Cite as: 596 U. S. ____ (2022) 9 KAGAN, J., dissenting candidate had before he makes a loan to his campaign, he has less after it: The amount of the loan is the size of the hole in his bank account. So whatever he could buy with, say, $250,000—surely a car, but that’s beside the point—he cannot buy any longer. Until, that is, donors pay him back. Then, the hole is filled, the bank account replenished, and the purchasing power restored. That is a significant financial gain to the officeholder, courtesy of donors. If they had not stepped up, the officeholder would have been $250,000 poorer. The majority’s second theory fares no better. Contributions to repay loans, the majority argues, do not really enrich an officeholder, because he has, from the beginning, “expect[ed] to be repaid.” Ante, at 20. But the record provides no support for that self-assured statement. Contra the majority, the Government “has recognized throughout this litigation” not that winning candidates are usually repaid, but only that they are repaid more often than losing ones. Ibid.; see App. 31–32, 317.1 That is no surprise—and the fact is affirmatively unhelpful for the majority’s position, because it shows how post-election donations reflect an expectation of payback from the recipient. Nothing else in the record (or outside it) is helpful to the majority either. The best empirical study suggests that a substantial portion of winning campaigns fail to retire candidate loans, —————— 1 The statement the majority quotes from a former FEC Commissioner does not support any broader understanding of the Government’s claim. That statement appears in a parenthetical to a citation for the Government’s actual argument: that winning candidates “possess a greater capacity” than losing ones do to get their loans repaid. App. 31. And the statement—that “only winners” have “an easy time dealing with debt”— means not that all or most winners do, but instead that no losers do. Id., at 31–32. The former Commissioner who made the remark had also served as counsel to a losing presidential campaign, and he was merely observing how hard that campaign had found it to repay debt. See P. Overby, How Will Clinton Resolve Campaign Debt? National Public Radio, May 14, 2008.