Last night on the sidelines of my weekly softball game, I was talking to a couple of friends about money in politics and the skyrocketing fundraising in the presidential race (one of the friends is a journalist covering the race, so it made some sense, and we had already determined we were going to lose the softball game).

He brought up the notion that all the talk of "the candidate who raises the most money wins" might be misleading, because perhaps it's the most popular candidates who attract the most money--so then they usually win the races, because of popularity, while raising the most money along the way. It's not a crazy argument.

But when you look at the numbers and where the money comes from, you realize that if it is true, it's mostly by luck. Here's the very simple reason why: the vast majority of Americans, 99.75%, never give more than $200 to a candidate, and most give nothing at all.

The Campaign Finance Institute ran the numbers for the presidential race and found that in the first quarter, candidates raised almost all of their money from people giving $1,000 or more. (Here are those percentages for the top three fundraisers on either side, but it's worth looking at the table for yourself: Clinton 86%, Obama 68%, Edwards 77%; Romney 88%, Giuliani 87%, McCain 74%.)

In other words, a popular candidate may end up raising more money, but that "popularity" only matters for that 0.25% of the public who give large donations to campaigns. And while yes, it's possible that this reflects overall popularity among the public, there's no certainty of that: it merely reflects popularity among the major donor class.

This also explodes the notion, which I've seen kicked around a lot lately, that the increase in small donors means a shift in political power away from the large donors. Looking at the CFI chart and the headline, "Big, $1,000+ Donations Supply 79% of Presidential Candidates' Early Money," explains that even if small donations are up, so are large donations, and candidates still spend their time courting big gifts from a relatively small group of wealthy donors. Big money still rules the game.

Which brings me to public financing, a system in which candidates can qualify for public funds for their campaign by showing broad public support in the form of very small donations. They do not have to raise millions upon millions of dollars, even for House and Senate races. Then the popularity and viability of the candidates rests on their ability to build support among a larger constituency, not just those writing the big checks, and it allows them to spend more time talking to all sorts of voters, not just big donors.

The best public financing vehicle in Congress right now is the Durbin-Specter Fair Elections Now Act in the Senate and a great article about it appeared yesterday in the journal "In These Times." It's worth a read.