Poor Sen. Bernie Sanders just can’t get any traction in the Democratic presidential primary. It’s not that voters don’t like him – it’s that they simply keep disproving his most common arguments.

Take his contention that billionaires are buying the election. In recent days, he has tweeted, “For the Kochs, $100 billion is not good enough. They will not be satisfied until they are able to control the entire political process.”

That’s a reference to the Koch brothers, who do contribute a lot of money to conservative candidates. But it’s not just the Kochs.

“Citizens United has enabled billionaires & special interests to increasingly control the political system & amounts to legalized bribery,” he tweeted. And “In America, millionaires and billionaires should not be able to buy elections. We must overturn Citizens United.”

The problem is that facts keep showing that narrative to be false. No less than New York magazine reported recently that billionaires aren’t actually buying any elections, even after the 2010 Citizens United campaign finance decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“You’d think buying an election would be easy,” the magazine reported. “This is, after all, the rough pitch that political consultants deliver when persuading donors to part with their money. … The formula traditionally goes like this: Out-raise the competition, bludgeon them with attack ads, and watch the votes roll in.”

But it hasn’t worked like that.

“Take the 2012 contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama,” New York explained. “Celebrated political strategist Karl Rove assured a murderers’ row of Republican megadonors that, with enough funding, his super-pac could put Romney in the White House.”

And so they kicked in another $25 million in the last weeks of the campaign. They were told they would see a Romney victory.

“Instead they watched Rove’s infamous Fox News meltdown as their $117 million grubstake went up in smoke,” New York reported. “To many of the billionaires it felt like a mugging.”

Earlier in that very election cycle, the well-funded then-Gov. Rick Perry flamed out, because no amount of money could overcome his weaknesses as a candidate.

Two 2013 Colorado recall elections are another example. Two lawmakers there voted for gun restrictions that their constituents didn’t like. So they filed petitions to recall the lawmakers. The NRA put about $400,000 into the races. But the NRA was vastly outspent by groups in favor of gun control.

“The shocking defeat Tuesday night of two state lawmakers in Colorado’s first-ever legislative recall election despite a 7-1 spending advantage by gun control proponents represented a double blow for Democrats,” the Washington Times reported. “Senate President John Morse and state Sen. Angela Giron lost their seats despite massive outside help from gun control forces, led by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.”

Bloomberg, you’ll recall, is a billionaire. And those gun control forces, including Organizing for America, took advantage of the Citizens United decision just as much as the NRA did.

The facts show that Citizens United isn’t the bogeyman Sanders claims.

Sanders isn’t unpopular. He’s just wrong.