Will Trump Be the GOP Nominee?

The $50 million the Trump campaign just picked up from Tim Mellon proves only that you can be very rich and still be a complete and total asshole. And before you start wringing your hands and shaking your head because you’re afraid that this one-shot donation will give Trump the wherewithal to outbuy Joe when it comes to running ads for the campaign, you might want to recall that Hillary outspent Trump by a two-to-one margin in 2016 and look what it got her — not one, goddamn thing.

There’s a group of economists at MIT who several years ago published a very detailed study (which I can’t seem to find at the moment) that attempted to determine the relationship between money spent on political campaigns and campaign outcomes. What they ended up figuring out was that the only clear instance in which how much money a candidate spent would impact that candidate’s electoral success was when someone was competing politically for the first time and used money to increase his or her name recognition. And even if spending more money got a candidate better known, it didn’t necessarily result in that election being won.

In that regard, my eagle-eyed lawyer sister sent me a story from NBC News which raises some serious issues about how the Trump campaign is being managed, or maybe we should say isn’t being managed, because it discusses how the GOTV effort by Trump may be falling…