Chart of the Day: The Surprisingly Stable Cost of Presidential Elections

This is a pretty fascinating chart from the latest issue of the magazine. (At least that’s where I assume it comes from. It looks too professionally done for anything but print.) What’s fascinating, to me, isn’t that the costs of presidential campaigns have skyrocketed so much, but that they haven’t. Until very, very recently, that is. From 1964 all the way through 2000, the cost of presidential campaigns was pretty stable, ranging around $300-600 million in inflation-adjusted terms. It was only in 2004 and 2008 that costs suddenly went through the roof.

I wouldn’t have guessed that. I always figured that campaign costs had been rising inexorably for decades. But apparently not. They’ve only been rising inexorably for the past eight years.