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.
Devastating facts, I actually wasn’t aware of Kazenberg. Damn. Most important election of our lives though folks. Promises to keep, to the donor class.
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
Donald Trump approves this message!
Let’s not forget that a massive segment of the voting electorate still supports Israel, which is the needle to thread.
If you care so much about this, what you can do is go on social media as well as speak to your friends and family about what Israel is doing to influence the polls directly. Reduce the national poll numbers and you’ll see a reflection in policy. The slow shift in policy towards Israel has obviously been proportional to the degrading national and international support.
Recent polling shows that isn’t true. Early in 2024 the most people wanted to condition military aid to food aid. Polls taken by late March and early April showed a swing to where people now believe it’s a dirty war on both sides that we should not be supporting, except to force them to accept food aid. Most democrats and independents are recorded with this position.
The question none of this polling dares to ask and probably should is, “will this issue prevent you from voting for a candidate in the general election?”
What polling are you referring to, because the March polling from PEW who I’d trust the most in this situation still has 36% supporting Gaza action and another 9% having no opinion.
The question none of this polling dares to ask and probably should is, “will this issue prevent you from voting for a candidate in the general election?”
I think that’s a fair question, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of people also do not place the Israeli-Palestinian war remotely at the top of their top list of concerns. So framing another way is: What % of the electorate in key states actually considers Biden’s actions as unacceptable, versus the % of the electorate who still continues to support Israel and would consider it unacceptable if he withdrew further support? Moreover in terms of damage-control what would happen to Biden if he withdrew all aid to Israel and they just so happened to incur another terrorist attack? Whether we like it or not, this election is inevitable and Biden is certainly the better option not only for the people of Gaza but also the people of Ukraine and the wider planet for that matter. Certainly wouldn’t be that difficult for a right-wing nationalist government to stage a false-flag akin to Russia’s apartment bombings. So I think the proportional wind-down as polls continue to turn against Israel is the smart move. If I was in the Oval Office (and of course, none of us here are), that’s what I would be advising. Meanwhile the second I win election, I’d be cutting Israel off entirely.
That’s why the question needs to be asked. The traditional ranking against other issues fails when an issue might be a deal breaker. It’s why Abortion is such a huge thing in campaigns, even though it never ranks highly in that polling question either. Even after Roe V Wade healthcare access is sitting at fifth in Gallup’s latest rankings.
My numbers are from Gallup.
Interestingly Pew’s report from earlier shows less engagement than Gallup’s but it’s also more in depth on Muslim and Jewish attitudes towards the fighting which is interesting but less useful for the campaign overall.
So either they managed to poll meaningfully different groups or things are shifting and the paying attention number jumped for some reason in March. Also of note in the Gallup poll is that Democrats and independents no longer approve of Israel’s war. At 70 and 60 percent for each. Suggesting the time to start divesting is now.
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
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.
Or text messages
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
From small donors too, the benefit of small donors is they can keep giving.
Once someone gives the ~million to BVF, they’re tapped out. And they tend to give as much as they can to attend something like this, then they’re tapped out for the race.
With small donors campaigns can spend as they earn, with large donors you have to try to budget. Which lets small donors campaigns get off to a fast start.
Going after just big money isn’t a good strategy, and the DNC should have learned that lesson from the 2016 primary and then the general.
Instead they’ve doubled down on chasing the wealthy.
102% true. Just like the 102,000 people that attended his rally
(/s)
How can you put anything he says out as true?
Weird…
So you think trump and all the rubes are lying about donating him money?
Like. Yeah, trumo lies about most things, but you think he convinced millions of idiots to claim they donated money to him, but not actually donate?
It’s trump…
Why would he ever want people to not give him money?
Like, I’ve never heard anyone call into his question that trump gets money from poor dumb people…
Just sayin’.
This was not an official document. It would be much easier to get 40 rich dudes who stand to make bank off his election to write checks and just claim it was small donations.
By all means, do t take a politicians word on anything.
But like, a bunch of poor people definitely give money to trump, it’s his bread and butter.
