Imagine how cooked we would be as a society if political ads were super effective. The vast majority of people tuning out political advertising is so much better than the alternative.
Completely agreed. Also note that AI exploitation of effective persuasion techniques is a serious safety concern even leaving aside its potential for partisan hackery. Just as well that at least in that domain it may have limited efficacy.
"President Biden’s... mega-donor operation has been driven into a state of paralysis...."
I'm not a mega-donor, or even a micro-donor, more on the pico-donor scale, but I can tell you that I am not suffering paralysis.
I am delaying my donation until after the convention. If Biden is still the nominee, then I'll give what I can, because anything is better than Trump. If (as I hope) Harris is the nominee, then I'll give what I can in order to signal a burst of enthusiasm, or at least a pico-burst, which perhaps in combination with other donors will look like a burst of enthusiasm at the national scale.
Until then, I'm keeping my powder dry. Not paralysis, just an attempt at strategic timing.
Updated on July 22, after Harris is clearly the nominee: I have now dropped a considerable sum, several pico-trillions, on a donation to the Harris campaign. The first 24 hours after Biden's announcement are going to break records, and I'm happy that I waited to be a part of that.
If the nominee is someone less familiar than Harris or Biden, then presidential campaign contributions would have more efficacy, since much of the country will have no idea who they are.
If the nominee is Harris (or someone other than Biden) I will also be donating to show support. If the candidate is Biden, I'm giving up my membership in the Democratic Party. I don't have a particularly good way to show disapproval moneywise because I still need someone to defeat Trump.
Excellent article, Ben. A few concurring points I would add:
• Given how diffuse media consumption is these days, I think there's good reason to be skeptical of the efficacy of political commercials in general in the future. We're long past the days of the Big Three Or Four near monopolizing entertainment. I'd like to see more work done to scrutinize the efficacy further.
• If ads do have increasing diminished returns, then what's the answer to get the advocacy out? The first thing I'm thinking of is that could come down to some really hard work of convincing friends and family that are on the fence to vote for who or what you want everyone to vote for. And that likely means getting out there and making more friends and other relationships and thus have more fence straddlers available to convince.
• I'm glad that you mentioned downballot races, and in specific, downballot races that are going to be close. And in many cases, those are going to be races that are out of one's district or even one's state. (Like my own near Downtown Boise: there have long been no competitive races on either the federal OR state level!) And I also like avoiding effective altruist traps like responding to people who say "I really want Democrats to get elected" with "Well, you could do more good by instead donating to this cause overseas...". What people who want Democrats elected need is knowledge to avoid traps like donating a bunch of money to Amy McGrath just because they really, really hate Mitch McConnell.
All good points. Never give up on your ability to persuade people in your life, or think that there aren't pragmatic things you can do push for political change. That's doomerism, which we don't do here at Slow Boring!
It seems like it should be easier than ever to hyper target ads for people that care about particular issues or have specific interests.
One of the challenges with broadcasting ads is that they have to appeal to anyone with a TV and then can backfire/be ineffective if the wrong people see them.
My experience with campaigns was just that they tended to be behind the times in terms of advertising and targeting practices and tech.
I love your 2nd point. One of the things they used to teach you as an organizer was to identify leaders. Often not anyone in any kind of formal leadership position; the person in a social circle who is genuinely respected by everyone else. To whom everyone still listens. Typically someone with integrity who is good at maintaining credibility, at separating fact from fiction. Good at finding a way to verbalize the concerns of others.
Those people still exist and still carry weight. They’re typically not volume posters on social media; they have in-person influence. Hard to become one intentionally; people can smell a hack who’s just trying to win elections for anyone with a (D) or (R) next to their name (and let’s be real, it’s hard to retain credibility and integrity while you’re doing that).
I know it’s been said a million times, but the waning of unions has been a real loss in this regard. I don’t know how to build what’s needed at scale in 2024, but I still think something like the 50 state strategy is necessary. People in communities, with basic old school organizing skills, finding leaders.
How angry and unhinged will Republicans become if New Democrat candidate parachutes in and defeats Donald Trump when they think he has it in the bag now.
