Want to Make the Big Bucks? Work for the Trump Campaign.

There’s no reason why you have to read the full, 814-page final report issued last night by the January 6th Select Committee, but what everyone should read is Appendix III, pps. 770–805, entitled ‘The Big Rip-Off: Follow The Money,’ which I am hoping will at some point be an issue that would attract the scrutiny it deserves.

I wish I could find this paper, it’s a research paper done a few years ago by a group of economists are MIT, and it is a very detailed attempt to figure out the impact of how much money is spent in a political campaign. And what the MIT team ends up saying is that the amount spent by a candidate running for any elective office only makes a difference if the candidate is hardly known and needs to build recognition for his or her name.

This certainly wouldn’t describe candidate Trump at the beginning of the 2020 election. In fact, from the very first head-to-head poll versus Joe Biden, the gap favoring Joe was seven points, a number which never wavered throughout the entire campaign. In fact, pollster after pollster remarked on how unusual it was to see not the slightest shift in electoral percentages over such a lengthy period of time.

The MIT research states that voters support a candidate for one or both of two reasons: either the voters just like a candidate in terms of how the candidate looks or talks, or they like a candidate because of what he or she has to say. In Trump’s case, his likability numbers cratered after he refused to…