ABSTRACT
The role of money in elections is much like the role of money in major-league baseball. Campaigns need it to communicate with voters and compete. Because money is related to a campaign's ability to compete, the distribution of money among campaigns is important to the functioning of our elections. In order to assess the impact of campaign money on electoral outcomes, political scientists have developed models of elections that include many of the various factors that affect the vote aside from candidates' campaign spending. If the distribution of money among campaigns is random, inequities in that distribution of money would not pose a great problem for our elections. The evident inequality between incumbents and challengers interferes with the functioning of elections as means for popular control of government, which reduces political equality. Republicans had a significant advantage in soft money in the 1998 election.