Growing up in Mississippi I remember the first time I saw the a picture of all the rioters with confederate flags by the ole miss campus during integration. My grandmother said “it was so horrible, I went by and they were saying these awful things.” She said it’s amazing that a shooting battle didn’t break out with the national guard. Her family was against segregation, her people coming from a more abolitionist Ohio river valley clan but they were afraid to be too public about it.
We’ve come so close to meaningful and violent disunity in this country in the last 100 years. We often forget, just like with nuclear incidents, how close we have come to throwing it all away out of hate, grievance and pride.
Everyone seems so angry. I woke up today and my daughter was complaining about everything. I said “look it’s a beautiful day, we are about to go get waffles, go the park and visit nana, that’s a good day right?” and she said “yeah, but it’s not THE BEST DAY”. I feel like that’s where we are as a nation. We go on social media and see how good people seem to be living, we doom scroll these sliding doors of catastrophe opening up around us and we retreat inside our own minds with anxiety and fear.
Well the sun is shining, the birds are singing and I’m about to go eat some delicious goddamn waffles from an A+ greasy spoon.
Amen. My son keeps piping up with doom-oriented language that I recognize from social media (usually smirking at it even as he says it, but still), causing me to hold forth at length about how he’s one of the luckiest humans who ever lived.
We’ve had much worse times than this, and not long ago, we just didn’t have a model for communicating information that was fully supported financially by maximizing hate and fear.
And now you’ve made me want Waffle House. No breakfast for me; a greasy double cheeseburger, hash with chili, cheese and ham. You only live once.
“Bruh, you could have been forced to be a pikeman for a feudal lord and then died of dysentery in a tent, covered in shit while wet and freezing to death. No cap, bet.”
Every summer is hotter than the last and, as a corollary, birds are on average getting smaller and shifting their migration patterns. The basic things that make a summer day enjoyable are under tangible threat and Matt Yglesias believes climate issues are overhyped and a waste of political capital by the only one of the two major parties that cares about them.
Look man, I really, really want to be less angry and depressed and enjoy my lifestyle of hedonistic overconsumption and modern amenities, but all the day to day things that I care about are under threat from the externalities generated thereby. I’m not going to be able to take my kids sledding in the North-East US anywhere near as much as I was able to as a kid and I feel like I’m constantly being told that this is an acceptable tradeoff to make for aggregate gdp growth when in fact I not only DGAF that I can buy a 75 inch instead of a 50 inch TV for a few hundred dollars, I don’t even watch live TV any more. I want to take ny kids sledding and be able to go outside and have autumun be a meaningful time of year instead of just having summer extend to October every year. The most basic entitlements of life are being traded away against my will for a bunch of shiny toys I don’t even want.
I get it. Everyone is going to process the trauma of their own experience and expectation for the future differently. Maybe your coping strategy is different than mine.
I just know for my mental health I need to practice a level of emotional sobriety that will allow me to pull back from all the sorrow and rage. I’m not always successful in this but I work very hard to try and start every day with a positive mental attitude and go to sleep at night at peace with what I’ve done.
We can’t build high speed rail in an all blue state with a GDP bigger than most countries. I don’t think preserving autumn and northeastern winter sledding is on the cards in our lifetimes.
Substack comments are not dissimilar from a social *network*, in the sense that this is the virtual equivalent of Matt throwing a kegger in his basement and inviting all his friends to come chat there. To the extent that any voice is boosted over another, it's a very explicit "my compatriots are upvoting this"--not unlike a small crowd gathering around a loud speaker standing on a chair in that basement. Pretty normal human stuff.
In contrast, Substack comment sections totally lack the engagement-for-the-sake-of-engagement features that make modern Twitter, Facebook, etc. so poisonous--the non-chronological "for you" bait for rageclicking and doomscrolling.
So no, Substack comments are very unlike social media as we understand it in the moment.
I superlike™️ this comment and agree completely - both that everyone seems angry, and that things are, in fact, pretty great. Envious of your waffles though!
Kamala Harris, still resentful from being thrown over for the Whitmer/Shapiro tickets, gets her revenge by doing what Mike Pence didn’t have the guts to do. Trump appoints her ambassador to Uganda.
Good article, though using "one of the largest electoral landslides of the 21st century" when talking about a presidential election is like saying "one of the most cost-effective American infrastructure projects of the 21st century" or "one of the most widely read poems of the 21st century".
