Rick Santorum played up his victories last night by pointing out that Mitt Romney has significantly outspent him throughout the race. “People have said, you know, you’re being outspent, and everybody’s talking about all the math and all the things – that this race is inevitable,” Santorum told his supporters. “Well for somebody who thinks this race is inevitable, [Romney’s] spent a whole lot of money against me for being inevitable.”
This is an attack line that Santorum’s likely to hammer in repeatedly in the run-up to the Illinois primary, especially since Romney and his allies are already shelling out enough money to flood the Illinois air waves with ads for the next week. Santorum, who has been trailing significantly in the fundraising department, has been blasting out emails asking for contributions so it can keep up with Romney today.
But while it’s true that Romney has outspent Santorum by a 10-1 margin, BuzzFeed reports that the disparity shrinks when you consider spending-per-delegate:
Romney is, however, getting his money’s worth: Measured by spending-per-delegate, the measure that matters, he’s running a more efficient campaign than one of his Republican rivals, Ron Paul, and a campaign that’s roughly equivalent to Newt Gingrich’s. Santorum, meanwhile, is running a more efficient campaign, but not by the order of magnitude the raw numbers suggest. Romney’s campaign has only spent about twice as much, per delegate, than Santorum; that figure increases to about three times as much if you include the SuperPACS — but nothing like the ten-to-one margin that emerges from the overall spending comparison.
There are also other gains that are more difficult to measure, i.e. the fact that some the primaries carry more weight than others regardless of the number of delegates they have. Romney has picked up more of the states that are considered “must-wins” than Santorum has, and hence those victories are more valuable.
