The book “Freakonomics” has an interesting bit where they look at polotical donations and the impact on support.
Their conclusion is that the correlation between popular candidates and the amount of money donated is not that large donations let candidates advertise and get themselves voters, instead it’s that popular people attract donations (presumably with an underlying idea that if I give money to the candidate most likely to win then that’s the best chance of getting them to sway towards what you want them to do).
The book is a bit old now, with new technology and platforms that are better for manipulating people it would be interesting to see if an unpopular party or candidate can get support through massive amounts of cash.
There are definitely past NZ examples where smaller parties in particular, notably ACT, New Conservative, Internet Mana, etc, have spent a lot of money for relatively few votes to the point where you could sometimes calculate the cost per vote in the terms of dollars, maybe tens of dollars.
I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that money is meaningless, though. If you have a compelling message but don’t have the resources to constantly remind voters that you’re there, and to make sure your message keeps being heard and reinforced over all the other messages telling people why they’re better than you, then you can fail to get votes you otherwise might have gotten.
Similarly, having resources to drown out badly resourced competitors can always pick up a few votes that you mightn’t really have been entitled to if it’d been a fair exchange of ideas, but as that was probably a small party anyway it mightn’t be as many votes as some people assume.
But yeah, the popularity thing seems quite accurate. Seymour has huge charisma and might have been the PM if he led National, but his charisma didn’t get ACT anywhere in 2017 or 2014 - it only reached Parliament at all in those years because National allowed it. The obvious difference this time is that National has had a serious leadership crisis and is badly lacking charisma and connection with its normal voting block.