On popular vote, sure. But there’s a chance that the electoral college looks very lopslided, which, to the less attentive voter will look like a huge landslide.
You know where I think political ads are really effective is in initiatives/referenda where people don't know a lot about the subject or only one side has any money to spend on ads. This is the most annoying part of California's process, imo.
David Shor (I believe in a conversation with Matt) has discussed how some ads even have a negative effect for the campaign that airs them. Every business that runs ads does a ton of split testing for their copy and it seems like campaigns need that as well.
Donations to lost-cause symbolic races seem like a huge waste but a beloved candidate(or someone running against a particular hated opponent) is going to bring in cash regardless of the strategic value of the race.
It also always seems a bit perverse that small donors are glorified so much but much of the spending is of dubious value and goes to huge media companies. Having the small-donors get excited about a doomed candidate and give millions of dollars to be spent on Twitter and Facebook or whatever TV company is a pretty shitty outcome.
If the parties were a bit stronger and more well liked they might be able to bring in more donations to the party rather than the campaigns and then they could distribute the funds to the most in need races. Obviously they attempt to do this but symbolic donations to a specific race or attempting to curry favor with candidate cuts into that a bit.
When it comes to money in races I think it's better to think of there being a sort of minimum threshold you need to have to become viable and above that the law of diminishing returns starts to really kick in. Take the recent Bownman race, obviously 20 million dollars is an absurd amount of money to spend on a house primary but that's not why Bowman lost. He lost because he took a lot of unpopular positions with voters in a new district that wasn't a good fit for him. BUT had his opponent been some obscure city councilmember with no money Bowman might very well have hung on due to the power of incumbency.
Per Future Forward’s ad testing, the average D/R ad this cycle moves presidential horse race by about +1.5pp on margin towards Biden/Trump respectively.
My guess is that is in a singular focus group. People respond to ads sometimes! But on Election Day, the question is whether it flips votes. And that is what's really hard to do.
Ben commented the other week that he'd vote for an old shoe over Donald Trump, and I 1000% agree with that sentiment. But the thing about an old shoe is that it cannot absent-mindedly misrepresent its fitness for continued service to Congress. You can just jettison the old shoe.
Cut to 2028: "I'm the only shoe that's ever beaten Donald Trump! What other shoe has made the kind of progress on international trade treaties focused on footwear that I have? Tell me!!"
Nate Silver’s recent kerfuffle with the DNC chair is interesting. Matt recently said he trusts Nate’s models more than those generated by political scientists because Nate is a degenerate gambler. I think Matt has his causal direction wrong. Nate Silver is inherently non-tribal. Some people do not embrace their herd with the same commitment as others. Nate has a high degree of commitment to truth as he sees it. He does not allow tribal loyalty to diminish his view of what is true. He minimizes motivated reasoning and just calls balls and strikes.
MY is unusually non-tribal in his thinking for a guy that is such a normie and engaged Democrat. This is why I subscribe. But his partisan attitude does make him less smart about seeing truth. The Biden age thing is a good example. I said (and many others) Biden is too old. People pushed back on this simple arithmetic because their partisan views made them dumb. Matt eventually got there. But it’s easy to see Matt’s tribal loyalty decreases his IQ.
Silver appears to be the most rigorous truth teller in the “take” business. It’s not because he’s a gambler it’s because it’s who he is. Which is why he said the DNC chair is a lying coward. Because it’s true.
A subtle note to add clarity to what I’m saying. I’m a Sam Harris fan. Sam largely is a truth teller and even wrote a book on lying and how it’s corrosive. But Sam has his blind spot not related to a tribe but to a way of seeing the world. Sam believes in institutions. I do too. But his loyalty there has him pulling punches on Fauci and other institutional leaders. He did this because he didn’t want to give aid and comfort to conspiracy theorists like his ex-buddy Bret Weinstein. I understand that but I did think slight less of Sam for not saying what was true.
Hedging in truth telling because we’re concerned either giving ammunition to bad people is a common thing. Some people do it so much that they become essentially dishonest. Sam and MY are definitely not there. But most politically partisan “take” people are.
