>fundraising is only useful if the people that ultimately vote for you feel as though you are meeting their needs. No amount of money can convince a voter to vote for someone with whom they don't align ideologically.
False, see Cambridge Analytica.
False, see Cambridge Analytica.
Um, elaborate? You literally cannot buy votes. If I'm a left wing progressive, no amount of money will convince me to vote for a right wing politician (and vice versa).
Also, by now Cambridge Analytica’s data has been shown to have been mostly useless at meaningful targeting. Even the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the election of Donald Trump as president was overrated.
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-brand/
From the article:
“But a dozen Republican consultants and former Trump campaign aides, along with current and former Cambridge employees, say the company’s ability to exploit personality profiles — “our secret sauce,” Mr. Nix once called it — is exaggerated. Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign. The technology — prominently featured in the firm’s sales materials and in media reports that cast Cambridge as a master of the dark campaign arts — remains unproved, according to former employees and Republicans familiar with the firm’s work.”
If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show me what that system is, and I'll try and use it to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.
Watch The Great Hack. It's not about targeting people who are thoroughly entrenched in their views like you. It's about targeting swing voters
>If you can come up with a system that can convince someone to do something against their will, please show me what that system is, and I'll try and use it to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.
Read up on Social Engineering. Victor Lustig "sold" the Eiffel Tower twice using social engineering tactics.
1. I've watched it.
2. You need to actually summarize here why it corroborates your argument. If I am attempting to refute your point of view, "Google it" is an extremely unconvincing line of argument.
3. Again, I provided you my sources directly, which show that it has already been reported that CA's impact on the 2016 election has been greatly overstated.
> It's about targeting swing voters
Sure, and? I can persuade someone of the most incorrect or immoral point of view, and there's not much you can do to prevent me from doing that except to try and make your own case to persuade them back. That is the consequence of living in a free society in which information can be freely disseminated. You cannot conflate persuasion with "buying votes". Is the New York Times "buying votes" by using their financial resources to report with a particular bias? Is Fox News "buying votes" when they do the same? No! They are publishing speech and advertising to try and persuade voters, as is the point of free expression.
While you're right that money affords one the platform to disseminate their ideologies, at the end of the day, ordinary voters need to accept that ideology, go to the ballot box, and check the box next to the name. No amount of money will install a leader that cannot convince voters to vote for them in a democratic election.
You don't think money is persuasive?
If you don't believe me, I'll start with anecdotes, and then close with data.
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.
In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).
Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.
Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both. Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.
Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.
Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more).
Decades of research[2] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[3] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[4]. Even the studies[5] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins. In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.
Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415
[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...
[5] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf
As Alvin Toffler wrote in Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, and as evidenced by GOOG and FB, information and attention are the new money.
>Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.
Those statistics dont factor in the absurd amount of attention liberal media paid to Trump throughout the election. His antics, and the attention it garners among their target market, are great for their bottom line
Yes, this has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the free press (or in your words "liberal media"). That's entirely my point.
You also seem to keep citing books as though they are somehow equivalent to peer-reviewed academic research. Books aren't peer-reviewed, anyone can publish their opinions. Publishing houses are not staffed by true peers of the author, and are ill-equipped to check information. While books are good and important, they are not authoritative for the discussion at hand.
I provided more than enough academic research, statistical results, and empirical results in recent history. Unless you can do the same, your entire argument is based on your personal perception of the world.
>Yes, this has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the free press (or in your words "liberal media"). That's entirely my point.
Nahhh; corporate media is very much concerned with money. No amount of academic research, statistical results, or empirical results can help you make sense of the world if you can't make assumptions based on common sense perception.
You have that COMPLETELY backwards. "Common sense" perception is extremely flawed because the perception of individual humans is limited by their own experiences and forms an incomplete picture of the truth. If your argument is that "common sense" (common according to who?) beats empirical data, it's no better than religion.