How Come Trump Beats Up On the GOP?

The national 2024 polls on the GOP side still show Trump with more than a 30-point lead over DeSantis and everyone else bunched at 5 points or less. But yesterday a story broke about how Tim Scott has now broken through the double-digit ceiling in Iowa, with his latest poll number at 11 percent.

What Scott’s upward shift in Iowa represents is a determined effort to get him running as a legitimate candidate in the early primary states, the idea being that once those numbers begin to move upward, that he will emerge as a serious contender to Trump in the other, later primary states.

Scott’s showing in Iowa appears to be largely the result of his campaign plunking down a lot of cash to buy TV ads, with the more than $3 million that his super PAC has spent in July being the most that any GOP campaigner has spent.

Several years ago, one of the NBER research teams did a study on determine the impact of spending on campaign outcomes. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find the paper in the NBER archive, but the issue being examined was whether candidates who spent more money on their campaigns did better at the ballot box than candidates who spent less.

The conclusion of this study was not what you might expect, because the research team could only identify one, specific positive result from how much money was…