Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's just start selling the role outright. It would be more efficient, most likely lead to the same result, and avoiding the grating, bullshit horserace coverage for a year would make everyone's live better.
This is a funny joke, but empirically not true as of this last election. Hillary massively out spent Trump.
There are some counter-arguments to make, of course.
One of them is that this model is true in general, but not in every single case. Rather, it may be more useful to say that media attention for your story wins elections, and typically money is a good proxy in terms of the purchasing power to get your story out there. Whether that's via pure advertising, or financing community organisers, or the best PR, money is a solid proxy. And Trump was exceptional in that he had celebrity status and an incendiary message that didn't need much money to get attention, combined with an exceptional time of social media that magnifies incendiary messages very cheaply and buries nuance as nuance doesn't go viral.
It'll remain to be seen if this will become the new model, or whether money will continue to be the best predictor of election outcomes. I think the model will change, but the latter statement will remain true.
Of course, by vote-outcomes indeed her campaign (and you may say, her money) did win her more votes. So even this election could be viewed as business-as-usual, the Democrats and its leader got the most votes.
Finally, there's lots of speculation about spending that aren't part of the official figures. We now have evidence that this is the case, with Russia spending in the order of millions on a divisive campaign, mostly against Hillary and in favour of her opponents (both Republican and Democrat. A bit like how Bush at one point ran a campaign for independents/greens, as they were most likely to steal away Democratic votes). With the level of support by Trump for cutting taxes for multinationals and the richest individuals in the country, as well as support from Russia, it wouldn't be surprising if they supported him outside of the official spending figures, either. There is evidence it happened, we're just unsure of the magnitude.