(From left) Meg Whitman, Rick Scott and Linda McMahon are in for a quarter-billion dollars. | AP Photos 3 GOP candidates spend $243M

A group of three Republican candidates have spent nearly a quarter-billion dollars on statewide campaigns this cycle, overshadowing even the heavyweight independent groups commonly considered the biggest financial players of the 2010 elections.

The trio of Meg Whitman in California, Rick Scott in Florida and Linda McMahon in Connecticut together have burned through more money than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have pledged to spend — combined.


Even in midterm elections awash with money and packed with larger-than-life campaigns, the collective sum of $243 million is nothing short of astounding — especially since that’s just the money that came out of their own pockets.

But here’s the punch line: None of these candidates is ahead in the polls. Two of them — Whitman and McMahon — are actually behind.

Here’s the ledger:

— In California, Whitman, the former eBay CEO running for governor, has set a record for the most expensive self-funded campaign in history, reporting this week that she’s spent $141.6 million out of her personal account. Including donations, she’s spent $163 million in total.

But a poll this week from the Public Policy Institute of California had her 8 points behind former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, while a Republican survey showed the race tied.

— Across the country in Florida, Scott, a former health care executive, disclosed Friday that he’d put just over $60 million in personal and family money behind his gubernatorial bid.

Scott appears to be the most competitive of the three candidates: Polls have differed over whether he or Democratic nominee Alex Sink is in the lead, but all of them have shown a contest that’s still too close to call.

— And in Connecticut, a small state where just 1.1 million people voted in the last Senate election, McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO, may be wishing she could get a refund.

She has used $41.5 million in personal funds for her no-expense-spared bid to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd — more than twice as much per voter as Whitman.

But after drawing within single digits of Democrat Richard Blumenthal in September, McMahon has fallen back to a wide disadvantage that the most recent survey pegged at 18 percentage points.

“I think you’re seeing just more confirmation of a very old cliché, that money can’t buy you love,” said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic strategist involved in Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman’s independent 2006 campaign against self-funder Ned Lamont.

It’s up to individual candidates, Gerstein said, to “capitalize — pun intended — on having all that money with having a good message, a good campaign, good character that gives people trust in you. … The political landscape is littered with people with big money, self-funders, who have had a lot of money.”

California, in particular, is no stranger to such characters: Then-Republican Rep. Michael Huffington spent $28 million of his fortune on a losing Senate campaign in 1994 — about one-fifth of Whitman’s total this year but, at the time, the most ever for a candidate not running for president.

Northwest Airlines executive Al Checchi dropped $40 million on a failed bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination four years later.

But in Florida and Connecticut, such personal spending is still a relatively new phenomenon. And McMahon’s campaign is also evidence that there may be such a thing as spending too much money: A Quinnipiac University poll taken in late September — placing McMahon within 3 percentage points of Blumenthal — found that 95 percent of likely voters had seen her ads.

But 56 percent found them annoying.

“A lot of people are oversaturated,” said one Republican familiar with the Connecticut race. “They’ve heard everything there is to hear and more, 20 times over.”

“There’s no lack for anything on the campaign, as far as I can tell,” the strategist said. “They’ve got unlimited television, radio, mail. It’s hard to say that they’re spending it incorrectly. It’s just, at some point, do voters find that it becomes somewhat abusive?”

The 2010 campaign has already claimed a throng of self-financed candidates who found out cash doesn’t translate into support. Most notable is Florida billionaire Jeff Greene, the flamboyant and undisciplined real estate investor who spent more than $20 million to lose badly in the Democratic Senate primary to Rep. Kendrick Meek.

In her Republican primary campaign, Whitman faced state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, a former telecommunications executive who invested about $24 million from his own bank account. He didn’t come close to matching Whitman’s spending — or her vote total. She defeated him by a nearly 40-point margin.

Now, Whitman, McMahon and Scott all find themselves on the edge of a general election vote that could effectively vaporize all their spending.

In part, strategists say, that’s because no amount of campaign spending can compensate for flawed candidates: McMahon’s background in professional wrestling has likely crippled her appeal with many of the female, suburban and independent voters who make up Connecticut’s swing vote.

Whitman’s problem could be more basic: She’s a Republican in a very Democratic state.

Despite Florida’s rightward lean this year, Scott has been unable to break away from Sink as the Democrat has hammered him on the air over his tenure at the Columbia/HCA hospital chain, which paid $1.7 billion in fines for Medicare fraud.

A late-September Quinnipiac poll in Florida found Scott, too, reaching the saturation point: Eighty-nine percent of likely voters had seen Scott’s ads, with a roughly comparable proportion to McMahon's — 54 percent — finding them irksome.

Scott’s personal spending has actually diminished since his primary campaign against state Attorney General Bill McCollum, a longtime officeholder who was overwhelmed by Scott’s spending blitz and aggressive campaign message.

Keith Appell, an adviser to Scott, explained that the first-time candidate wanted to “prove to potential supporters that he was real, that he meant business, that this was a very serious undertaking.”

“He got into this race at a point where other candidates had been running for a year, and his whole attitude was: If I’m going to get people to support me, they need to see that I am all in,” Appell said. “I think that his initial investment has paid off handsomely.”

Whitman and McMahon declared their candidacies earlier, and both have outpaced Scott in spending per voter. Going by the number of votes in Connecticut’s last Senate race, McMahon has spent about $37 per voter, compared with $16 for Whitman and $12 for Scott, relative to the last gubernatorial races in their respective states.

Some self-funded candidates have done better, with less of their own money on the line, and Michigan gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder is chief among them. The former Gateway Computers executive spent $6.1 million in the GOP primary and now holds a wide lead over Lansing Democratic Mayor Virg Bernero in the general election.

“He’s certainly doing better than most of the self-funders,” said former Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, recalling that Snyder spent most of his personal funds carving out a middle-of-the-road, outsider image for himself during the primary.

“He established himself as 'One Tough Nerd,' a can-do guy, not a politician,” Anuzis said, referring to Snyder’s ubiquitous TV slogan. “Most of the independent voters went his way on Election Day.”

Snyder, however, has the benefit of competing against a weak Democratic candidate in Bernero. McMahon and Whitman both face well-known political veterans in Blumenthal and Brown, while in Florida, Sink is a popular official with a reputation as a moderate.

The Democrats also have something else in common: They’re all millionaires, too, though not nearly at the same level as their GOP opponents. Blumenthal even lent $500,000 to his campaign last quarter to pad its budget.

Referring to the McMahon campaign, Gerstein reflected: “I think the great tragedy of it, particularly if you’re running for U.S. Senate, is you’ve got to have your own money.”

“It wipes out a lot of the talent, and it closes off a lot of perspectives we need in Washington,” he said. “There’s this perception, which has a lot going for it, that the millionaires in Washington are in bed with the billionaires in New York.”