Politics + Cash

I've been reading Freakonomics and there was a really interesting theory. That more money doesn't necessarily garner more votes. That if a political candidate had twice as much money as another candidate that was more popular - then that additional cash would only increase his vote share by 1%. But the real reason that the popular candidates have all the cash is because people want to back them and show off that they donated money to the winning candidate, and the additional money did not actually equal additional votes. It's interesting to think about especially with the political fund raising competition that has been going on recently. But you would think that the more popular the candidate the more people would want to see him/her win and the more money that they would have. So I'm not sure that I can completely separate the cash and the popularity because I would think that they are intertwined, especially since there are laws about how much money you can donate to a particular campaign. I guess though a lot of politicians have a lot of money on their own - so that might be the difference between a popular candidate and a not so popular candidate with money. So maybe the theory should be revised to the person that will win the election is not the one with the most money - but rather the most number of individual donors? I'm not sure if that would actually play out in the numbers though.