The Massively Overrated Value of Money in Politics
By 
Time to talk truth about giving your hard-earned money to political candidates:
In 2020, Jamie Harrison burned $130 MILLION and got 44.2% of the vote in South Carolina’s Senate race.
In 2022, Krystle Matthews spent $136 THOUSAND and got 37.5% of the vote in South Carolina’s Senate race.
— Ed Burmila (@edburmila) November 9, 2022
This doesn’t even get to the Sara Gideon campaign, a winnable race in which Democrats just flooded Maine with more money than she or anyone else could spend and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
There is room for giving money to candidates, I grant you. In competitive races, you need enough money to do what you need to do. But there’s a sharp point of diminishing returns in all of these races. It’s easy to convince people to give away their money though–you don’t want to be the person who leaves Catherine Cortez Mastro or Raphael Warnock short and they lose. But that’s also not realistic–there are lots of ways that these candidates can get enough money to operate a good campaign.
What all this direct marketing of candidates does is pay off the political operative class big time. The fundraising teams, the strategists, the consultants, oh they are making bank. They are who you are giving your money to. The nationalization of every political campaign also causes problems, in that it keeps everyone in a state of mental breakdown due to the stress and nervousness. It takes attention from our own communities. And it pulls money away from where it can really matter–local community organizations outside of the election world. This is why when I give money, it’s to groups such as Providence Student Union, groups that build the next generation of political leaders on the left.
I gave $50 to candidates in this cycle and that was a donation to a personal friend of mine running a city council campaign. That’s an appropriate amount to give to politicians in a given election cycle, especially for races outside your home state/district.
That’s because in the end, you are funding a successful candidate. You are funding consultants who exist to find ways to separate fools from their money while they party harder than they’d like to admit. Don’t be the fool.