Robitaille got the most bang for his buck
December 1st, 2010 at 8:00 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
As I reported yesterday on WPRI.com, Rhode Island’s four candidates for governor spent a combined $6.3 million on their respective campaigns over the course of nearly two years. Here’s a chart showing the totals for each one:
That’s a lot of money – so much that it can be hard to wrap our brains around it. So let’s look at the numbers another way – spending per vote. (A little crass, perhaps, but interesting just the same.) To get that number, I took the amount of money each candidate spent on his campaign and divided it by the number of votes he received.
By that metric, John Robitaille ran by far the savviest race. The Republican’s campaign invested $603,833 in the race and received 114,911 votes – so he spent only $5.25 for every vote he received.
At the other extreme, Frank Caprio’s campaign invested $2.7 million in the race but only managed to get 78,896 votes, so he spent $33.66 for each vote he received, more than six times as much as Robitaille. Here are the spending-per-vote numbers for all four:
- Caprio: $33.66
- Block: $23.79
- Chafee: $20.42
- Robitaille: $5.25
Tags: campaign 2010, frank caprio, governor's race, john robitaille, republicans
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
Now that you have the spend per vote, you can start to calculate out a recommended minimum spend based on votes required to win, rate of inflation and such.
Also, I think you have to take Robitaille’s numbers with a mountain of salt. He received, literally, incalculable benefit from Caprio’s two magic words of 10/25/10!
But, on a serious note, this is just the campaign spend, right or does it include the outside groups?
As I’m sure you guessed, I’m planning to sell that information for thousands of dollars when we launch Nesi’s Notes Pro™.
Joke aside, I still think Robitaille’s showing was quite impressive. Caprio gave him plenty of help, but the man’s name-recognition was very low coming out of the primary.
And you’re exactly right on the last question – this is the campaigns’ spending, doesn’t include DGA, RGA, PACs, etc.
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