The one candidate you wont contribute to is a sure loser. ( Just ask any presidential hopeful who bombs in Iowa and New Hampshire.) So front-runners and incumbents raise a lot more money than long shots. And what about spending that money? Incumbents and front- runners obviously have more cash, but they only spend a lot of it when they stand a legitimate chance of losing; otherwise, why dip into a war chest that might be more useful later on, when a more for- midable opponent appears? Now picture two candidates, one intrinsically appealing and the other not so. The appealing candidate raises much more money and wins easily. But was it the money that won him the votes, or was it his appeal that won the votes and the money? Thats a crucial question but a very hard one to answer. Voter ap- peal, after all, isnt easy to quantify. How can it be measured? It cant, really-except in one special case. The key is to measure a candidate against . . . himself. That is, Candidate A today is likely to be similar to Candidate A two or four years hence. The same could be said for Candidate B. If only Candidate A ran against Candidate B in two consecutive elections but in each case spent different amounts of money. Then, with the candidates appeal more or less constant, we could measure the moneys impact. As it turns out, the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections all the time-indeed, in nearly a thousand U.S. congressional races since 1972. What do the numbers have to say about such cases? Heres the surprise: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all. A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate   who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1 percent. What really matters for a political candidate is not how much you spend; what matters is who you are. (The same