The impact of money on elections: evidence from open seat races in the United States House of Representatives, 1990-2004

A binary win/loss model is constructed and estimated on the results from 1990-2004 contests for open U.S. House seats. The results indicate that election outcomes are highly sensitive to the major-party candidates' campaign spending ratios, and increases in spending ratios are shown to translate into non-trivial increases the candidate''s probability of winning, a result that holds for both Republicans and Democrats. The payoff to high levels of spending explains why it''s so attractive for candidates to outspend their opponents by large margins.