There has been a lot of talk about free speech absolutism lately. I would love to see a group in our political ecosystem that are truth absolutist. I think this would be much better than the current politically motivated misinformation experts. I know it sounds like another fact checking operation but we still haven’t gotten that right. A group dedicated purely to truth as we know it and acknowledging the proper context would be good. Fuck the consequences. If Trump is right about something then he is right end of story. No thinking about the consequences of acknowledging truth.
Nate Silver is the closest thing I’ve seen to this. I hope the Democrats beat Trump and the DNC chair is a lying coward. That’s awesome!
Matt's whole point was that Nate's gambling spirit is why he's vigorously non-tribal. He cares more about making correct calls than seeing one group always win. It's like the sports bettor who refuses to root for any team, because he knows there will be opportunities where it's best to bet against any team.
I understand but he does it even when he doesn’t have money on the line in the form of a bet. It’s who he is outside of gambling. And it likely makes him a better gambler. The gambling doesn’t make him more honest.
Matt, you hit it at the end. The mega donors are buying access, either for their egos or for their business interests What I find striking is how little it all costs compared with the potential benefits. Trump’s policies on EVs and China are worth billions to Elon Musk. Spending a few percent of that to get on Trump’s good side? Easy, right?
I wish we’d ban political advertising and today’s whole reality TV show process.
Instead of party primaries, something like a 3 round election, where it’s a wide open field for round 1, top 5 for round 2, and then always the final 2 for the last round. Structure campaigns as a series of debates and town hall events aired on PBS and NPR.
Combine that with Ben’s earlier idea of shortening the campaigns, these rounds could be like one month each, so a total campaign season of 3 months.
Something like that would allow voters to actually vote for their preferred candidate (especially in round 2), and could *hopefully* tilt the campaign to focus on policy debate and persuasion.
Beyond the 1st amendment issues that COT mentions, you also have to address that fact that the majority of the country has no idea who *most* candidates are and by banning political advertising you give enormous advantage to people who are already celebrities/well known.
Isn't banning political advertising just going to further tilt the field in favour of electing celebrities who already have "built in" advertising? Do you consider that a good thing?
I think the most effective form of advertising these days would not be ads, but rather memes. They're cheap to produce, and a viral image or short video clip can have a much larger reach than a TV or paid ad.
It's worth noting that, even though Amy McGrath lost badly in 2020, she did outperform Joe Biden by about 2%. Her $100 million of campaign spending probably had something to do with that.
I mean, strong progressive Charles Booker ran with far less money in 2022 and got .04 percent less than McGrath - maybe the reality is only about 38% of people in Kentucky want to send a 21st century Democrat to the Senate, no matter how moderate or progressive they are.
McGrath ran against McConnell. The last time he ran alongside a Pres election his Dem opponent beat Barack Obama by 6 points. So McGrath out-performing by 2 doesn't prove a lot.
Imagine how cooked we would be as a society if political ads were super effective. The vast majority of people tuning out political advertising is so much better than the alternative.
Completely agreed. Also note that AI exploitation of effective persuasion techniques is a serious safety concern even leaving aside its potential for partisan hackery. Just as well that at least in that domain it may have limited efficacy.
"President Biden’s... mega-donor operation has been driven into a state of paralysis...."
I'm not a mega-donor, or even a micro-donor, more on the pico-donor scale, but I can tell you that I am not suffering paralysis.
I am delaying my donation until after the convention. If Biden is still the nominee, then I'll give what I can, because anything is better than Trump. If (as I hope) Harris is the nominee, then I'll give what I can in order to signal a burst of enthusiasm, or at least a pico-burst, which perhaps in combination with other donors will look like a burst of enthusiasm at the national scale.
Until then, I'm keeping my powder dry. Not paralysis, just an attempt at strategic timing.
Updated on July 22, after Harris is clearly the nominee: I have now dropped a considerable sum, several pico-trillions, on a donation to the Harris campaign. The first 24 hours after Biden's announcement are going to break records, and I'm happy that I waited to be a part of that.
If the nominee is someone less familiar than Harris or Biden, then presidential campaign contributions would have more efficacy, since much of the country will have no idea who they are.
If the nominee is Harris (or someone other than Biden) I will also be donating to show support. If the candidate is Biden, I'm giving up my membership in the Democratic Party. I don't have a particularly good way to show disapproval moneywise because I still need someone to defeat Trump.
