Donald Trump Crushes The Field… Again

Donald Trump is by far the most cost effective candidate in the field.  Traditionally, being the front-runner in a presidential nomination process costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jeb Bush spent over $138 million in his campaign and won just 4 delegates. That works out at a staggering $34.5 million per delegate. Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz’s newly appointed running mate, spent $24.2 million on her campaign for her sole delegate.  So once again, Donald Trump is rewriting the rule book on running for president as he hasn’t relied on millions of dollars from rich donors and super PACs; instead he has been positively frugal and to date has won over 987 delegates for just $50,152 per delegate.

Donald Trump has been the master of self publicity.  He appears on every news channel, every hour of every day regardless of the political leanings of that channel.  He is compelling viewing whether you love him or hate him.

Yahoo Finance decided to calculate how much the Trump Effect and his unique blend of fame and notoriety is really worth.

So Yahoo Finance tallied the campaign spending for each candidate, along with the delegates and votes each has won, to see who’s spending their money most effectively. Here are the numbers for each candidate who has won at least one delegate:

In business terms, Trump is the most efficient candidate by far, with a marginal cost, if you will, of about $50,000 per delegate. All that airtime gives him massive scale, allowing him to spread his costs over a huge marketplace and push down the dollar-to-delegate ratio. The cost per delegate is roughly four times higher for Ted Cruz and John Kasich. As for Jeb Bush and the other candidates who won a single-digit number of candidates, they’re like startups that raised a lot of money for research and development but only managed to build a prototype or two before going out of business—making their dollar-to-delegate ratio stratospherically high.

There is no doubting that Donald Trump has run a remarkable campaign to become the effective presumptive nominee but to beat Hillary Clinton in a general election he will have to change his usual brash style that has done so well for him.  In a general election he will have to deal with his unfavorables and to do that, he will need to dump much of his trademark vulgarity and bullying. On May 17, he will sit down with Megyn Kelly, with whom he has been feuding for 8 months after the first GOP debate, for a major one on one interview.  Many will view this interview as a test on whether a new more presidential Trump can handle tough and personal questioning without resorting to his traditional response of various levels of insults.

You can discuss Trump’s campaign in the chat room:

[flyzoo-embed-chatroom id=’570d7aa1bb547e129c2bf67e’ width=’auto’ height=’640px’]

H/T Yahoo Finance

Comments

comments