It's incredibly messed up that the thing that ensures we get a good candidate in US politics is bags of money. It's almost like the system might have some glaring problems.
I mean, we all knew what this campaign was gonna look like.
He appointed Jamie Harrison as the DNC chair, someone that appeared out of nowhere to checks notes lose to Lindsey Graham despite getting record breaking donations...
I mean seriously, dude raised $57,000,000 dollars but couldn't beat Lindsey Graham so Biden put him in charge of the DNC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/us/politics/jaime-harrison-lindsey-graham-south-carolina.html
And he's got a "media mogul" named Jeffrey Kazenberg as a campaign co-chair. His bonafides involve access to celebrities and bundling donations from millionaires.
It's not like the actual campaign manager knows better, this is the first time she's been a campaign manager, so it's good she used such a low stakes campaign as her springboard.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/25/bidens-campaign-team-00093671
And that last link covers the rest of the team as well.
But when people keep wondering "who the fuck is making these calls?"
It's those people handpicked by Biden, and they're fucking up a very important campaign and refusing to listen to any feedback that doesn't come from the incredibly wealthy.
Some valid criticism here, but in fairness to the campaign manager, you make it sound like she was pulled off the street when:
but she served as the deputy campaign manager on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ last campaign and is close with the president.
That only makes things worse.
Money endures quality candidates like it endures quantity products, eg not at all.
It's unsustainable long term, eventually either someone with enough money comes along and ends the game and establishes some kind of an autocracy, Or enough people will get pissed off about it that they can't ignore making reform's on it.
I feel like we're much closer to one of those eventualities than the other at the moment, because as far as I'm aware there's not much for campaign finance reform on the horizon. And it'll be interesting to see what kind of punishment is handed out for violating our current campaign finance laws, but I'm not holding my breath for incarceration.
Well there effectively aren't any rules for campaign finance at the presidential level. There's intentionally huge holes they can use to inject billions of dollars. Of course you need lawyers and networks of connections to access those holes, so yeah it's 100% a proto-oligarchy setup. Step two is using the criminal justice system to shut down effective opposition. Which is why giving Trump the duest of processes is so important. If it becomes fashionable to send political opponents to prison then we've effectively lost the game.
To put it into sports it's mid-game and we're down by half the other team's goals. It's not unwinnable but it's not looking great either.
Where does all this money go? Naively, I would think ad campaigns and campaign tours.
30 million is 10c for every voter they try to reach. That's about a letter per household if bought in masses.
It's important to look closely so they can't misuse the funds, and they need to be held accountable if they do.
He should try a "improving my polling numbers" weekend blitz.
He can start by dropping all federal government support to Israel and by promoting BDS
How do you get Millenials and Gen Z'ers to answer their phones for more accurate polls?
Send me a fuckin email for Christs sake
Or leave a voicemail so I can call you back when I've got ten minutes to take the poll
Or text messages
How do you prevent duplicate voting when anyone can share a link? How do you avoid spam filters, or stay within compliance of anti-spam laws?
Well they could try to not be so daft about these challenges and act in acccordance with living in the 21st century. (I know, very difficult for Biden and his team, but it is possible.)
Phone-based MFA, spend a tiny fraction of campaign dollars to advertise on social media platforms so respondents can opt-in for the poll, applied stats to randomly select for the target demographic you’re after. This should satisfactorily solve for the above and improve poll quality.
So first off, you seem to be confusing direct campaign activities with polls. Campaigns do sometimes run internal polls, but you should never trust the numbers they put out. Generally, they do want them to be accurate because they want to make strategic decisions around them. However, they aren't obliged to release those numbers to the public, and if they do, it's often for a specific reason; they may want to spin a narrative that they're in a powerful position, or perhaps paint themselves as the underdog. Either way, you don't want to rely on those numbers.
FiveThirtyEight has not historically included campaign polls in their Presidential model. They sometimes do for Congressional campaigns, because those don't get polled as heavily and there would be a lack of data if they weren't included (which also means they have to use other factors to correct the results to get a good model).
Most polls aren't like that, though. They're run by private companies.
Second, any little road bump you do to polling means fewer participants. Need to verify MFA through a text message? Whole lot of people are going to see that and promptly stop and go back to what they were doing.
Third, advertising for opt-in? No way you're getting a randomized sample out of that.
Turns out, polling companies are not run by idiots. This is not an easy problem.
You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.
Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.
We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There's a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we've banned them for a reason. It's one of those problems that we've solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.
Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you'll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That's because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn't particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.
Where do they get those weights and how do we know they're valid? That's a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we're trying to get away from.
They gonna stop spamming people to donate now? Nah they'll do a bigger push for regular people's money.
600% match now!
The most used word in my text message app these days is STOP
They think that because I donated to Bernie years ago that it means I want to donate to any shit democratic candidate they put in front of me. The lesson I learned is to never donate to a political candidate ever again.
There's gotta be more than 2 political parties on my city level elections. I bet there's a candidate whos sensible and who wants to improve my city. I'll buy a yard sign of any who aren't r/d
This seems like a lot but in 2020 both parties (together) accounted for spending 5.7 Billion dollars on the presidency. Taking that at half, this is 1 percent of what they're expecting to spend. Further, according to Open Secrets, Democrats get about half of their campaign donations from small donations.
That's not a bad thing, I just want to keep this in perspective. It also means Democrats are more likely to listen to voter pressure, you know, if there was some kind of emergent thing going on, say... in the middle east.
It also means Democrats are more likely to listen to voter pressure, you know, if there was some kind of emergent thing going on, say… in the middle east.
Then why haven't they been listening?
I said more likely, not guaranteed.
And trump raised way more by being convicted
Trump raised more than Biden last election and still lost
Well it it makes a difference them fine. Even if I do believe in funding limits (which will never happen of course). But I'm not blind to reality, so if all that money is enough to flip one borderline state, them it'll be worth it.
Roe v. Wade falling really is paying off for both parties
one gets money because it fell and the other gets money to try and restore rights indefinitely
two party scam
People in denial are downvoting you, but you're pointing out reality. Obama had a chance to do something about it but said it was not a top priority. Politicians love their bargaining chips, but actually solving problems would mean fewer bargaining chips, so they don't tend to solve problems.
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