Excellent article, Ben. A few concurring points I would add:
• Given how diffuse media consumption is these days, I think there's good reason to be skeptical of the efficacy of political commercials in general in the future. We're long past the days of the Big Three Or Four near monopolizing entertainment. I'd like to see more work done to scrutinize the efficacy further.
• If ads do have increasing diminished returns, then what's the answer to get the advocacy out? The first thing I'm thinking of is that could come down to some really hard work of convincing friends and family that are on the fence to vote for who or what you want everyone to vote for. And that likely means getting out there and making more friends and other relationships and thus have more fence straddlers available to convince.
• I'm glad that you mentioned downballot races, and in specific, downballot races that are going to be close. And in many cases, those are going to be races that are out of one's district or even one's state. (Like my own near Downtown Boise: there have long been no competitive races on either the federal OR state level!) And I also like avoiding effective altruist traps like responding to people who say "I really want Democrats to get elected" with "Well, you could do more good by instead donating to this cause overseas...". What people who want Democrats elected need is knowledge to avoid traps like donating a bunch of money to Amy McGrath just because they really, really hate Mitch McConnell.
All good points. Never give up on your ability to persuade people in your life, or think that there aren't pragmatic things you can do push for political change. That's doomerism, which we don't do here at Slow Boring!
Dena asked in a different comment(https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-most-money-goes-where-it-matters/comment/62680057) but do you have data on what those "pragmatic things you can do push for political change" are?
It seems like it should be easier than ever to hyper target ads for people that care about particular issues or have specific interests.
One of the challenges with broadcasting ads is that they have to appeal to anyone with a TV and then can backfire/be ineffective if the wrong people see them.
My experience with campaigns was just that they tended to be behind the times in terms of advertising and targeting practices and tech.
I love your 2nd point. One of the things they used to teach you as an organizer was to identify leaders. Often not anyone in any kind of formal leadership position; the person in a social circle who is genuinely respected by everyone else. To whom everyone still listens. Typically someone with integrity who is good at maintaining credibility, at separating fact from fiction. Good at finding a way to verbalize the concerns of others.
Those people still exist and still carry weight. They’re typically not volume posters on social media; they have in-person influence. Hard to become one intentionally; people can smell a hack who’s just trying to win elections for anyone with a (D) or (R) next to their name (and let’s be real, it’s hard to retain credibility and integrity while you’re doing that).
I know it’s been said a million times, but the waning of unions has been a real loss in this regard. I don’t know how to build what’s needed at scale in 2024, but I still think something like the 50 state strategy is necessary. People in communities, with basic old school organizing skills, finding leaders.
How angry and unhinged will Republicans become if New Democrat candidate parachutes in and defeats Donald Trump when they think he has it in the bag now.
That was my thought when watching the GOP convention. If they lose this thing, now they're really gonna think it was a stolen election.
Growing up in Mississippi I remember the first time I saw the a picture of all the rioters with confederate flags by the ole miss campus during integration. My grandmother said “it was so horrible, I went by and they were saying these awful things.” She said it’s amazing that a shooting battle didn’t break out with the national guard. Her family was against segregation, her people coming from a more abolitionist Ohio river valley clan but they were afraid to be too public about it.
We’ve come so close to meaningful and violent disunity in this country in the last 100 years. We often forget, just like with nuclear incidents, how close we have come to throwing it all away out of hate, grievance and pride.
Everyone seems so angry. I woke up today and my daughter was complaining about everything. I said “look it’s a beautiful day, we are about to go get waffles, go the park and visit nana, that’s a good day right?” and she said “yeah, but it’s not THE BEST DAY”. I feel like that’s where we are as a nation. We go on social media and see how good people seem to be living, we doom scroll these sliding doors of catastrophe opening up around us and we retreat inside our own minds with anxiety and fear.
Well the sun is shining, the birds are singing and I’m about to go eat some delicious goddamn waffles from an A+ greasy spoon.
Amen. My son keeps piping up with doom-oriented language that I recognize from social media (usually smirking at it even as he says it, but still), causing me to hold forth at length about how he’s one of the luckiest humans who ever lived.
