According to the website of the Center for Responsive Politics:

"Obama's victory in the general election was aided by his tremendous fundraising success."

However, on another page of the same website they say:

"Despite raising four times more than her incumbent opponent, Republican Deborah Honeycutt lost this week by a landslide in the race to represent Georgia's 13th District."

And yet, Obama raised less than twice as much as his opponent and he won by a landslide.

What's going on here? Obama spends a load of money on his campaign and wins. We believe what we want to believe, and we make the cause-and-effect link that seems obvious. But there is not much evidence for it. First of all, there have been plenty of contenders for political office who spent a lot of cash and lost. Then there is the research carried out by the idiosyncratic economist, Steven Levitt, which he writes about in his book Freakonomics. His evidence suggests that the commonly-held belief about campaign spending is a myth.

Of course, Obama's fund-raising success and his election victory are linked. But one is not so much caused by the other as both are caused by another phenomenon, namely his popularity!

The Affect Effect

We know that we don't always act rationally, that we are often influenced more by our feelings or beliefs. A huge amount of research has demonstrated this phenomenon, which psychologists call affect. It just means a state of mind that is not based on reason and includes emotions, feelings, moods and so on. Our judgement is affected by affect more often than we realise.

In practice it's very difficult to prove whether two observations are cause and effect or just coincidences. The debate over possible health effects of overhead electric power lines has rumbled on for some 30 years without any conclusion. Just recently, an epidemiological study in Switzerland found a link between dementia and living near power lines. But the researchers face the usual criticisms. Several of the recognised factors that increase the risk of dementia describe people living in poorer areas. Power lines tend to be associated with poorer areas. It is human nature to look for explanations. In adversity we look for something or someone to blame, even ourselves if necessary. So, when misfortune strikes, and there's an elephant in the room, we tend to blame the elephant.

It is easy to find examples of this phenomenon. A teenager takes a drug to alleviate his severe acne. Soon after stopping the medication, the young man kills himself. The parents blame the drug. There is no proof that one caused the other. Many young men commit suicide without having taken powerful acne medication. Even global warming: the generally-accepted theory is that mankind is warming the globe by releasing carbon dioxide and other stuff into the atmosphere. We are pretty sure about the observations. The average global temperature is on an upward trend. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing spectacularly. Does one cause the other? That's a lot harder to prove.

Cause or affect? In general, we tend to go with our feelings rather more than our intellect. When there is no evidence or explanation, that's all we have to go on. We have to rely on our 'gut feeling'. When there is an obvious explanation, it's even more difficult to go against our emotions.