The Problem
With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:
This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.
And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.
In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.
While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.
Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)
The Incumbent
The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.
With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".
Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.
As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.
The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.
If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)
The Voters
The voters are so unhappy!
Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.
When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.
To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.
There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]
With a month to go before the midterms, there are more than a dozen districts where a progressive woman is running for office as a first-time candidate against an absentee Republican incumbent, and has polling in hand showing her able to win outright if she can reach independent voters with a short statement along these lines:
I don't take corporate money, and I support universal health care. My opponent takes corporate PAC money, voted against the Affordable Care Act, and has refused to hold a town hall.These same polls show that the incumbent has less than 50% of the vote, and that a large proportion of voters has never heard of the challenger. Once the large group of undecided respondents hear a two-sentence message about the two candidates, they break decidedly for our challenger.
This polling evidence suggests that reaching independent voters in those districts in time for the election, using any tools available, should be a top priority of the Democratic Party.And yet, candidates in these districts are struggling to find the means to get their message out, in an environment where marginal candidates and candidates running in completely safe districts are marinating in millions of dollars.
In many cases, the shortfall amounts to something like $100-$200K, the cost of a block of TV ads in a smaller media market.
While I don't believe that every candidate in this situation is guaranteed to win if she can reach independent voters, I believe that they will all lose if they don’t.
Given the relatively small sums at play, a national party flush with money, and the critical importance of winning the House in 2018, it confounds me that these campaigns can't get the resources to win. (...)
The Candidate
Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.
She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.
Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.
Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.
Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.
The Money
The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.
Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.
Call time kills the soul.
It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.
Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.
In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.
People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.
This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.
The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.
Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.
There is! And her opponent has found it.
Our archetypal candidate in 2018 is a progressive woman running for Federal office for the first time. Some combination of the events on Election Day and the Women's March in 2017 led her to make the most difficult decision of her professional life—to run for Congress.
She's running in a district that voted for Trump, but not overwhelmingly so. It is a district where she has deep roots, and has spent much of her life. She understands the people there.
Our candidate began her run in mid-2017, initially working out of her home, more recently working from a small campaign office tucked away in a strip mall or shared office building. Her paid staff consists of three to six people, most of them also working on their first election, a few of them the kind of young political science addicts who rove from campaign to campaign, never finding succor. The campaign is run mostly by volunteers, a mix of retired people and students.
Campaigning has required our candidate to put her life on hold. She is either retired or has the kind of job (like non-profit public service) that allows her to take a leave of absence, but the decision to run has had a serious impact on her family and her financial well-being.
Very early on, she had to develop the two near-sociopathic skills required of a politician in 2018: the ability to repeatedly tell a truncated version of her life story with unaffected sincerity, and the ability to shake down a list of wealthy strangers on the phone for money.
The Money
The principal activity of any Congressional candidate is call time.
Call time is the period of four to six hours each day the candidate spends phoning potential donors, like it's 1983. All but the most depraved extroverts hate it. Many campaigns have a person whose job it to bully the candidate back onto call time to meet her quota, either while driving between campaign events or locked inside her office.
Call time kills the soul.
It requires raising something like a million dollars to run a House race. Unless you are wealthy enough to fund your own campaign (which the Democratic Party encourages!), you must collect this money in pieces of up to $2,700 from individuals, or $5,000 from political action committees.
Call time puts strong constraints on the kind of people who can seek office. Without a list of wealthy donors, or the ability to procure such a list, it is difficult to get a candidacy off the ground.
In Democratic primaries, you find people running campaigns who happen to be well connected because they went to an ivy league law school, or worked at a major nonprofit, or otherwise have strong ties in the corporate/philanthropy complex. You will also find very wealthy people (the DCCC avidly recruits self-funders), business owners, and people whose personal story is so compelling that it can serve as a fundraising prop in its own right.
People who are good at schmoozing with the rich, and who can take eighteen months off of work, do well running for Congress. People who are bad at going hat-in-hand to the wealthy do not.
This is why you will rarely find teachers, office workers, tradespeople, union reps, farmers, scientists, or anyone in the service professions running in a party that claims to represent the working class. Nobody who must work a day job can sustain the pressures of running for Congress.
The process selects for candidates who are good at raising money, not winning votes.
Fundraising consumes an inordinate amount of our candidate's time. A campaign that was supposed to be about the voters is instead focused entirely on a class of fickle donors. Going through the slog of perpetual fundraising convinces our candidate that there has to be a better way.
There is! And her opponent has found it.
The Incumbent
The incumbent is a middle-aged Republican man who haunts his district like a ghost, appearing once or twice a year for just long enough to frighten children, though never long enough for witnesses to gather. He got elected a few terms ago and has coasted through re-election ever since, often with over 60% of the vote. His comfortable victory margins are less a reflection of his political prowess, and more a symptom of the fact that he has never faced a strong opponent. Every two years, a political novice appears, fails to raise significant money, loses to him by 80,000 votes, and exits the political stage.
With every such victory, the incumbent cements the impression that his is a safely Republican district, which discourages serious candidates from running against him the next time around, in a vicious circle. The spreadsheets that matter begin to list this district, where most people don't vote, as "solid red".
Unlike our candidate, the incumbent doesn't have to worry about fundraising. The money comes to him. Most of his donations come from corporations, who donate through political action committees (PACs) that are allowed to give individual candidates up to $10,000.
As the incumbent climbs the seniority latter in Congress, the list of corporations interested in giving him money grows, making his financial position stronger.
The incumbent also gets large contributions from the network of rich donors mobilized by the Republican party. In 2018, in the kinds of districts I'm talking about, it's normal for the incumbent to have a 5:1 advantage in cash on hand.
If the race should threaten to become competitive despite this cash advantage, the incumbent can count on one of the large outside spending groups to come bail him out. These are the “dark money” groups you hear about in connection with people like the Mercers, or the Koch brothers. (...)
The Voters
The voters are so unhappy!
Part of the challenge of winning a Congressional election is convincing people they should bother to vote. They’re disenchanted with a political system that has done little to help them, and many are also disengaged—they don’t know there’s an election, don’t plan to vote, don’t want to hear more, and don't want you knocking on their door again.
When our candidate holds town halls, the voters rarely mention Trump. But they do ask pointed questions about 'partisan bickering in Washington', and how she plans to move past it.
To an outside observer, this can sound like an infuriating kind of both-sides-ism, but I have come to perceive it as an expression of anger. The voters see paralysis in the political system and ascribe it to a political class, not a party. They want assurances that the candidate will not become part of the problem.
There are three issues in particular that seem to get voters riled up at campaign events...
by Maciej Cegłowski, Idle Words | Read more:
Image: Toothfish, Idle Words
[ed. Important.]