We’ve had much worse times than this, and not long ago, we just didn’t have a model for communicating information that was fully supported financially by maximizing hate and fear.
And now you’ve made me want Waffle House. No breakfast for me; a greasy double cheeseburger, hash with chili, cheese and ham. You only live once.
“Bruh, you could have been forced to be a pikeman for a feudal lord and then died of dysentery in a tent, covered in shit while wet and freezing to death. No cap, bet.”
Every summer is hotter than the last and, as a corollary, birds are on average getting smaller and shifting their migration patterns. The basic things that make a summer day enjoyable are under tangible threat and Matt Yglesias believes climate issues are overhyped and a waste of political capital by the only one of the two major parties that cares about them.
Look man, I really, really want to be less angry and depressed and enjoy my lifestyle of hedonistic overconsumption and modern amenities, but all the day to day things that I care about are under threat from the externalities generated thereby. I’m not going to be able to take my kids sledding in the North-East US anywhere near as much as I was able to as a kid and I feel like I’m constantly being told that this is an acceptable tradeoff to make for aggregate gdp growth when in fact I not only DGAF that I can buy a 75 inch instead of a 50 inch TV for a few hundred dollars, I don’t even watch live TV any more. I want to take ny kids sledding and be able to go outside and have autumun be a meaningful time of year instead of just having summer extend to October every year. The most basic entitlements of life are being traded away against my will for a bunch of shiny toys I don’t even want.
I get it. Everyone is going to process the trauma of their own experience and expectation for the future differently. Maybe your coping strategy is different than mine.
I just know for my mental health I need to practice a level of emotional sobriety that will allow me to pull back from all the sorrow and rage. I’m not always successful in this but I work very hard to try and start every day with a positive mental attitude and go to sleep at night at peace with what I’ve done.
It’s tough out there.
Climate issues are, in fact, overhyped and a waste of political capital. Enjoy your Saturday.
We can’t build high speed rail in an all blue state with a GDP bigger than most countries. I don’t think preserving autumn and northeastern winter sledding is on the cards in our lifetimes.
Delete. Social. Media.
Eat waffles. But the first part is a milliongodzilla times more important.
Substack is social media, really
Substack comments are not dissimilar from a social *network*, in the sense that this is the virtual equivalent of Matt throwing a kegger in his basement and inviting all his friends to come chat there. To the extent that any voice is boosted over another, it's a very explicit "my compatriots are upvoting this"--not unlike a small crowd gathering around a loud speaker standing on a chair in that basement. Pretty normal human stuff.
In contrast, Substack comment sections totally lack the engagement-for-the-sake-of-engagement features that make modern Twitter, Facebook, etc. so poisonous--the non-chronological "for you" bait for rageclicking and doomscrolling.
So no, Substack comments are very unlike social media as we understand it in the moment.
There is virtually no difference between Substack Notes and Twitter.
Sort of feels like a No True Scotsman argument.
Also, at most I'm jealous that someone else is eating waffles, I'm not seeing their amazing, curated vacation photos
I superlike™️ this comment and agree completely - both that everyone seems angry, and that things are, in fact, pretty great. Envious of your waffles though!
Thanks for turning a positive into a negative, Ben.
Kidding - that is a good point.
And yeah the Republicans at the convention 100% looked fat and happy.
If they try their hand at insurrection while an administration unsympathetic to their cause is in charge, they are free to reap that whirlwind.
Sure, but they were going to do that anyway.
It's Trump's party now and you can cry if you want to.
"How angry and unhinged will Republicans become...."
It's a risk I'll happily run.
And I'm not worried about the VP certifying the votes in that scenario.
Kamala Harris, still resentful from being thrown over for the Whitmer/Shapiro tickets, gets her revenge by doing what Mike Pence didn’t have the guts to do. Trump appoints her ambassador to Uganda.
That’s funny!
Per Jim Justice: "totally unhinged"
Good article, though using "one of the largest electoral landslides of the 21st century" when talking about a presidential election is like saying "one of the most cost-effective American infrastructure projects of the 21st century" or "one of the most widely read poems of the 21st century".
On popular vote, sure. But there’s a chance that the electoral college looks very lopslided, which, to the less attentive voter will look like a huge landslide.
