In 2014, Huelskamp raised and spent $845k for both the primary and general election...but in 2016, his $945k spent only on the primary could not surpass his opponent's $1.6 million, PLUS $3 Million in PAC money...an amount of PAC money that was 10 times the amount of outside spending spent on the previous election.
Huelskamp was not prepared for it at all...and I have to emphasize, the ads just simply lied. They painted Huelskamp as the establishment candidate...I hope this is all making sense: McConnell controlled PACS (the establishment) flooded a race with PAC money (the PAC money alone was triple what Hueslkamp raised), and bought ads that said Huelskamp was the establishment candidate.
It was a dirty ambush, made possible by large spending. I firmly believe that any primary, but especially a primary that is safely republican (and therefore hasn't seen alot of campaign money being raised in the past) could fall victim to this.
My post wasn’t about small vs large districts. My post was simply to show that the outspent candidate sometimes wins.
As for Huelskamp, perhaps if he’d criticized Obama as harshly as he criticized Trump things would have gone differently for him.