A huge part of politics is money. Politicians typically live or die by how much money they can raise and spend on their electoral campaigns. But there is reason to believe that this year’s presidential election will buck that expectation and be an outlier.

The 2024 presidential election is the first rematch between two candidates since the 1956 election pitted Republican President Dwight Eisenhower against Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson for the second election in a row. This year, voters will choose whether to give President Joe Biden a second consecutive term or give former President Donald Trump a second, nonconsecutive term.

So why won’t money matter that much in a presidential election that could be the most expensive in history? Because the public’s opinions about both men are, to a large extent, pretty baked in at this point.

In 2020, there was a combined $6.6 billion that was spent on the presidential election. That is more than was spent on all races, up and down the ballot, during the 2016 election.

But unlike 2020, Biden is not running as a nostalgic former vice president against a controversial incumbent who defeated a historically unpopular Democratic nominee in 2016. He is running as a historically unpopular incumbent against the very man he unseated in 2020.

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Biden will outspend Trump on the airwaves, with mailers, and with campaign staff. But money does not vote. And when the two men who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars happen to be the two most famous people on the planet, there is really not a whole lot that an aggressive ad campaign will do to change the minds of voters who have, in all likelihood, already made up their minds about both candidates.

Indeed, since September, the RealClearPolitics polling average has remained remarkably stable, with Trump consistently leading Biden by 1 to 2 points nationally and in all of the swing states. And while the polls are not entirely reliable, they do indicate that there could be some stability in this electoral rematch. And no matter how much money is spent between now and Nov. 5, there may not be very many voters left for either candidate to persuade.