Political Contributions

I was watching Jacobin's YouTube channel yesterday (for the first time) and found out something I hadn't heard before. Sara Gideon, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, ended her losing campaign with $14 million in the bank. I was astonished. (I think some other losing candidates also ended up with sizable bank accounts.) We had been giving modest donations to Senate candidates around the country. Once you do that, you get daily emails from these candidates asking for more. Some days I would get two or three emails from the same candidate.

That is all well and good. I understand that the most efficient way to get money is to go to those who have already given to you. But to give money to a candidate and then find out it wasn't spent is a little odd. And then to have the centrists in the party blame their loss on people like me adds insult to injury.

This is intended not so much to be a grievance as it is just a statement of reality. It causes me to wonder if giving to candidates in partisan elections is the most efficient way to spend our money. If candidates collect all that money and then run bad campaigns and lose the election, not very much has been accomplished. I think it's reasonable to ask if, say, a $100 contribution to Sara Gideon or Amy McGrath would have been more effective if given instead to William Barber's Poor People's Campaign or the local Black Lives Matter or Democratic Socialists of America or the local food bank.

As always, there is also a cynical side to this, namely that the party infrastructure is designed for the benefit of the donor and consulting classes, not for the voters.

Sara Gideon, Amy McGrath, Cal Cunningham, et al, all lost their Senate races. But the important thing is that they lost without moving the needle. Lots of people--including many or most Democrats--don't care much for AOC and other progressive politicians, but the party can only deny that she moves the needle at its own peril. The fact that she gets so much negative press is testimony to that. When you cover someone--even in a negative way--you are also letting that same person set the terms of the debate in some way. For another example, the conventional wisdom is that Occupy Wall Street was a failure, but here we are today with income inequality being talked about as an important issue. Occupy Wall Street moved the needle much more than all these failed Senate candidates. BLM and abolish ICE have also moved the needle (admittedly not in the way that's comforting to the party establishment).

Our money will be going to those groups that fight for the things we believe and also move the needle.