The High Cost of Democracy: What Illinois Primary Candidates Spent Per Vote
Money Can’t Always Buy Electoral Success
The 2024 Illinois primary elections revealed a harsh truth about modern American politics: spending the most money doesn’t guarantee victory at the ballot box. When the CBS News Data Team crunched the numbers on campaign spending and vote totals, they uncovered some eye-opening statistics that demonstrate just how expensive—and sometimes inefficient—the road to Washington can be. While some candidates managed to win their races with relatively modest spending, others burned through millions of dollars only to come up short on election day. The analysis, which examined financial data through late February and focused on direct candidate spending rather than outside PAC money, paints a revealing picture of the modern campaign landscape where television ads, direct mail pieces, digital advertising, and ground operations can quickly drain campaign coffers without delivering proportional results at the polls.
The Senate Race: A Tale of Two Strategies
The race for U.S. Senate in Illinois provided perhaps the most striking example of how campaign spending doesn’t always correlate with electoral success. U.S. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi emerged as the top spender in the Democratic primary, pouring nearly $24 million into his campaign war chest. Despite this massive financial investment, Krishnamoorthi finished in second place with fewer than 400,000 votes, resulting in a cost of approximately $60 per ballot cast in his favor. This astronomical per-vote cost demonstrates the limits of what money alone can achieve in politics, even when a candidate has the resources to saturate the airwaves and fill mailboxes across the state. In contrast, the winner of the Democratic primary, Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, ran a far more efficient campaign from a financial perspective. Stratton spent only about $2.8 million—roughly one-eighth of what her main opponent invested—yet managed to secure more votes than Krishnamoorthi. Her cost per vote came in at less than $6, making her campaign ten times more cost-effective than her nearest competitor. This dramatic difference suggests that factors beyond raw spending power—such as name recognition from her current office, grassroots support, endorsements, and message resonance—played crucial roles in determining the outcome.
On the Republican side, the financial picture looked completely different. Don Tracy secured the Republican nomination for Senate with an even more efficient spending strategy, investing just $462,000 to capture nearly 211,000 votes. This translated to slightly more than $2 per ballot, making his campaign the most cost-effective of any major Senate candidate in terms of dollars spent per vote received. Tracy’s efficient campaign likely benefited from a less crowded primary field and a Republican electorate that may have been more unified around a smaller number of viable candidates, reducing the need for expensive advertising to stand out from the competition.
House Races: When Millions Don’t Matter
The congressional races revealed even more dramatic examples of campaign spending that failed to translate into electoral success. In the contest for Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, candidate Kat Abughazaleh took the distinction of being the biggest spender among all U.S. House candidates in the state, investing nearly $3 million in her bid. Despite this substantial investment, Abughazaleh’s campaign ended in defeat, capturing only about 31,000 votes. The mathematics of her campaign spending are sobering: she spent approximately $94 for each vote she received, a cost-per-vote ratio that raises serious questions about campaign strategy and resource allocation. For context, that amount per vote is enough to buy a nice dinner for two at a upscale restaurant, yet it bought her campaign only a single ballot cast in her favor and, ultimately, not enough of them to win.
However, Abughazaleh’s spending efficiency looks remarkably prudent when compared to Neil Khot’s campaign in the 8th Congressional District. Khot’s campaign represents perhaps the most extreme example of campaign spending failing to deliver results in the entire Illinois primary. Coming in sixth place in his primary race, Khot managed to secure only about 4,500 votes despite spending a staggering $1.8 million on his campaign. When you do the math, this works out to an almost unbelievable $401 per vote—a figure so high it seems to defy the logic of campaign finance altogether. To put this in perspective, Khot spent enough money per vote to buy a decent used laptop, a week’s worth of groceries for a family, or a monthly car payment for every single person who voted for him. His campaign demonstrates that in modern politics, it’s entirely possible to have substantial financial resources and still fail to connect with voters in a meaningful way.
Understanding the Data and Its Limitations
It’s important to understand what these figures represent and what they don’t capture about the full financial picture of these campaigns. The analysis conducted by the CBS News Data Team examined campaign finance data through late February, providing a snapshot of spending during the primary season but not capturing any last-minute expenditures that might have occurred in the final days before the election. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, these numbers reflect only direct spending by the candidates’ own campaigns and don’t include money spent by Political Action Committees (PACs), super PACs, or other outside groups that may have purchased advertising or conducted other activities on behalf of these candidates. In modern American politics, outside spending has become increasingly important, sometimes matching or even exceeding what candidates spend from their own campaign accounts. This means the true cost of these campaigns—and the real cost-per-vote figures—could be substantially higher than what’s reflected in this analysis.
Furthermore, campaign spending isn’t always about winning in the immediate term. Candidates who ran expensive campaigns and lost may have been investing in name recognition for future races, building donor networks, or advancing policy conversations they care about. Some candidates enter races knowing they’re long shots but use the campaign platform to raise their profile for appointed positions or future electoral opportunities. Nevertheless, the per-vote costs revealed in this analysis are striking and raise legitimate questions about how effectively campaigns are allocating their resources and whether the astronomical costs of modern political campaigns serve democratic purposes or create barriers to entry that favor only the wealthy or well-connected.
The Broader Implications for Democracy
These findings from Illinois illuminate broader concerns about the role of money in American politics and the escalating costs of running competitive campaigns. When candidates spend tens of millions of dollars on a single race, it inevitably means that running for office becomes accessible primarily to those who are independently wealthy or those who have the connections to raise substantial sums from donors. This dynamic potentially excludes qualified individuals who lack personal wealth or access to donor networks, thereby limiting the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds represented in government. The fact that Lieutenant Governor Stratton could win while spending a fraction of what her opponent invested offers some hope that money isn’t everything, but her victory likely benefited from the advantages of incumbency and the platform that comes with already holding statewide office—resources that first-time candidates or political outsiders don’t have.
The extreme cost-per-vote figures seen in races like Neil Khot’s also raise questions about how campaign consultants, media buyers, and political strategists are serving their candidates. Are campaigns spending money effectively on activities that actually persuade voters, or is money being wasted on expensive television advertising in an era when fewer people watch traditional TV, or on glossy mailers that go straight into the recycling bin? The candidates who spent the most per vote may have fallen victim to the “more is better” mentality that pervades political consulting, where the assumption is that flooding the zone with advertising will eventually break through to voters. The data from Illinois suggests this approach doesn’t always work, and that message, authenticity, and connection with voters still matter—perhaps more than ever in an age when voters are increasingly skeptical of traditional political advertising and more likely to tune out expensive media campaigns in favor of information from trusted sources, social networks, and their own research.
