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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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