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Also, consider the declining marginal value of campaign spending.
Even Trump spent a quarter of a billion dollars. That's a lot of money that even he thought was useful. (His affiliates spent another quarter billion dollars, but they're probably old-fashioned politicians with poor judgement about campaign spending.) I think that was comparable to the 2000 campaign. So if Trump is our judge of the value of money, maybe politicians are spending too much today, but maybe they weren't just a few years ago.
Clinton spent half a billion dollars and her affiliates spent another half a billion. Much of this money was probably badly spent. And Clinton seems to have spent a lot of time raising money, while it may have been better for her to campaign. But she spent only twice as much money as Trump, or 4x if you count her affiliates and not his.