Politico thinks they’ve found a nut by adding up the total money spent on Democrats and Republicans, and finding Democrats in the lead.

The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Included in that total: conservative groups have spent $169 million on ads attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates, compared to $80 million by liberal-leaning groups, based on figures as of Tuesday morning.

Of course, plenty more will be spent in this final week of the campaign.

The argument that Democrats make is two-fold. First, you can’t really compare money spent throughout the cycle with money spent in the last couple months, and there, we’ve seen an advantage for Republicans and allied groups. The other thing is that a lot of the money that Republican outside groups have spent simply wouldn’t have been legally available to them pre-Citizens United. They’re getting unlimited, secret donations, in ways that not even the Supreme Court intended (or at least in ways they claimed not to intend).

The Supreme Court sent a wave of corporate and union money flooding into campaign ads this year, but it did so with the promise that the public would know — almost instantly — who was paying for them.

“With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in January. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

But Kennedy and the high court majority were wrong. Because of loopholes in tax laws and a weak enforcement policy at the Federal Election Commission, corporations and wealthy donors have been able to spend huge sums on campaign ads, confident the public will not know who they are, election law experts say.

The high court majority wasn’t duped, I don’t think. They had a pretty good sense of current campaign finance laws, and anyone looking at Congress knows that it would be a struggle to change them. As a result, we don’t only have undisclosed donors but in many instances undisclosed money, which makes tracking the full impact impossible.

That said, I do think that Democrats shouldn’t cry poor here. They just threw another $22 million into House races. Their candidates have the resources to compete. The national mood, as much as secret money, is driving the outcomes. And it’s no given that all this money on TV will translate into big gains next week; there’s an open question whether outside groups can effectively drive turnout.

But if anything, the same groups funding outside attack ads in the midterms spent even more influencing that public mood throughout the past two years. The corporate money sloshing around politics is very visible in the run-up to an election. But it’s more important in the lobbying arena, letting politicians know who they have to backscratch in order to compete for re-election. Perhaps the most important outside money being spent right now is on lobbyists courting potential Republican committee chairs:

Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, hosted a fund-raising breakfast late last month for Representative Dave Camp that drew so many donors the firm’s lobbyists had to pull extra chairs into their largest conference room.

The day before, Mr. Camp was at a Capitol Hill town house owned by a founder of the Online Lenders Alliance, raising thousands of dollars more. And then there was the dinner reception and fund-raiser at Carmine’s, a downtown Italian restaurant, for Mr. Camp that same week.

To an outsider, it might be confounding why Mr. Camp, a relatively unknown Michigan Republican who has no viable challenger in his re-election bid this year, would be seeing such a flood of cash, including contributions from names like Bob Dole, the former United States senator turned lobbyist, and Joseph E. Gallo, the chief executive of E. & J. Gallo Winery in California.

But there is nothing mysterious for the lobbyists and corporate executives writing most of these checks. Mr. Camp is slated to take over the powerful, tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee if Republicans win the majority next week, transforming this low-key conservative Republican almost overnight into one of the most powerful men in town.

That’s the danger of unlimited campaign spending: how it affects public policy. And that’s the spigot that only public financing of campaigns will turn off.