How Donald Trump proved that most campaign spending is a scam

At least half — and probably as much as 80 percent — of all the money spent in presidential and state-level campaigns is wasted.

This is one of the key lessons of Donald Trump's presidential bid.

Campaigns spend billions every election cycle on extremely pricey consultants and armies of everything from phone-bankers to computer geeks, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising on TV, radio, and social media. Trump barely has any of that. He has done everything to alienate every constituency in America except white working-class males. And he still might win.

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Trump received 13.3 million votes in the primary. He easily dispatched a field of 16 candidates, many of them extremely qualified. And he did it by spending just $49 million. To give you some perspective, that's less than any significant major party candidate has spent since 2000, even accounting for inflation. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has thus far spent $227 million. She's also spent tens of millions of dollars on TV advertising and booked a lot more airtime than Trump. Jeb Bush, who famously raised more than any other candidate and ended up with underwhelming results, spent more than $5,000 per vote.

What about field offices? Trump has a grand total of one field office in Florida. Clinton has 51. Back in 2012, Obama had 102. Clinton and the Democratic Party have 291 field offices nationally, compared to Trump's 88.

And then there's data. In 2012, we were told all about how President Obama had the world's best data team and how that was crucial in his victory, while Mitt Romney's "ORCA" app, which was supposed to make all the difference, crashed and burned. We were told that the Democrats' lifestyle liberalism appealed so much to Silicon Valley techies that they would keep recruiting the best minds in technology and thereby have a perpetual advantage in political campaigns in the era of Big Data.

And yet, despite all of this, the latest RealClearPolitics poll average has Clinton at 45 percent, and Trump at 44 percent. Clinton is ahead, sure, and has been consistently ahead. But not by much, and against a candidate who is perpetually shooting himself in the foot.

Never mind the issues. Never mind the politics. Never mind the repercussions of the country. Just in terms of the mechanics of winning an election, this is simply astonishing.

So why are politicians — and political donors — caught in this spending racket?

One sad ("Sad!") but very appealing conclusion is that most of our politicians are simply suckers. Political consultants, like used car salesmen, sell them on the latest fad, and they buy it hook, line, and sinker, because, well, they're just not that bright. Say what you will about Trump, but at least he can probably smell a con artist a mile away — it takes one to know one.

But there's a bigger, epistemological, problem. The book The Everything Store, about the age of Amazon, explains that in the go-go 1990s, before spending all of its money on TV ads like every other dotcom, Amazon ran a series of randomized experiments in small media markets to test whether TV ads made people more likely to buy from Amazon.com. The findings? They didn't, and so Amazon didn't invest in TV ads.

Controlled experiments like this don't exist in the election cycle. There's no Earth B where we can run the exact same campaign, except Trump has a huge, Clinton-like campaign apparatus, to see what difference it makes. Campaigns simply don't know what will work, and what won't, so they just have to throw everything at the wall, even though most of it is probably just money down the drain.

But they have to, because the stakes are so high. Let's say you had a life-threatening cancer, and you could either spend $10,000 on a therapy that has a 50-50 chance of healing you, or $20,000 on a therapy that has a 60-40 chance of healing you. Would you spend the extra money? Of course you would, because you're talking life or death. Similarly, with a presidential election, the stakes are huge and binary: You're either the most powerful person on the planet, or you're a loser. And so many elections end up being so close. If having 300 field offices instead of 50 has just a one-in-10 chance of making a difference to the eventual outcome, it's still rational to spend that money.

Deliriously wasted political cash is probably with us to stay. But still, give Trump credit for one thing: He's showed us that so much of professional politics is a scam.