Good ol' 1912: Woodrow Wilson gets only 41.8% of the popular vote, but an electoral vote landslide of 435-88-8.
You know where I think political ads are really effective is in initiatives/referenda where people don't know a lot about the subject or only one side has any money to spend on ads. This is the most annoying part of California's process, imo.
David Shor (I believe in a conversation with Matt) has discussed how some ads even have a negative effect for the campaign that airs them. Every business that runs ads does a ton of split testing for their copy and it seems like campaigns need that as well.
Donations to lost-cause symbolic races seem like a huge waste but a beloved candidate(or someone running against a particular hated opponent) is going to bring in cash regardless of the strategic value of the race.
It also always seems a bit perverse that small donors are glorified so much but much of the spending is of dubious value and goes to huge media companies. Having the small-donors get excited about a doomed candidate and give millions of dollars to be spent on Twitter and Facebook or whatever TV company is a pretty shitty outcome.
If the parties were a bit stronger and more well liked they might be able to bring in more donations to the party rather than the campaigns and then they could distribute the funds to the most in need races. Obviously they attempt to do this but symbolic donations to a specific race or attempting to curry favor with candidate cuts into that a bit.
Parties did bring in massive amounts more money, but then Congress enacted a series of campaign finance reform bills that made that much harder to do.
Cocaine Mitch is correct. Repeal BCRA. Give fundraising and spending power back to political parties.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4507868/senator-mitch-mcconnell-bipartisan-campaign-reform-act
When it comes to money in races I think it's better to think of there being a sort of minimum threshold you need to have to become viable and above that the law of diminishing returns starts to really kick in. Take the recent Bownman race, obviously 20 million dollars is an absurd amount of money to spend on a house primary but that's not why Bowman lost. He lost because he took a lot of unpopular positions with voters in a new district that wasn't a good fit for him. BUT had his opponent been some obscure city councilmember with no money Bowman might very well have hung on due to the power of incumbency.
Per Future Forward’s ad testing, the average D/R ad this cycle moves presidential horse race by about +1.5pp on margin towards Biden/Trump respectively.
That seems way higher than described in the article, right?
Yes
Any idea why? I would have thought ads were especially less effective this cycle.
My guess is that is in a singular focus group. People respond to ads sometimes! But on Election Day, the question is whether it flips votes. And that is what's really hard to do.
Never mind Biden's ability to win the election. The obvious problem is that he is completely unfit to do the job.
Disagree. I'd rather have a weak Pres with a bunch of good advisors than a fascist bully like Trump.
Could I interest you in a third option? 🥥
Thrilled to be Coconut Pilled.
Broke: K-Hive
Woke: Coconuts🥥🥥🥥
Trump being unfit doesn't magically make Biden fit. They can both be unfit.
Unfortunately your view and Red’s are not mutually exclusive, which is precisely the crisis we are in.
Ben commented the other week that he'd vote for an old shoe over Donald Trump, and I 1000% agree with that sentiment. But the thing about an old shoe is that it cannot absent-mindedly misrepresent its fitness for continued service to Congress. You can just jettison the old shoe.
Cut to 2028: "I'm the only shoe that's ever beaten Donald Trump! What other shoe has made the kind of progress on international trade treaties focused on footwear that I have? Tell me!!"
Nate Silver’s recent kerfuffle with the DNC chair is interesting. Matt recently said he trusts Nate’s models more than those generated by political scientists because Nate is a degenerate gambler. I think Matt has his causal direction wrong. Nate Silver is inherently non-tribal. Some people do not embrace their herd with the same commitment as others. Nate has a high degree of commitment to truth as he sees it. He does not allow tribal loyalty to diminish his view of what is true. He minimizes motivated reasoning and just calls balls and strikes.
MY is unusually non-tribal in his thinking for a guy that is such a normie and engaged Democrat. This is why I subscribe. But his partisan attitude does make him less smart about seeing truth. The Biden age thing is a good example. I said (and many others) Biden is too old. People pushed back on this simple arithmetic because their partisan views made them dumb. Matt eventually got there. But it’s easy to see Matt’s tribal loyalty decreases his IQ.
Silver appears to be the most rigorous truth teller in the “take” business. It’s not because he’s a gambler it’s because it’s who he is. Which is why he said the DNC chair is a lying coward. Because it’s true.
