Does money squash actual democracy?

(draft) starting from This Is Not Democracy

A potentially distracting hypothesis: It doesn't matter what the two major parties are saying or who represents them. If you pour enormous amounts of money into both sides of the conflict, the votes will end up quite evenly split.

Just as I was pondering this question, I rediscovered my Politometrics professor from UCI, Rein Taagepera, because he helped develop the "effective number of parties" concept, which Sabine Hossenfelder mentions in this relevant video.

One of my memories from that class back when is a discussion about how the Cold War split countries across the planet pretty evenly. I think we had a few other examples which clearly weren't about money, but were about the strange dynamics of large-scale debacles.