For all the fuss about money in state legislative races, you’d think that in politics, cash was kingmaker.

Legislators attend fundraiser after fundraiser to raise money they will spend getting their message out to voters. Outside spending groups pour money into mailers and television ads in the hopes of tipping the scale in favor of one candidate or another. And journalists track all this spending, trying to draw conclusions about which races are the closest and who’s likely to win.

But, as the old saying goes, money isn’t everything.

In races for seats for the Minnesota House and Senate in November, DFL candidates and their affiliated groups spent about 40 percent more than Republicans, yet the GOP picked up sufficient seats to win control of Senate and increase the size of their majority in the House.

That result raised some uncomfortable questions for Democrats: all that organization, fundraising and spending — significantly more than their opponents — only to lose power in St. Paul. Was it worth it? Had money made any difference at all in the race? With the final reports on spending in the campaign made publicly available this month, MinnPost combed through the numbers, trying to figure out where money mattered in the 2016 legislative races.

Democrats spend, Republicans win

Campaign finance filings show nearly $31 million was spent to influence state legislative elections in Minnesota this year. Of that total, which includes spending by candidates, parties and political committees and funds, about 58 percent was spent by those seeking to help Democrats — either by supporting the candidate or attacking his or her opponent.

There’s something big missing from these numbers, though. Spending reports for two active political committees — the Minnesota Jobs Coalition Legislative Fund, which is a major GOP spending group, and the smaller Building a Greater Minnesota, were not filed by the Jan. 31 deadline, and as a result their filings only show independent expenditures reported as spent through Oct. 24. At that time, Minnesota Jobs Coalition had spent more than $638,000 on independent expenditures, so the missing disclosures potentially include a lot of money spent in the weeks before the election. By Oct. 24, Building a Greater Minnesota had spent about $4,000 to help elect a DFLer running for Senate.

MinnPost’s tally does not include spending related to candidates who lost primary elections. It also doesn’t include money we don’t know about — unreported expenditures made through “dark money” groups.

Republicans had a great election night. They increased their majority in the House by three seats and now hold the chamber 76-57 (a special election will determine the fate of the final seat, 32B, on Tuesday). They gained six seats in the Senate for a 34-33 majority.

If you look at spending patterns in the races themselves, Republicans and affiliated groups put more resources into outspending Democrats in certain House races (where Democrats spent about $1.1 for every $1 Republicans spent), than in Senate races, (Democrat-affiliated spending for Senate seats was about $1.9 for every $1 Republicans spent).

There’s also the matter of where the money came from: While DFL funding and strategizing largely came from the party, Republicans’ playbook, which relied more heavily on independent expenditure groups, may have allowed them to be more nimble, said Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin.

Despite the attention cash gets, the races with the most spending weren’t always the most competitive. Take House District 17B rematch between incumbent Republican Dave Baker and challenger Mary Sawatzky, where more than $700,000 was spent in total. Baker held onto his seat with a 19 percentage point margin. Nor did candidates who outspent their opponents by a large margin always win.

Candidates, parties and interest groups have a finite amount of money, and they tend to use it where they think it’ll make the biggest difference.

Many of the closest races did see a lot of spending: More than $1 million was spent, for example, in the Minnetonka Senate District 44 open seat formerly held by DFLer Terri Bonoff — it was the most expensive legislative contest last year. That race, between Republican Paul Anderson and DFLer Deb Calvert, resulted in Anderson winning by 0.4 percentage points, following a recount.

Were politicos betting on a race they thought would be close? Probably. Did all that money make the race more competitive than it otherwise would have been? Who knows.

Other races that looked like sleepers from the political spending perspective were close: there was very little spending on either side, for instance, in Senate District 5, where Republican Justin Eichorn unseated longtime Grand Rapids DFL Senator Tom Saxhaug with less than a two-point margin (then again, in presidential races, this district went from blue in 2012 to solid red in 2016).

Big money wins

In some races, though, there’s an argument to be made that spending did make a difference. One of them is House District 42A, which covers Twin Cities suburbs including Mounds View, Shoreview and Arden Hills. Here, two-term DFL House incumbent Barb Yarusso lost in a suburban district that favored Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Republican Randy Jessup’s success can’t really be explained by 42A voters’ presidential politics. Political tides did not push this suburban district toward Trump (a not-uncommon phenomenon). Instead, Clinton won the district with 52 percent of votes in November, while Trump got 48 percent (results similar to the party breakdown in presidential votes in 2012).

Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Keith Downey contends that Jessup won because he’s a good fit for the district — he’s a business owner who Downey called likeable, with a strong message: his  campaign focused on improving education, lower taxes and health care costs, and roads and bridges. And compared to some new candidates, Jessup likely had name recognition with voters, as the race was a rematch (with close to the opposite results in 2014).

But this was also a contest where Republican groups targeted resources, outspending Democrats by 1.6 to 1.

While the candidates themselves spent comparable amounts of money, independent expenditures spent on ads and mailers against Yarusso or for Jessup by groups like the House Republican Campaign Committee and the Minnesota Jobs Coalition (even with some of their spending ostensibly missing) was significantly more than equivalent spending by groups like the DFL and Planned Parenthood to help Yarusso.  In particular, voters saw a lot of spending to attack Yarusso.

All that spending doesn’t buy votes, exactly: Staunch partisans who vote frequently are unlikely to change their behavior, so campaign spending is generally aimed at voters who are “up for grabs” — those most likely to switch their vote (usually independents) or mobilize (usually people who affiliate with a party but not strongly enough to vote in every election), wrote University of North Florida political science professor Nicholas Seabrook in a 2010 study on money in state legislative races. So, money can matter more in districts where there are more independent voters and weakly affiliated partisans.

Voter behavior in 42A suggests split-ticket voting, behavior attributed to independent voters. The race was a close one, but it appears as though some 42A voters who voted for Clinton at the top of the ticket chose Jessup further down.

“In districts with higher levels of independents, enough swing voters exist that can be influenced by spending to substantively affect the outcome of elections,” Seabrook writes.

House District 42A wasn’t the only district to swing in the November elections — but they didn’t all swing in the same direction. Did a wave of positive advertisements help a DFL history teacher new to politics unseat the sitting Republican Senate minority leader in a banner year for Republicans?

In September, Steve Cwodzinski called this race between him and longtime Republican Senator David Hann a David versus Goliath one, Minnesota Public radio reported. Indeed, Hann’s defeat would mark “only the fourth time in more than a century that the leader of a legislative caucus was ousted by voters.”

Yet it was a race the Democrats were willing to sink their teeth — and their cash — into. Nearly twice as much money was spent to help Cwodzinski, a well-known American government teacher in Eden Prairie schools, as was spent to help Hann, who was first elected to the Senate in 2002.

DFL groups got an early start. In particular, groups like Alliance for a Better Minnesota, the DFL and Planned Parenthood poured cash into mailers, web and television ads that painted Cwodzinski in a positive light. Most of the independent expenditures spent to help Hann came from groups like the Minnesota Action Network and Freedom Club, with no money recorded from state Republican party groups.

To be sure, you could argue the district’s gotten bluer in recent years: it went for Clinton by a large margin, whereas Obama barely beat Mitt Romney there in 2012. And Hann’s margin of victory shrunk from more than 11 percent in 2010 (before redistricting, he represented Senate District 42), to less than 3 percent in 2012.

But the incumbent seemed pretty sure he would keep his seat.

“The Democrats are probably going to want to spend some money here but they have a lot of seats they need to worry about,” Hann told MPR back in September. “This is a Republican district where I'm at.”

With the advantage of hindsight, the outgoing chair of the Minnesota GOP seemed to disagree with Hann’s carefree assessment: “That is one where I think absolutely (money) made a big difference,” Downey told MinnPost.

Since incumbents already have name recognition in their districts (this can be a double-edged sword, as their records can be used against them), campaign spending is thought to help challengers like Cwodzinski — and Jessup, for that matter — more than legislators defending their seats.

“The challenger often begins as an unknown whose every expenditure may yield additional information to the voter or at least increase the probability of name recognition,” write professors Michael Giles and Anita Pritchard in a study of money in legislative races.

Maybe Cwodzinski wasn’t so unknown, having long been a teacher in the district, but it’s possible all that spending got his name and message out to voters effectively.

