Alice Cooper – "Elected" (1972)

I never lied to you

I’ve always been cool

I wanna be elected!

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again” is a proverb you’ve probably heard many times.

The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock rejected that adage:

There is an old motto that runs, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  This is nonsense. 

It ought to read “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit at once.”

If you can’t do a thing, more or less, the first time you try, you will never do it.  Try something else while there is yet time.

It’s too bad that billionaire David Trone didn’t listen to Stephen Leacock.  If he had, he would have saved a lot of money.

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Saying that Trone spends money on his political campaigns like a drunken sailor is probably not fair to drunken sailors.

If you were as rich as David Trone,
you’d be laughing, too!

Trone knows drunken sailors, by the way – he and his brother Robert own Total Wine & More, which operates 250-odd liquor superstores in 28 states.  The company’s 2023 revenues exceeded $6 billion.  

Trone set a record in 2016 when he spent $13.4 million of his own money in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic primary election for Maryland’s 8th congressional district.  No one had ever spent more money to lose a race for Congress.  (He got 35,400 votes, so his cost-per-vote was about $378.)

His estimated net worth is $2.5 billion, so dropping a mere $13.4 million didn’t discourage Trone.  When 2018 rolled around, he ran for Congress once more – but in Maryland’s 6th district instead of its 8th.  (Trone didn’t have to change his address to run in the 6th district – members of Congress don’t have to reside in the district they represent.)  

Trone outspent his Republican opponent by a 10-to-1 margin and cruised to victory in November.  He then  easily won re-election in 2020 and 2022.

He probably could have held on to his congressional seat for as long as he wanted to.  But when one of Maryland’s incumbent U.S. Senators announced his intention to retire in 2024, Trone decided he was just the man for the job.

That turned out to be a very costly mistake.  Trone spent a whopping $62.5 million seeking the Democratic nomination for that Maryland Senate seat, only to lose to Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.

And it wasn’t even close.  Alsobrooks beat Trone by a 53-to-43 margin.

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But even a second expensive defeat wasn’t enough to teach Trone a lesson.  This year, he decided to run for his old 6th district seat.

Perhaps he thought that April McClain Delaney, the woman who took his place when he tried to move from the House to the Senate, would politely step aside for him.  But she quickly disabused him of that notion.

Like Trone, Delaney is a very wealthy person.  (She obtained her wealth the old-fashioned way – she married a very rich guy.)

The two candidates go way back.  Delaney’s husband John represented the 6th district in Congress from 2012 until 2018, when he resigned to run for the Democratic nomination for President.  (You weren’t aware that Delaney was a candidate for President in 2020?  You’re not alone – his poll numbers were infinitesimal.)

Who took over Delaney’s seat in Congress?  None other than David Trone.  The Delaneys supported Trone’s candidacy, and Trone returned the favor by endorsing John Delaney for President.  But friendship went out the window when Trone tried to claw back April Delaney’s 6th district seat.  

Delaney speculated that Trone had  decided to run against her because he was “a bored billionaire.”    

But Trone said boredom had nothing to do with it.  “If I felt the congresswoman was doing a good job in representing the district and the Democratic Party, I would definitely have not run,” Trone told the Washington Post.

Because there no real policy differences between the two candidates, I can’t help but believe that the whole kerfuffle was about ego more than anything else.  (If there’s something I know a lot about, it’s egos.  I may not have a Trone-sized bank account, but I’ll match my ego to his any day of the week.)

 *     *     *     *     *

The fight for the 6th district Democratic nomination was the most expensive Congressional primary campaign in history.  Delaney spent $7.5 million of her husband’s money in hopes of holding on to her seat.  Trone topped that by shelling out a cool $25 million.

Nevertheless Delaney ended up prevailing by a 44-38 margin.  (Six other wannabes shared the remaining votes.) 

Just under 21,000 votes were cast for Trone, which means each vote cost over $1000.

Because Maryland allows a candidate to win with only a plurality of votes, we will be spared the spectacle of a runoff campaign this summer.  One can only imagine how much do-re-mi Mommy and Daddy Warbucks would go through in such a contest.

*     *     *     *     *

When I wrote about Trone’s expensive defeat in the 2024 Maryland Senate primary, I noted that I was old enough to remember when it was the Republicans who had the advantage when it came to buying elections.  But now it’s the Democrats who have a big edge in campaign spending.

According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group, Democratic candidates for federal office in 2020 heavily outspent their Republican opponents:

Biden’s campaign became the first to raise over $1 billion from donors.  Biden’s cash advantage over Trump helped him pepper swing states with far more campaign ads.  Biden also received more help from super PACs and “dark money” groups. 

Trump’s campaign raised $774 million.  Trump raised over half of his money from small donors giving $200 or less, a stunning figure no other presidential candidate has matched. . . .

In Senate races, Democratic general election candidates raised over $1.1 billion, easily dwarfing Republicans’ $752 million.  In House races, Democrats outraised Republicans $898 million to $763 million. 

That Democratic advantage held up in 2024, when the total spending for Democratic candidates in all federal elections was $3.8 billion compared to $2.6 billion in spending for Republican candidates – which is close to a 50% advantage.

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Times may have changed when it comes to which political party has the most money to spend.  But what hasn’t changed is that Alice Cooper’s 1972 masterpiece, “Elected,” is still the record ever about political candidates

Click here to view the fabulous “Elected” music video.

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.