Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars and he won the presidency. So the obvious question is, does it help to be rich if one is standing for elections?
The question assumes significance as many of the candidates who have filed their nominations for the State elections are crorepatis. Take Michael Lobo for instance, who is the BJP candidate in Calangute. The man is worth Rs 49 crore. When he stood for the first time in 2012 he had assets valued at Rs 20 crore. Does this automatically mean he can win?
At the other end of the spectrum are a couple of AAP candidates who have zero income. How they keep body and soul together is a mystery. Perhaps, their strength comes from the white topi that they so proudly adorn. Or they could be entirely dependent on the food allowance provided by the party which I am told is around Rs 200 a day, enough to buy one good meal in Goa, or three bad ones.
Of course no one here is as rich as Donald Trump, and they don’t tweet like him either.
Let’s take the case of Michael Bloomberg, the 6th richest man in the world. Mike, as he is known, is worth around 43 billion dollars, which means he could finance all the parties and all the candidates standing for elections in Goa, although he would have trouble remembering their names. He is supposed to have spent 140 million dollars of his own money on his campaign for mayor of New York, a post he held twice. So he is one of the rich chaps who won.
A study of 467 Congressional races held in 2012 showed that 91 per cent of the candidates who won had spent more than the losers. In other words, the richer the candidate better are his chances of winning.
In the Indian context, no one knows how much a candidate spends because we have an artificial cap on election expenditure. For the present elections the sum that a candidate can spend is Rs 20 lakh, which is not enough to buy you a one BHK apartment but sufficient to buy drinks for all your friends, well-wishers or voters in the constituency and saris for the ladies, not the expensive stuff, though.
The Election Commission has been sweating it out to create a level playing field by restricting election expenses to Rs 20 lakh, which is a meager sum. The whole thing has been very successful on paper. And it is truly amazing how candidates who spend more than Rs 20 lakh in reality, show an expenditure of less than the prescribed sum on paper. In the field of business it’s called creative accounting. In the field of politics, it’s called lies, outright lies and clever lies. You have to be smart to outwit the EC.
And that is why those who say, ‘money is not everything’ never stand for elections.
