Do You Have to be Wealthy to be a Successful Politician? --Allie's Op-Ed

There are many examples of successful politicians who are wealthy–if you consider a successful politician someone who has made it as the nominee. Looking at net worth’s, Barack Obama’s at the end of 2007–right before he became president for the first time–was $1.3million.[1] Hillary Clinton currently has a net worth of $31.1 million and Donald Trump’s is very high at $3.7 billion. Though these are large net worth’s, it is important to keep in mind that all of these politicians are not the “average politician” they are/were at some point presidential nominees. By only considering this small group, we only consider what level of wealth is necessary to be a president.

            An important takeaway from our class, which I agree with, is that is not the pure wealth that is a factor on whether or not an individual is a successful politician. It is what inevitably comes with wealth. For someone to be wealthy, they have to have done well for themselves. They most likely went through secondary schooling, have had a successful career, and thus met people along the way. It is the network that is built that plays a role in the success of a political career. This leads to the analysis of a nominees’ way of maximizing their utility.

            A wealthy politicians network is usually full of other wealthy people, which can lead to help in their campaign as it is important for donations to be made. Though it is nice for a politician to receive large donations from either corporations or individuals, the majority of the American population will not be making that grand of a gesture. It is important to think about campaigns such as Bernie Sanders’ whose average donation was $27 as his rhetoric was to lift up the lower working class. These individual, smaller donations correlate to votes. For a corporation to make a donation, is great for a campaign as it is a large sum of money, but it just shows an endorsement from maybe one person at that company. It will not be every employee of the company that then ends up voting for that candidate, which in the end is the goal.

            In the end, running a political campaign has changed in the past years and it is worth questioning if the incredibly large sums of money that are being used is worth it. Just from Bush’s campaign in 2004 to Obama’s 2008 campaign, the spending doubled making the total: $730 million. This is more than 260 times the amount of money Lincoln spent during his first campaign, as explained by a Mother Jones’ article “The Crazy Cost of Becoming President, From Lincoln to Obama”. With these huge increases in cost, it is important to understand how campaigning has changed along with it. For a nominee like Donald Trump–all press is good press. He focuses on getting seen through saying outrageous things that news stations and tabloids pick up on. This takes no monetary output from the campaign, but in the end acts as a commercial as it is time that a person spends watching Trump and forming an opinion. This opinion either can end in a vote and further support or their decision is to support another candidate. Either way, in the past elections, the major way for a voter to see the nominees was if they air a commercial, which takes money to be fundraised. So, in this case, Donald Trump is maximizing his utility.

            In this election especially, but in recent elections social media has also played a large roll in the campaigning process. It is free for a nominee to have an account, though they do have to pay for staff to run the accounts. With the surge in use of Social Media, campaigning in the future will change. Candidates will be able to reach a larger spectrum of voters and reach out to people who normally not be interested in following a campaign trail. This, will help maximize a candidates’ utility as the only cost is staff where as for running commercials there are multiple costs–and they aren’t small.

            Finally, it is worth going back and taking a look at net worth’s. According to, Tom Gerencer’s article “Barack Obama Net Worth”, President Obama’s net worth is 48 times larger than the median U.S. households ($68,000) net worth. This leads to some interesting questions on income equality. Furthermore, though Obama’s net worth does seem high, it is actually just 1/10^th of Hillary Clinton’s and 1/2059 of Donald Trump’s. In conclusion, it is important to understand the other ways that a politician maximizes their utility that makes them successful. It is not purely their wealth.

---

[1] http://www.snopes.com/Politics/obama/networth.asp