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1888-1898 Montana. Two mining magnates try to out-bribe one another for the votes of the state legislature to be named the state's senator (and to control the location of the new state capitol). One wins the election with a maze of mortgage payoffs and other incentives, plus straight cash being handed out to key votes. The cost is placed, by some estimates, at over a million dollars a piece. In 1898 dollars (roughly 35-70 million in today's dollars depending on the actual amount and the inflation calculations being used). The response, in part, is a movement to have Senators elected by direct vote of the people (rather than appointed by state legislatures), culminating in the 17th amendment (after another scandal in Illinois which amounted to the same thing) and a variety of campaign finance laws, some of which have been rendered moot by the recent Citizens United decision.

The cost of an average US Senate seat now is around $8.5 million per election cycle. Since this is much reduced from that $35-70 million figure, this was all most effective at reducing the influence of money on campaigns and increasing the amount of input and influence of the average citizenry…..

I have a couple thoughts here.
1) I'm often surprised, given the rate of return on investment, that companies do not engage more often in lobbying and bidding wars over elections. I expect that this is because most individual elections have very little at stake for their profits and operations.
2) I'm surprised that people thought, and still do, that either major business interests, more precisely the broad legal entities which such interests take the form of and share with other political interest groups, should or would be silenced by such efforts and that this was somehow necessarily a good thing for government that they should be.
3) that people believe that government should be so involved in the protection or regulation of such business interests that they (businesses) should become invested in the outcome of political events to begin with, over and above the interest of the common man
4) that people believe large expenditures in campaigns somehow only represent nefarious business or ultra rich candidacies rather than merely large associations of people pooling monies together over some shared interest or passion in the issues or candidacies. The evidence at the state level is that very often large expenditure is done through unions and trade groups for example, not businesses. Money may or may not represent corruption in the campaign or it may or may not represent interest and public engagement. We should not really care how much is spent but rather the nature of its spending and its effects on policy or political appointments. Buying the seat by bribery is clearly worse and more corrupt than having to spend lots of money on political attack ads.