A subtle note to add clarity to what I’m saying. I’m a Sam Harris fan. Sam largely is a truth teller and even wrote a book on lying and how it’s corrosive. But Sam has his blind spot not related to a tribe but to a way of seeing the world. Sam believes in institutions. I do too. But his loyalty there has him pulling punches on Fauci and other institutional leaders. He did this because he didn’t want to give aid and comfort to conspiracy theorists like his ex-buddy Bret Weinstein. I understand that but I did think slight less of Sam for not saying what was true.
Hedging in truth telling because we’re concerned either giving ammunition to bad people is a common thing. Some people do it so much that they become essentially dishonest. Sam and MY are definitely not there. But most politically partisan “take” people are.
There has been a lot of talk about free speech absolutism lately. I would love to see a group in our political ecosystem that are truth absolutist. I think this would be much better than the current politically motivated misinformation experts. I know it sounds like another fact checking operation but we still haven’t gotten that right. A group dedicated purely to truth as we know it and acknowledging the proper context would be good. Fuck the consequences. If Trump is right about something then he is right end of story. No thinking about the consequences of acknowledging truth.
Nate Silver is the closest thing I’ve seen to this. I hope the Democrats beat Trump and the DNC chair is a lying coward. That’s awesome!
Matt's whole point was that Nate's gambling spirit is why he's vigorously non-tribal. He cares more about making correct calls than seeing one group always win. It's like the sports bettor who refuses to root for any team, because he knows there will be opportunities where it's best to bet against any team.
I understand but he does it even when he doesn’t have money on the line in the form of a bet. It’s who he is outside of gambling. And it likely makes him a better gambler. The gambling doesn’t make him more honest.
Honestly I love Silver's bluntness and willingness to basically say "you're full of shit and I don't respect you" directly to public figures.
I will add a shout out to scientist Sabine Hossenfelder. I love her. A truth teller for sure.
Matt, you hit it at the end. The mega donors are buying access, either for their egos or for their business interests What I find striking is how little it all costs compared with the potential benefits. Trump’s policies on EVs and China are worth billions to Elon Musk. Spending a few percent of that to get on Trump’s good side? Easy, right?
“Matt, you hit it at the end. ”
This one was written by Ben Krauss.
Yep...I should have seen that! Ben, you hit it at the end!
My own half-baked take:
I wish we’d ban political advertising and today’s whole reality TV show process.
Instead of party primaries, something like a 3 round election, where it’s a wide open field for round 1, top 5 for round 2, and then always the final 2 for the last round. Structure campaigns as a series of debates and town hall events aired on PBS and NPR.
Combine that with Ben’s earlier idea of shortening the campaigns, these rounds could be like one month each, so a total campaign season of 3 months.
Something like that would allow voters to actually vote for their preferred candidate (especially in round 2), and could *hopefully* tilt the campaign to focus on policy debate and persuasion.
The First Amendment would stand in the way of a political advertising ban. I am coming around to endorsing a French style two round system though.
You shouldn’t legally be allowed to say that.
Beyond the 1st amendment issues that COT mentions, you also have to address that fact that the majority of the country has no idea who *most* candidates are and by banning political advertising you give enormous advantage to people who are already celebrities/well known.
A ban on political advertising would have to come with an end to primaries.
In that case, you'd vote for whoever the party you trust nominated, short of some scandal.
Isn't banning political advertising just going to further tilt the field in favour of electing celebrities who already have "built in" advertising? Do you consider that a good thing?
I think the most effective form of advertising these days would not be ads, but rather memes. They're cheap to produce, and a viral image or short video clip can have a much larger reach than a TV or paid ad.
It's worth noting that, even though Amy McGrath lost badly in 2020, she did outperform Joe Biden by about 2%. Her $100 million of campaign spending probably had something to do with that.
I mean, strong progressive Charles Booker ran with far less money in 2022 and got .04 percent less than McGrath - maybe the reality is only about 38% of people in Kentucky want to send a 21st century Democrat to the Senate, no matter how moderate or progressive they are.
McGrath ran against McConnell. The last time he ran alongside a Pres election his Dem opponent beat Barack Obama by 6 points. So McGrath out-performing by 2 doesn't prove a lot.