He gets plenty from large so it’s too, it’s just weird someone would act like he doesn’t get any
And small donations still get tracked, campaigns are responsible for not accepting anything over the limit, so there are rules about tracking.
Now, if you wanted to argue that they’re doing some kind of straw donation scheme where a wealthy person gives money to friends so they can donate…
Yeah, that can happen, and kind of what bundling is but there’s access and Influence to the bundler at play too. Like, if a business associate you want a deal with asks you to bundle implying it helps the odds of a deal or something.
That’s plausible.
But there’s still a bunch of idiots that donate to trump every pay period.
The DNC gets about half of it’s donations from small donors versus the RNC getting about 30 percent. You’re yelling at the wrong tree.
You got a source?
Like, legitimately not trying to start an argument. Stuff like this where things are better than I thought is good news, so I genuinely would like to see that you’re right.
Open Secrets tracks fundraising. I left a link in my other comment.
Thanks!
The confusion is that doesn’t include outside money:
Which also wouldn’t include the DNC share from the Biden Victory Fund.
https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00744946/
Biden has a lot more cash available than the 195 million in your link, that was the big red flag. I mean, he had this 30 million weekend, another 60 million just a couple weeks ago I think.
The math didn’t add up for your numbers and what keeps getting reported, but it was pretty easy to find where the wires got crossed.
Yeah I see that. As far as my original point though the Democrats are still way ahead on small donations. Assuming the PACs are all large donations, Trump has a bit more outside money supporting him. So the ratio between the two doesn’t really change, just the actual numbers being smaller.
Maybe.
trump also uses PACs and his daughter-in-law has the RNC purse strings.
The whole system is intentionally confusing and designed to make it hard to track money.
I did just find this article that I might post I’m not sure if 2 weeks is out of date tho
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-64-million-mystery-anonymous-donations-2024-presidential-campaign/
What we should probably be looking at for this is the number of small donors.
I couldn’t find that anywhere, but Biden did just pass trump on total number of donors last month, which might just be the Haley bump.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/16/us/elections/biden-trump-donors.html
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.
It’s funny how the Left looks at the rich and power as the enemy… when in fact, the vast majority of them in this country are Democrats… all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry like to say “we’re just like you!” and the Left eats it up…
The liberal celebrities you are referring to are mostly millionaires who beat the odds. The vast majority of billionaires, on the other hand, are conservatives with generational wealth who are attempting to continuously shape society for their exclusive benefit.
deleted by creator
What’s your point? The dude can do both. This is what fundraising looks like on the left.
That’s the problem. And I feel calling him out about it is valid considering only a select few on the left try to do anything regarding campaign finance reform
I don’t disagree with you, but until laws are enacted, dems can’t fight with one arm tied behind their back. Gotta fill the war chest or it’s basically over.
How about running on campaign finance reform and actually trying to do something about it within your party until it becomes a major philosophy of your party like they did with gay marriage?
deleted by creator
fundraising looks like on the left
And a true reflection of who they represent, the big money people. Working class people got the opportunity to watch him on television
I’m gonna hard disagree. I vote for the Democratic Party because they champion the values of most Americans. Do I wish Bernie or Elizabeth Warren had won the 2020 primary? Of course. Not all dems will fight as hard for the same issues.
If you’re trying to contrast Biden’s campaign trail with Trump’s, just remember the guy is also busy being president. And Trump does a million rallies not because he loves the common man, but because otherwise people will be left to, I dunno, read his policies? The entertainment keeps the mob ignorant and sated.
they champion the values of most Americans
That must explain their Biden’s 38% approval rating or Congress’ 13% approval rating.
OR 62% of Democrat voters have a 62% disapproval rating of Biden and an 87% disproval rating on Congress.
Do you know how to read polls?
Do you understand that a president’s approval rating will be much lower among the opposition party? And that that number will skew the average far below that of the controlling party?
Or do you enjoy misrepresenting data to dunk on a stranger on the internet?
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-BIDEN/POLL/nmopagnqapa/#
That must be why only 17% of Democrats are excited to vote for him
