About the Money

If you are like me you get a handful of emails every day from political candidates asking for money.  I get emails from the DNCC, from Senators - almost never my Senators, from Congressmen - almost never my Congressmen; I even get emails occasionally from people running in other parties.  I must be on a whole lot of mailing lists.

First things first: I can't afford to give a meaningful amount of money.  Even in this booming economy things have yet to trickle down to my family in such a way that we can spend money this way.  Any dollar that I send to a candidate is one that is being diverted from something my family needs.  I can send a couple of bucks to a couple of folks, but all things being equal even if I wanted to support all of these candidacies I couldn't.  Occasionally I wonder if the fundraisers have some kind of closed loop feedback where they can tell who has already given.  I would assume they do, but my inbox would suggest otherwise.

Second, and this is perhaps a more salient point, I am under the impression you don't need my money.  There was no end of press around Citizen's United.  All that reporting drove home the idea that there was now a virtually unlimited source of funding out there from mega wealthy donors and corporations (and I guess from foreign governments funneling through third parties).

Why are you even asking me for my $50 when there's someone out there to give you 100 or 1000 times that amount and that can now do so legally?  Are the candidates soliciting my money just really bad at identifying high value donors?

I thought what you now needed from me was door knocking.  I thought you needed people to do registration drives.  I thought you needed people to drive voters to the polls on election day.  I thought the issue was no longer money, that it was all about turnout.  I guess I can see how money could drive turnout, but then we're back to what are you going to do with my $50 that you couldn't do with some mega-wealthy donor's $50,000.

Asking for these small donations can't be free either.  Sending an email is fairly cheap I guess, but you have to pay the firm that is sending the email and that can't come cheap.  I guess the ROI on such things must be positive or they would stop, but again wouldn't the resources be better allocated chasing huge donations than thousands of small donations?

I dug deep on the last round and was rewarded with losses across the board, and that view was against the backdrop of what I understand was the highest earning campaign in history.  I just can't get past the idea that it is no longer about the money - and every solicitation I get suggests to me that the candidates I would hope to elect haven't figured that out yet.  That can't be a good thing.