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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.

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> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.

That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.

Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.

You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.

Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.

> if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to ... They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.

This is the crux. You give money to both candidates, while you frame the issue in terms of things voters don't immediately recoil at and don't work to understand. The part that IS population-facing you dress it up in dishonest language that makes the average person who disagrees think they mustn't have the average viewpoint. For example Faceboot's recent semi-successful lobbying to require OSs to betray their users.

> Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.

This seems like a falsifiable theory.

Find a candidate who is extremely anti-establishment. They want to break up all the big companies, do the thing DOGE was supposed to do and then return the money to the middle class, reform the healthcare laws to get the cost of healthcare under control at the expense of the big healthcare companies, etc. Then have them not change their positions for money. This should be popular, right? Run on a platform of peeling off all the leeches; the thing the majority of voters actually want.

Then the leeches won't give them any money, and then we get to find out what happens. Do they win because they're doing the thing the voters want or do they lose because they don't get any money?

I'd say they lose because the media talks about their non-electability as a done deal. Even if we didn't have plurality primaries, there's a strong pull for people to only support candidates they think are going to win. So this type of candidate is in that 3% polling target you've already excepted (and it's only that high if they're doing well in spite of the media!).

I tried applying our argument while considering the validating [0] media coverage as a type of lobbying (in-kind donation. But I think this is being too reductive, and the two are really different types of support. We've seen candidates that are independently-wealthy outsiders come into political races trying to spend their way to legitimacy, and how they end up being portrayed.

[0] ie casting a character as a serious candidate regardless of whether they're judged as "good" or "bad"

(also, nit: "DOGE" did exactly what it was "supposed to" do. it would have taken a much different type of nuanced approach to actually trim fat to cut down spending while not being penny wise and pound foolish)

> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.

If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lefty-influencer-kat...

A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.

Using a new york post article to dismiss the insurgent left on grounds of experience is one way to describe it I guess. Schumer and Jeffries have decades of experience between them and the Democratic party has the lowest approval in its history among its base. Kat Abughazaleh is more in step with where that base is on foreign and domestic policy, ignore the progress her wing of the party is making at your peril. There will be more Abughazalehs and Mamdanis in the future because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents instead of more technocratic hand wringing combined with the bloodiest period of foreign policy since Vietnam.

You may have misunderstood my point.

I'm not discrediting anything except the notion that this was business as usual and the winners were as expected.

The article was simply the first I found as reference (could not remember the original source I read about this) and I make no comment on its bias.

This is starting to get into 2015 "nothing to see here, Donald Trump will never win" levels of denial.

I may be taking out some frustration on you undeservedly here.

This "Democratic party has low approval" thing is a canard. The Democrats have low approval because Congress has low approval and because the Democratic base is angry we're fully out of power right now. Many of the people responding to polls saying they disapprove of the party would crawl across broken glass to vote for them in the midterm general.

Abughazaleh has 0 experience governing. To claim that she is actually interested in delivering public services when there is literally no evidence of that is laughable. There were 2 other candidates in this race from the insurgent left as you call it, both were local and have experience governing. If the insurgent left voters backed either of them they very likely would have won. Instead they backed a tiktok clown and it cost them.

I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.

And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.

There was a really amusing article in Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago which pointed out that most of the really big donors just sprayed money at a unicause indiscriminately and that Michael Bloomberg was the only one that showed any sign of investing rationally.

I mentioned that to my wife and she of course rolled her eyes because it seemed so self-serving to her. (Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about how much better The Economist was than Bloomberg Businessweek and how I finally canceled my subscription to the latter when they hired genius financial writer Matt Levine [1] to write a whole issue boosting crypto in a 200% cringe writing style just before the FTX scandal broke)

[1] ... sent him an email about how sorry I was for him!

If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about.

Of course the media tending toward "every election is super close, impossible to call, tune in tomorrow" before the election and "it was so obvious he'd win" afterwards doesn't help.

See

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659

it's not necessarily straightforward that "more fundraising => win" because "better candidate => more fund raising". Like definitely if a candidate gets people excited they are going to raise more small money donations and some big donors are sensible, though of course one senseless whale can blow out the numbers. [1]

Note Clinton and Harris outraised Trump by large margins in 2016 and 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2024_United...

[1] as someone who has run third party candidates for office I am going to push back on some of the discourse around access because in most places the restrictions aren't that bad and if you find it hard to get enough signatures on the ballot and find it hard to get at least some money from donors you are going to find it hard to get votes

> If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about

Not if you correct for incumbency. The thing people want to talk about is that money buys elections.

The whole point is that “money buys elections” is what’s under discussion - is it true? Does it, or does the money spent, even if it correlates, not cause?

> whole point is that “money buys elections” is what’s under discussion - is it true?

No. What is true is candidates and NGOs push this angle, and folks who lose elections like it as an explanation for why they aren’t represented.

Reinforcing the status quo is one of the primary reasons lobbying is deployed.

You can trust that people with money are frugal and only spend when they expect to see a return.

If the region was going to go that way anyway, then the lobbying was wasted spend. So what would you rather have as your truth: that the money was spent to overturn public will, or that it was a dumb error to spend that money in the first place? What does that say about the people who see the status quo as something worth preserving?

The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.

> he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition

Money doesn’t buy elections. Someone gets shocked about this every cycle when the overwhelmingly-funded toast sandwich lands with a thud.

Your statement is one of those "not even wrong" pedantic ploys that falls apart at the lightest sneeze in its direction.

Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.

> Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives

It’s not. Every piece of state and federal legislation I personally wrote language into passed before I was wealthy. Showing up is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Being decent and eloquent when you do is impossible for the rest.

I’ve donated to get power and gotten involved. The latter absolutely smites the former, to the point that donors are almost being taken for a ride outside a few idiot candidates who unfailingly lose.

You were paid by rich companies to write those laws, or else given access by people with more money and influence than you. These things are often done in ways that result in those same people making more money. It is incentive and reward all in one.

I'm fond of telling people that Krishnamoorthi called me personally, on the phone, twice, to raise money in elections he ran unopposed in. Each time he had a story for why it was important I donate to him and not some other Democrat in a contested race.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.

It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.

Not easy and effective post election .

The candidate doesn't own you anything and cannot receive donations directly anymore. Thus you get to pull the corruption, illegal, or indirect, less effective, cards.

Supporting the candidate to get him elected is much different.

owe

> cannot receive donations directly anymore

Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.

Not all.

Maybe it's a sign that your "pennies on the dollar" theory needs some work?

In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.

This bodes well for democracy. Hopefully things stay such that they can’t be bought. Once they can be we are in trouble.

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