Illustration: Chris Sharp

What can $60 million buy you these days? A few seaside mansions? A fleet of private jets? How about a seat in the U.S. Senate? That’s roughly what Democratic political newcomer Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs chairman and now governor of New Jersey, shelled out for his senatorial victory in 2000.

From Steve Forbes (with his Republican presidential runs of 1996 and 2000) to Ned Lamont (Connecticut’s 2006 failed Democratic senatorial candidate), recent election cycles have featured plenty of multimillionaires pouring their fortunes into bids for national office. These candidates often tout their independence from special interest money, while critics warn of plutocracy and the buying of elections. In the wake of Corzine’s record personal spending, Congress attached a “millionaires’ amendment” to the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, raising the cap on contributions for House candidates facing opponents who self-finance above a threshold of $350,000 or, for Senate can­didates, above an amount pegged to a state’s voting-age population. But accord­ing to Jennifer Steen, a Boston College assistant professor of political science, the positive and negative impacts of self-financed candidates have both been “radically overstated.”

In her book Self-Financed Can­di­dates in Congressional Elections (2006), Steen, a former political consultant who helped run races in California and Idaho, analyzes the campaigns of 2,339 wealthy congressional candidates who underwrote runs for office between 1992 and 2000. She reports that while an aspirant’s brimming bank account may have deterred some potential office-seekers or spurred efforts to augment an incumbent’s war chest, a self-financed victory like Corzine’s was rare and almost never translated into lasting freedom from the sway of big contributors.

Steen focused on challengers because incumbents’ campaigns are hardly ever self-financed. In the elections she studied, 31 percent of challengers and open-seat candidates self-financed $50,000 or more.

According to her analysis, the main advantage of self-financing is that it scares off experienced politicians from a primary challenge. The bigger the bankroll of a self-financer, the fewer seasoned opponents enter the race, and therefore the better the chance of a wealth-enhanced primary win. In fact, Steen found that for wealthy primary candidates with no political experience in an open-seat contest, the deterrent effect of the first $100,000 of self-financing translated into a 5 percent rise (to nearly 40 percent) in their chance of victory, and a 10 percent increase (to more than 60 percent) for the same money kicked in by politically experienced candidates. But the influence stopped short of the general election: Self-financing, according to Steen, “had no effect whatsoever on the quality of candidates running in the other party.”

Steen also found little evidence of self-financed candidates grossly outspending opponents in general elections. The average amount of self-financing was $320,686 for Sen­ate candidates and $39,762 for House candidates, figures that pale compared to the average fundraising levels—$1.1 million for the Senate and $227,426 for the House.

Steen notes a genuine advantage for incumbents (who won 93 percent of reelection bids between 1992 and 2000), but sees no statistical reason for potential candidates to duck opponents who underwrite their campaigns. The “extreme self-fi­nan­cers” among Senate and House primary candidates were victorious just 42 and 37 percent of the time, respectively, while Senate and House challengers who relied on fundraising alone won 70 and 71 percent of the time, respectively.

As to why self-financed candidates achieve so little with so much cash, Steen hypothesizes that it’s because fundraising is itself a political act, a garnering of votes along with dollars. “If you’re able to raise a couple hundred thousand from individuals and interests groups, that represents a lot of people supporting you,” she said in an interview. “Whereas if you write yourself a check for a couple hundred thousand, that represents one person supporting you.”

Even so, self-financers aren’t as independent as they claim. Most fund their campaigns with self-loans they repay, if elected, from contributions. As Steen documents, successful deep-pocket candidates “assimilate very rapidly to the norms of fundraising.”

Chris Berdik is a writer based in Boston.

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