Who will run in 2020?

:heart:

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Hard to believe a candidate wouldn’t sit idly by and let their crowd engage in inflammatory rhetoric they take zero responsibility for encouraging or enabling, and yet here is Warren

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Why would an escort agent tell you who their clients are? OFC they’re going to deny that Warren hires 24-year-old dudes for kinky sexing.

Bernie went on Chapo.

I haven’t listened yet but I assume he discusses his policy on the redistribution of stock once we kill all billionaires.

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Do we have any stats on how much time the candidates spend stumping vs. specific fund raiser activities? I would think that $/fundraising hour is more informative than raw fundraising totals, at least among the top tier candidates (candidates in the single digits need raw cash just to keep going, even if that’s all they do. And that is a sign of viability).

I would expect both Bernie and Warren to be strong on that based on my impressions of their campaigns, and Biden’s numbers might come away looking a lot worse, but I don’t have the stats.

As of about a month ago, Warren was the only major candidate who had zero fundraisers on her schedule. Bernie had a small amount of “grassroots” fundraisers. Biden, Buttigieg, and Harris have fundraisers making up 35-40% of their campaign events.

Biden’s fundraising numbers are bad considering the types of donations he’s willing to take.

Has this video been shared yet?

https://twitter.com/krystalball/status/1180185102715883527?s=20

Bernie really is the GOAT.

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Especially since his campaign says the average donation was $44, which works out to about 350k donations.

I do not for a second believe the average donation was 44 dollars. Not unless he spent a bunch of money soliciting 1$ donations to get the average down, which is probably exactly what happened.

@anon24898493

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That’s what I immediately thought of. If you are a woman who is pro choice but doesn’t vote in 2020 you deserve whatever is coming to you.

Isn’t stumping also a fund raising activity?

Well, sorta, but I am thinking about things like dinners with rich people where the cost of entry is the maximum allowable individual campaign contribution as opposed to asking people to donate at a rally where anyone can attend free.

Stump speeches are campaign speeches delivered to multiple groups, using the same text or talking points, named because candidates used to often stand on tree stumps to deliver them as they went from town to town. So, “stumping” is often used to refer to traveling and giving speeches. I suppose it could include speeches given to donors and small groups, but I think the connotation has more to do with speaking to the masses.

I get that. Ideally (and every candidate will hope that) if you listened to his stump speech you will donate to the campaign. With a fundraising event the candidate is more explicitly soliciting donations, I suppose. What I was getting at is that one cannot clearly distinguish between fundraising and non-fundraising activities because everything they do is a fundraiser in a way.


Has anyone ever tried to calculate how many $ you need to “buy” (through legal campaign activites) one vote? Like if candidate A raises an extra million dollars he can expect a certain gain in votes?

Think of it as fundraising events being those where you have to pay to get access and non-fundraising events where you don’t have to pay anything, they just want your enthusiasm, at least for voting, though they would be happy for donations.

There’s no direct correlation. Some people have spent tons of money for little return. It’s more like you need a certain amount of money for the media to consider you to be a serious candidate. Then, you need to keep pace with other candidates so that the media doesn’t beat you up in reporting on the financial horse race.

A quick google turned up some old estimates that an extra $100,000 would be worth slightly less than 1,700 votes.

But, as both that article and the next link argue, it’s hard to come up with a clean model for a bunch of reasons, including (1) relatively small sample size with lots of confounding factors (for example, television ad rates vary a lot between markets, so a year where the candidates were buying tons of airtime in, say, Miami would look different than a race in Wyoming. Using mailers has a different impact than rallies or facebook ads, etc). and (2) the marginal cost of winning over a swing voter may be different than the cost of turning out someone in your base.

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You probably don’t get it because this is probably illegal in Germany and most countries with reasonable protections against corruption, but politicians in the US go to events at mansions where people pay up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to have dinner with them.

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