How much for that Georgia Governor’s Mansion?

There was a moment this week at the final stop of Rick Jackson’s five-month, whirlwind gubernatorial campaign that showed just how much money the healthcare executive has to spend on this thing.

As his campaign rally at Cobb County International Airport wrapped up, photographers wanted to know if Jackson and his team would leave in his enormous private jet, complete with personalized “RJ” tail number.

Or would they go in his private helicopter, which was parked next to his private jet?

Jackson’s campaign staff left in the plane, while the candidate took the helicopter home, slowly lifting off and disappearing into the horizon.

It was one of many luxuries Jackson had at his disposal throughout the campaign. But money wasn’t everything in the GOP race for governor this week, when Jackson, a multibillionaire, finished second behind a multimillionaire, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. That’s after Jackson put more than $80 million into the race, compared to the $16 million Jones lent his campaign (and spent more than that).

It’s no coincidence that Jackson and Jones, the men with the biggest piles of money to spend on their campaigns, also ended up as the top-two finishers on Tuesday.

While Jackson’s money is his own, made through a successful business career after a tragically terrible start in life, Jones’ access to funds was always going to be easier than the others.

Not only is his father a multimillionaire and the owner of the Jones Petroleum empire, Jones has his own leadership PAC thanks to a 2021 law that lets certain state officials, including the lieutenant governor, raise unlimited funds and coordinate their PAC operations with their campaigns. Despite multiple legal challenges from multiple opponents, Jones was able to use the PAC throughout his primary.

That mean that Jackson and Jones’ access to practically limitless funds gave them both the ability to drench the airwaves, fill mailboxes, and staff professional campaign operations with all the bells and whistles.

It also meant that Chris Carr, the well-qualified but cash-poor attorney general also running for governor, never really had a chance. And Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had to make do with his own sizable fortune, supplemented by money he raised the old fashioned way, bit-by-bit, without access to a leadership PAC.

Whether Carr or Raffensperger would have been good governors for Georgia was never really part of the equation.

It‘s not clear what all of this means for future political hopefuls in Georgia if the candidates with the most money can reasonably be assumed to be the top voter-getters, too. Other than passing laws to even the playing field, like limiting contributions from all sources, ambitious Georgians now just have to hope they end up in a year and in a race where another candidate’s unlimited money does not limit their own futures.

The really interesting part of this year’s GOP contest is that Jackson is happy to talk about the role his money has played in launching him from an unknown to a contender in just four months.

“I wouldn’t be competitive, from the standpoint of nobody’s known me for 20 years,” he told me. “Name recognition is a huge issue, no matter who is running.”

But he also said there are limits to what even he can do with his fortune.

“I don’t think you can buy an election. I think you have to earn it,” he said. “ If (voters) don’t like me, they don’t like the fact that I’m an outsider. If they don’t like my message, they’re not going to vote on it. I don’t care how much money we have.”

In the waning days of his own campaign, Carr liked to point out that Georgia has had a long line of self-funded candidates since 1990 and only one, former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, has won a general election. He did it in 2014 on an outsider message like Jackson. But after six years in Washington, Perdue lost to U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who accused Perdue of insider trading.

“The question is, does the trend continue?” Carr said.

But Carr acknowledged that being David to two Goliaths in the governor’s race was no easy task.

“My challenge was always going to be to get in front of enough people to tell them that I am the alternative,” he said.

In the end, he didn’t get close.

While Democrats make a plan for how to run against one of these two money machines in the fall, Jackson and Jones will fight it out for the next four weeks until their June runoff.