, or $10.80 per vote.  That&#8217;s still a lot of money, but it went farther.<\/p>\n<p>What does this mean?  For one thing, it shows that &#8220;buying an election&#8221; is easier said than done.  This doesn&#8217;t disprove that money matters, but it shows that money isn&#8217;t the only thing that matters.  If money was the only factor, Gabrieli would have walked away with 50% of the vote, not Patrick.  The next time you read an editorial compaining about the role of money in elections, remember to check the numbers once the dust has settled a bit.<\/p>\n<p>Did you read this information in the mainstream press?  Not too likely.  It&#8217;s after the fact, there&#8217;s no one to give a sound bite, and that makes it boring.  Check out the Globe&#8217;s <a title=\"boston.com\" href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/local\/politics\/money\/\">political finance<\/a> page.  Last update?  Last month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I reviewed Gabrieli&#8217;s campaign spending on the OCPF website. It looks like he spent $9.4 million in his primary campaign. He got 248,000 votes. That works out to $37.93 per vote. Winning, of course, makes you look good: Patrick spent $4.9 million to get 452,000 votes, or $10.80 per vote. That&#8217;s still a lot of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-massachusetts","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}