Furthermore a fair number of the largest crypto trading firms (DRW, Jump, Wolverine) are HQ’d in Chicago.

They are saying that was a bad strategy and not the usual one. I have no idea to what extent that’s true.

He means in politics you don't need to bet on the winning horse, you can just bribe him after he wins. Or bet on both.

The aim is not to influence the election it is to own the person who wins the election. The less likely they are to win the cheaper it is, but higher the chances it is all for nothing.

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

> he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition

Money doesn’t buy elections. Someone gets shocked about this every cycle when the overwhelmingly-funded toast sandwich lands with a thud.

I'm fond of telling people that Krishnamoorthi called me personally, on the phone, twice, to raise money in elections he ran unopposed in. Each time he had a story for why it was important I donate to him and not some other Democrat in a contested race.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.

They didn't throw the election per se, they just didn't try very hard to win a fight they could easily lose. Why burn bridges with a very important ally over something that might not end up being your problem?

Did you miss the part where I said that the AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated PAC spending never mentions Israel?

Pesky thing called the First Amendment.

A lot of rich people were afraid democracy would change the world but it turns out those with money will always have the power.

And this is not an American thing every country has its lobbying industry.

In his victory speech, Biss credited J Street. So still Israel, just not AIPAC specifically.

That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".

I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically

1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;

2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;

3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and

4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.

And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.

But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".

>imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed

Ranked choice still succumbs to a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

Approval voting works better and simpler, and STAR voting works even better though with more complexity. https://www.equal.vote/beyond_rcv_zine

Kat did not in fact come close to winning. She mobilized exactly the people she was expected to mobilize, and the only surprising thing about the election is that Bushra Amiwala --- a locally engaged and active elected with exactly Kat's profile --- didn't pull more votes from her. That sucks. But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.

People are looking at the vote spread in isolation and not the whole breakdown of the election. Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender, and that was to pull votes from Biss and Fine in north suburban Cook County. She failed to do so, and Biss, who basically everyone thought was going to win, won.

It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.

Having been involved in some political campaigns and movements, I totally believe that nobody knows the ROI on where the dollars are going.

Political campaigns certainly need money, but there are heavily diminishing returns pretty quickly. In races where all the candidates have money just throwing more in doesnt seem to accomplish much.

This is the mainstream view in political science/economics, since well designed studies consistently show these results.

I won't spend hours chasing down such studies. If you're interested, ask an AI for references!

Donating to the winner means you're on good terms with the future holder of power. This "works" in the sense that you can expect favors in return, but this is just lowkey corruption, not affecting the election result.

Note that candidates who are guaranteed to win often get substantial donations!

"Regulating crypto grifts" is a nice euphemism for prohibiting mutually voluntary economic interactions involving digital currency, and putting open source developers in prison:

https://freeromanstorm.com/

"DOJ determined to set a precedent

Tornado Cash is an open source software protocol that uses smart contracts and a cryptographic method known as zero-knowledge proofs to enable users to conduct private transactions on the blockchain. Neither Roman Storm, nor any other person has the ability to stop or modify this immutable, unstoppable protocol.. In this context, Tornado Cash operates much like the Bitcoin or Ethereum network. The prosecution of Roman Storm by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in U.S. v. Storm for his role in developing Tornado Cash will set a chilling precedent for the crypto industry by holding developers liable for how third parties use their open-source code.

The case hinges on allegations that Storm violated 18 U.S.C. § 1960 by operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, despite Tornado Cash being a non-custodial protocol where users retain full control of their funds, challenging the applicability of Section 1960 to decentralized software.

The money laundering conspiracy charge raises concerns about whether developers can be criminally accountable for the actions of bad actors, like North Korea’s Lazarus Group, who used Tornado Cash to obscure illicit transactions. A conviction could deter innovation by discouraging developers from creating privacy-focused tools, fearing prosecution for misuse beyond their control, while an acquittal might affirm that writing open-source code is protected speech under the First Amendment.

The outcome will likely shape the legal boundaries of developer liability and the future of decentralized finance (DeFi), impacting how regulators approach immutable protocols."