One reason politicians (and some startups) are stuck
It may be easier to raise money effectively than it is to spend it well.
Raising money for your marketing budget, your ad budget, your staff–this is a linear process. You can look at others who have raised money before you and emulate and increment and escalate those tactics and raise even more than the other guy.
What's interesting is how bad these very same people are at spending that money.
Marketers at companies big and small spend their money in childish, frightened, copycat ways. They believe that escalating the budget on what has worked before is a professional act, and one likely to work. So they give up insight and initiative and, yes, intuition in favor of scale, and try to scale their budget the way they scaled their fundraising.
Good luck with that. The competition is just as good (or better) than you at raising money, so the only competitive instrument available to you is to be better, not merely louder.