The Democrats have decided to make the Koch Brothers an issue in the midterm elections. First, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid attacked the brothers in a pair of floor speeches, calling them “un-American” because they “pour unlimited money into our democracy to rig the system to benefit themselves and the wealthiest one percent.” Now, Democratic campaign organizations are planning to run advertisements in states with contested Senate races. The ads will use the slogan Reid got from his wife: “Addicted to Koch.”

Will this strategy be effective? Who knows. But if a recent Wall Street Journal editorial is indicative, it’s going to provoke conservatives into making some very silly arguments—as they try, desperately, to downplay the Kochs’ influence.

The column, by Kim Strassel, ran late last week and put forward what seems like a straightforward argument. While the Koch brothers spend a lot of money on politics, Strassel acknowledged, labor unions spend a lot more. Citing figures complied by the Center for Responsive Politics, Strassel said that labor groups spent nearly $639 million on campaigns between 1989 and 2014. Affiliates of Koch Industries spent just $18 million. That’s a pretty big differential—going by those numbers, labor outspent the Koch Brothers by $618 million. Says Strassel, “It's an extraordinary thing, in a political age obsessed with campaign money, that nobody scrutinizes the biggest, baddest, ‘darkest’ spenders of all: organized labor.”

But is it really so extraordinary? It’s true that labor unions and their members made far more political contributions than the Koch Brothers and their affiliates did. It’s also a misleading comparison. There are 14.5 million people in the labor movement, according to the latest government statistics. There are exactly two people in the Koch brotherhood—Charles and David Koch—plus another 350 or so self-identified Koch employees who, over that same time period, made direct campaign contributions. Extrapolate from that math, and you’ll see that the donation per Koch Industries affiliate positively dwarfs the donation per union member—by a factor of around 1,000, give or take.