Political tides

A deluge of positive ads and mailers may have helped Cwodzinski, but apparently weren’t enough to help incumbent Vicki Jensen, a moderate DFLer, win in Senate District 24, which encompasses Faribault and Owatonna. Did Trump’s popularity drown out the effects of DFL-affiliated spending?

In this swing district, Jensen lost to Republican challenger John Jasinski by 17 percentage points — more than three times greater than her margin of victory in 2012.

That’s despite that spending to help Jensen from union, DFL and major donors like Alliance for a Better Minnesota outweighed spending to help John Jasinski from groups like Freedom Club and Minnesota Action Network (there were no independent expenditures from Republican Party groups benefitting Jasinski, according to filings) by more than 3 to 1.

“That’s the perfect example of a rural district that saw a huge swing of working class rural voters (go) toward the Republicans in this election,” Martin told MinnPost.

Indeed, while Romney won the district with 51 percent of the vote to Obama’s 46 percent in 2012, Trump’s margin of victory was a much larger 25 points, with 58 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 33 percent.

“It’s no different than what we saw in most parts of Greater Minnesota,” Martin said. “There was a huge swing — this Trump wave that happened in rural counties that ended up the vote totals not only in Senate District 24, but in Senate Districts 21, Senate District 14, Senate District 2 … the Trump impact clearly affected those races in a big way. Those are things that are outside of the control of candidates and parties and how much money was being spent or not spent.”

Also worth noting is that spending isn’t necessarily an indicator of strength for incumbents — it may indicate they and their allies anticipate a tough fight to defend their seat.

Money in elections

Academics have been studying spending in state legislative races for decades. They tend to agree that how much cash is expended does matter: After all, it costs money to buy ads and send out campaign literature, which is how candidates gain name recognition and get their message out to voters.

But if money were the only factor that mattered in races, the people who spent the most of it would always win, and that’s obviously not the case.

There are money spending dynamics to consider. Timing and strategy matter, and at some point, each additional dollar spent by a campaign is thought to be worth less than the dollars before it, because airwaves and mailboxes have already been saturated. Plus, there’s some evidence that money spent by outside groups in favor of candidates is often aimed more at gaining name recognition with soon-to-be legislators than at helping them win.

“Imagine you’re an interest group lobbyist and you can talk to a member of a state senate as he’s walking to one meeting or another,” said Harvey Tucker, a political science professor at Texas A&M University who has studied the relationship between money and election results in state legislatures. “You don’t want to spend 15 seconds telling him who you are and who you represent.”

And all kinds of other things going on this year that might have limited the influence of money in Minnesota districts can’t be ignored. For example, some of the DFL’s weakness in November was attributed to voters’ concerns over the Affordable Care Act and MNsure. Now-President Trump’s relative success here and the banner year for Republicans also suggest Trump’s coattail effect was big for down-ballot candidates in some Minnesota districts: after all, he came within 1.5 percentage points of Democrat Hillary Clinton in Minnesota, where a Republican hasn’t won electoral votes since 1972.

Not everything

So what does this mean for the politicos and journalists who track all this spending?

Money matters, but so does context.

In many, but not all, House races where spending to aid Republican candidates outpaced spending to aid Democrats by a considerable margin, Republicans won. Results were more mixed in House and Senate races with significant spending where expenditures to help Democrats considerably outweighed those to help Republicans.

Maybe Republicans spent more wisely — or maybe the top of the ticket helped in down-ballot races. Maybe both, depending on the circumstances.

Martin said that though there are lessons to be learned from this election, the outcome had a lot to do with forces larger than campaigning and money.

“It wasn’t for lack of efforts, and in some cases, I don’t think, for lack of tactics. You either ride the wave or get swamped by it,” he said.

“A lot of what we did in terms of our organizing was the right way of campaigning and is something we should continue doing in the future,” he said, cautioning his party against condemning its strategy.

Compared to past elections, Downey said Republicans have edged much closer to spending parity with Democrats and have improved their strategy.

“Money is always a factor in elections — it’s just the nature of it,” Downey said. “You need to get your message out — present your candidate, contrast yourself and your message with the opponent. Money is the key to doing that.”

Still, he said, he believes the backdrop of the November election and the issues voters cared about — like national security, border security, health insurance, jobs and the economy — favored Republicans.

“We had awesome candidates, and the issues were on our side.”