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.

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PaulHoule 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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!

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bombcar an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	PaulHoule an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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