The Millionaire Smackdown: Wealthy Candidates Try To Buy The Ballot In Connecticut

Aug. 6, 2010 — -- It's a phenomenon common to the homestretch of every hotly contested political race: the endless phone calls, mailings, and campaign commercials that inundate voters in the final days before the election. But a cluster of wealthy candidates in Connecticut has kicked that barrage into overdrive this week as the state's August 10th primary draws near, pouring tens of millions of dollars from their own deep pockets into their campaigns.

"I thought it was an L.L. Bean catalog," said Connecticut voter Karen Rogers, describing a glossy 14-page mailer featuring multi-millionaire Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon posing in a brown cable-knit sweater with children against a colonial New England backdrop. "You can just tell she has a lot of money."

McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has burned through $21 million of her personal fortune in her bid for the US Senate, spending eight times more than her primary rivals, investment advisor Peter Schiff and former Congressman Rob Simmons, and 16 times more than her likely Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, according to campaign finance data from the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

In the Connecticut governor's race, meanwhile, two Greenwich millionaires are leading in the pre-primary polls. Democrat Ned Lamont, the cable television entrepreneur who tried to take Joe Lieberman's Senate seat in 2006, has poured more than $6.8 million into his run for office, while Republican Tom Foley, a private investor and former US Ambassador to Ireland, has loaned his own campaign $2 million, according to an ABC News review of state campaign finance filings.

The Connecticut millionaires are among dozens of self-financed candidates across the country trying to take advantage of a public mood that could favor political outsiders this November. Campaign observers say the fate of this year's unusual crop of self-funders has the potential to shape political campaigns and the recruitment of candidates for years to come.

"There is a very clear deterrent effect with wealthy self-financers -- they tend to push a lot of other types of candidates out of the field," said Jennifer Steen, a political science professor at Arizona State University and former campaign manager who has studied the impact of self-funded campaigns.

That scenario played out in May when Simmons, at one time considered the favorite to win the GOP nomination in the Connecticut Senate race, suspended his campaign, citing "the mathematical reality of competing against an opponent with unlimited financial resources." Simmons re-entered the campaign in late July.

Steen believes that self-financers' outsized spending can also create an "arms race effect" with opponents feeling the pressure to keep up.

"They end up spending more time trying to raise money, and less time doing other campaign activities like meeting with regular voters who aren't campaign contributors or interacting with citizens in other ways," says Steen. "I don't think that's so great for democracy."