$480: The Price Rick Perry Paid for Each Iowa Caucus Vote

More

What can you buy for $130? A nice pair of headphones. A romantic dinner for two. Five hours of a typical worker's pre-tax salary. Or, if you're running for president, maybe you can buy a vote.

If you combine the Republican presidential candidates' total direct spending on media with SuperPAC outlays and other television ad buys from outside groups, you come out to about $15.6 million spent on TV ads in an Iowa caucus with about 120,000 total voters. That means the average price of a buying a vote via media came out about $130 dollars, according to data collected by Buzzfeed Politics.

But $130 would have been a bargain for Rick Perry. The Texas governor spent nearly $500 in media for every vote on Tuesday. If he received enough of the 120,000 votes to average $130 per vote, he would have easily won the Iowa caucus with with 46,000 votes, or 38 percent. Here is a graph of media spending per caucus vote, all numbers in dollars.

Screen Shot 2012-01-04 at 10.58.13 AM.png
To get a full appreciation for the actual price of a vote -- total spending divided by total votes -- you would have to factor in the amount of money spent by each candidate on travel, advance, logistics, dining and living expenses, and so forth. We don't have that information, yet. What we do have, courtesy of the Buzzfeed team, is a handy breakdown of paid media spending per candidate.

Jump to comments

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com. More

Thompson has written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has also appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.

Get Today's Top Stories in Your Inbox (preview)


Elsewhere on the web

Join the Discussion

After you comment, click Post. If you’re not already logged in you will be asked to log in or register. blog comments powered by Disqus

Video

Miami: The Next Big Start-Up City?

How the city became a center for innovation

Video

Video

A Brief History of Romantic Comedies

From The Atlantic's Chris Orr

Video

Life in 'the New Arctic'

A moving portrait of a fading landscape

Video

Video

The Rise of New York City

A fascinating look at Manhattan in the 1940s

Video

What Is Methane Hydrate?

"Flaming ice" is a vast natural energy source

Video

NASA's Time-Lapse of the Sun

Now with epic dubstep music

Video

Shaken Not Tuned: Cocktail Experiments

Can a tuning fork improve a cocktail?

Video

Video

Is He Cheating? A 1950s Guide

'That little blonde secretary from the office?’

Video

New Yorkers: Vintage Vacuum-Tube Amps

Risking electric shock to restore old amplifiers

Video

The DIY Piano-Bicycle

Everybody needs a hobby

Writers

Up
Down

More in Business

In Focus

Photos of Tornado Damage in Moore, Oklahoma