Self-Financed Candidates Spent Millions, but Most Fared Poorly

How's this for a top-10 list, Dave: The top 10 congressional candidates who spent millions of dollars of their own money on campaigns and still lost on Tuesday?

Well, all right, two on the big-spender list -- a Senate candidate in Wisconsin and a House hopeful in Virginia -- were elected. But eight others, ranging from former wrestling mogul Linda McMahon (a Republican who poured $46.6 million into her Connecticut Senate match) to Democrat Susan DelBene (who dropped $2.3 million on a Washington House contest), spent their dough in vain, the Washington Post reports.

The most generous with her own funds was California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, a Republican who in a former life headed eBay. She spent $175 million on a futile campaign to defeat Democrat Jerry Brown. That amounted to roughly $57 for each of the 3 million votes that went her way, the Post calculated. Also in California, former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina spent $5.5 million of her own money trying unsuccessfully to topple Sen. Barbara Boxer.

McMahon, onetime CEO of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, lost decisively to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

The winners among the wealthy-enough-to-spend-their-own-cash Top 10 were both Republicans: Ron Johnson ($8.2 million), who defeated Sen. Russ Feingold in Wisconsin; and Scott Rigell ($2.4 million), who knocked off Democratic Rep. Glenn Nye in Virginia.

The willingness to throw a personal fortune into a race -- sometimes swearing off public financing as a trade-off -- is hardly a new phenomena in American politics. H. Ross Perot and Steve Forbes both tried it, unsuccessfully of course, in presidential bids. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on the other hand, has thrown millions into his successful efforts to remain in City Hall in Lower Manhattan. And businessman Rick Scott spent $75 million out of his own pocket to help him become Florida governor in a race with Democrat Alex Sink.

But most of the time, elections are not bought. Only five of the top 20 self-financed candidates over the last 20 years have won, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Often, wealthy candidates jump in with little experience in the contact sport called politics. "You can call it arrogance or naivete, to be more charitable," Arizona State University Professor Jennifer A. Steen told the newspaper. "They don't tend to learn the lessons of past self-financiers, and they don't tend to recognize their own deficiencies."