Even if he’s not getting incremental votes he can dominate the share of voice by pricing out the competitors.
Candidates + parties + PACs + lobbying + think tanks + advocacy organizations spent $10B in 2018 in the US, whereas the US almond industry made $12B in 2018. So I expect political spending to not be able to change ad prices very much compared to commercial ad spending.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
For me, it just made me annoyed at Whitman.
A quick googling gave this¹ doc, that says MW spent $178.5M against $36.7M from JB. Brown won easily.
¹ https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...