The astounding costs of American politics

When you look up the definition of politics, you find references to it being an art, a science, a process, a practice. More and more these days, and much to our detriment, it's also advertising.

We're awash in it now, a couple days from Election Day. Television and social media are overrun with political ads. Projections this past week put spending on this midterm cycle at $11.6 billion, making it the most expensive election to date, worse even than the 2024 slugfest that featured a presidential contest. More than $500 million is being spent on each Senate race in Texas and Ohio. That's more than $1 billion for two Senate seats.

The numbers are numbing. And nauseating.

As many Americans struggle with basic costs like housing, food, gas, healthcare, childcare and utilities, this kind of spending is obscene in comparison. One recent analysis of the Maine Senate race found that Democrats and Republicans are shelling out $167 per voting-age resident on advertising; imagine if the candidates simply visited each county in the state to talk about their platforms and each voter got a $167 credit for food or a heating bill. In California, billionaires have spent more than $300 million to defeat that state's proposed billionaire tax.

One could decry the increasing influence of the nation's wealthiest residents, whose giving has been unleashed by a series of court decisions that removed restrictions on the size of donations and, as a bonus, allowed some groups to keep secret the identity of their donors. The angst could be dubbed the Elon effect; the world's only trillion-dollar man, Elon Musk, has given $446 million this cycle to super PACs that support Republicans, with most of that trying to prop up scandal-plagued Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race.

The landscape is a clash of adages: It's the old saw that money is the mother's milk of politics vs. the eternal verity that you get what you pay for. But do we really get what we pay for? We're smashing spending records but are we getting better candidates? It's hard to make that case. Are we getting better information? Clearly, no. So much of what's aired is muck — black and white images meant to scare, heavily edited videos that distort truth, a mélange of deep massages of facts and some outright lies, spooling out on an infinite loop.

That doesn't even include the $137 million identified by the Wesleyan Media Project that campaigns and political action groups have spent on ads generated by artificial intelligence — which, given their level of fabrication, is its own dark issue.

The situation seems intractable. With political contributions recognized as free speech and our party warfare as tribal as it is, it's hard to imagine anyone backing down. And it's nearly inconceivable that Congress would pass a major reform on money in politics. Too much self-interest. We seem doomed to continue this cycle in which each election sets a spending record, unless the system starts to seem so broken that momentum builds for change.

One ray of hope would be big victories by lesser-funded candidates, which likely will happen this week. But that might not resonate as one would hope. For some losers, the takeaway will be that they would have won if only they had gotten their message out to even more people even more often, rather than that the quality of the candidate might matter more than how much they spend.

Election Day will bring a stop to the mailers and TV ads. But almost immediately after the votes are tabulated, fundraising will begin for 2028 and its crowded presidential contest with no incumbent running, no clear front-runners, and control of the Senate and House again at stake.

In American politics, the cash dash never ends. Perhaps one day we all will realize that money can't buy everything.

Columnist Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie1@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.