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Paul Waldman summarizes a Washington Post piece today that I didn’t link to when it first came out. But I should have:

Everyone knows that campaigns get more expensive every cycle; that is, we knew it until this year. As The Washington Post detailed last week, this has been the cheapest primary campaign in over a decade. Four years ago, the Republican candidates spent a total of $132 million through the September before voting began; this year they spent a mere $53 million. That combined total is less than one candidate, Mitt Romney, spent during that period four years ago. This year he spent a mere $18 million through September, compared with the nearly $54 million he spent through September 2007. Political observers swooned over Rick Perry’s dramatic fundraising during the 12 minutes or so he spent at the front of the pack. But even if Perry sank $100 million into Iowa, it wouldn’t help him now. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich became the front-runner without his campaign having two nickels to rub together. That isn’t to say the ads won’t fill the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire soon enough, but to this point things have been awfully quiet.

I’ve been mulling this over ever since I first saw it, but I’m no closer to figuring out what’s going on. In theory, this should be a big money year for Republicans since President Obama looks genuinely vulnerable and the conservative base is practically in a frenzy of anti-Obama venom. But it hasn’t been so far. I can think of a few reasons why this might be:

Despite the happy talk, GOP donors don’t actually believe that Obama is that vulnerable. They don’t want to waste their money on a lost cause, so they’re reluctant to open their pocketbooks.

The media landscape has changed more than we think, especially for conservatives. Over the past few years, they’ve discovered that they can run very effective campaigns by using free media (Fox News, talk radio, etc.) rather than paid ad buys on mainstream media. This is especially true in primary campaigns, where their sole audience is the conservative base.

Big money donors don’t have much of a dog in the race this year. This is because either (a) they like all the candidates and don’t have a strong preference for any of them, (b) they dislike all the candidates and don’t want to be associated with any of them, or (c) they just don’t think it matters much because they’re all pretty much saying the same things.

These days, all the right-wing money is going into super PACs, which seem like a more effective force for promoting conservative goals than individual campaigns do.

All of these are partly true, but I’m not sure I believe that even taken together they add up to the real answer. It’s especially perplexing because Obama, who has problems with his liberal base that most of the GOP candidates don’t, is nonetheless having no trouble raising enormous sums of money. So it’s not because donors in general are sick of politics or because the recession has depleted everyone’s bank accounts. But what is it?