Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
AnthonyMouse 2 days ago [-]
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
This seems like a falsifiable theory.
Find a candidate who is extremely anti-establishment. They want to break up all the big companies, do the thing DOGE was supposed to do and then return the money to the middle class, reform the healthcare laws to get the cost of healthcare under control at the expense of the big healthcare companies, etc. Then have them not change their positions for money. This should be popular, right? Run on a platform of peeling off all the leeches; the thing the majority of voters actually want.
Then the leeches won't give them any money, and then we get to find out what happens. Do they win because they're doing the thing the voters want or do they lose because they don't get any money?
mindslight 16 hours ago [-]
I'd say they lose because the media talks about their non-electability as a done deal. Even if we didn't have plurality primaries, there's a strong pull for people to only support candidates they think are going to win. So this type of candidate is in that 3% polling target you've already excepted (and it's only that high if they're doing well in spite of the media!).
I tried applying our argument while considering the validating [0] media coverage as a type of lobbying (in-kind donation. But I think this is being too reductive, and the two are really different types of support. We've seen candidates that are independently-wealthy outsiders come into political races trying to spend their way to legitimacy, and how they end up being portrayed.
[0] ie casting a character as a serious candidate regardless of whether they're judged as "good" or "bad"
(also, nit: "DOGE" did exactly what it was "supposed to" do. it would have taken a much different type of nuanced approach to actually trim fat to cut down spending while not being penny wise and pound foolish)
longislandguido 2 days ago [-]
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
__loam 2 days ago [-]
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.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
This "Democratic party has low approval" thing is a canard. The Democrats have low approval because Congress has low approval and because the Democratic base is angry we're fully out of power right now. Many of the people responding to polls saying they disapprove of the party would crawl across broken glass to vote for them in the midterm general.
longislandguido 2 days ago [-]
You may have misunderstood my point.
I'm not discrediting anything except the notion that this was business as usual and the winners were as expected.
The article was simply the first I found as reference (could not remember the original source I read about this) and I make no comment on its bias.
This is starting to get into 2015 "nothing to see here, Donald Trump will never win" levels of denial.
__loam 2 days ago [-]
I may be taking out some frustration on you undeservedly here.
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
Abughazaleh has 0 experience governing. To claim that she is actually interested in delivering public services when there is literally no evidence of that is laughable. There were 2 other candidates in this race from the insurgent left as you call it, both were local and have experience governing. If the insurgent left voters backed either of them they very likely would have won. Instead they backed a tiktok clown and it cost them.
burningChrome 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
__loam 1 days ago [-]
Everyone I've spoken to that actually lives in New York city was very happy with the plow schedules. I'm also under the impression that they approached many of these homeless people multiple times over several days to try to get them into shelters but many refused help.
bombcar 2 days ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 2 days ago [-]
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!
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about
Not if you correct for incumbency. The thing people want to talk about is that money buys elections.
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
The whole point is that “money buys elections” is what’s under discussion - is it true? Does it, or does the money spent, even if it correlates, not cause?
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> whole point is that “money buys elections” is what’s under discussion - is it true?
No. What is true is candidates and NGOs push this angle, and folks who lose elections like it as an explanation for why they aren’t represented.
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
[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
17 hours ago [-]
yborg 1 days ago [-]
The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
uoaei 1 days ago [-]
Your statement is one of those "not even wrong" pedantic ploys that falls apart at the lightest sneeze in its direction.
Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives
It’s not. Every piece of state and federal legislation I personally wrote language into passed before I was wealthy. Showing up is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Being decent and eloquent when you do is impossible for the rest.
I’ve donated to get power and gotten involved. The latter absolutely smites the former, to the point that donors are almost being taken for a ride outside a few idiot candidates who unfailingly lose.
onlyrealcuzzo 2 days ago [-]
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
elgenie 1 days ago [-]
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.
epolanski 2 days ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 2 days ago [-]
> cannot receive donations directly anymore
Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.
actionfromafar 1 days ago [-]
Not all.
drysine 2 days ago [-]
owe
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
Maybe it's a sign that your "pennies on the dollar" theory needs some work?
uoaei 1 days ago [-]
Reinforcing the status quo is one of the primary reasons lobbying is deployed.
You can trust that people with money are frugal and only spend when they expect to see a return.
If the region was going to go that way anyway, then the lobbying was wasted spend. So what would you rather have as your truth: that the money was spent to overturn public will, or that it was a dumb error to spend that money in the first place? What does that say about the people who see the status quo as something worth preserving?
gigatexal 2 days ago [-]
This bodes well for democracy. Hopefully things stay such that they can’t be bought. Once they can be we are in trouble.
daft_pink 2 days ago [-]
Pretty sure primary sending isn’t very helpful when it’s intended to change election results.
What’s helpful is donating to people who you already know are going to win so that they do you favors later on.
itsdesmond 2 days ago [-]
The article suggests something like 90% of their spend was intended to change results. Can you help me understand your comment? I don’t get it.
arijun 2 days ago [-]
They are saying that was a bad strategy and not the usual one. I have no idea to what extent that’s true.
shimman 2 days ago [-]
It's the same strategy they used in 2024 to a great effect: if you are against the crypto industry we will attack you. Not support the other candidate, but just attack you.
The intention is to not waste money on supporting candidates, but to attack those that challenge the crypto industry.
It's a very unique strategy in US politics that has been deployed quite successfully at varying times (Bill Clinton, uber, airbnb). Now with the elites being so brazen about their opulence they're taking it to the extreme.
2 days ago [-]
vasco 2 days ago [-]
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.
itsdesmond 2 days ago [-]
Sure but like… he’s just some fucking guy on a tech comment thread (as are we all). You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes? Nah. The people who won wouldn’t take their money. It had to be those losers.
This is not a story about people being bad at bribing, it’s a story about The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes. Not necessarily because they took crypto money, more because shit policy positions usually come in sets, and we’re not into it.
daft_pink 1 days ago [-]
I mean that receiving election funding generally just correlates with winning and it doesn’t cause winning.
Everyone wants to write checks to the winner, because they think they will win. But writing checks to some random candidate doesn’t result in them suddenly winning.
blitzar 2 days ago [-]
> The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes
The people voted for candidates who were openly taking bribes from other people.
> You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes?
Crypto bros know better and wont hire the professionals
itsdesmond 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
shimman 2 days ago [-]
I understand the frustration but you realize how brazen the US is about bribes right? It's not a bribe unless you say "I'm giving you this money as a bribe." That's the legal standard SCOTUS has declared.
itsdesmond 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, for sure. That’s why I vote for candidates that refuse PAC money from crypto and otherwise. This goof is lazily and without evidence asserting that there exists no good option. I dunno if they wanna just be smug or if they’re actively trying to dissuade participation, but I don’t need it either way.
elgenie 1 days ago [-]
That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent.
But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.
rfw300 2 days ago [-]
On those terms, they also wasted a lot of cash. 90% of it went to candidates who lost (or opposing candidates who won).
lotsofpulp 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
blitzar 2 days ago [-]
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.
lern_too_spel 1 days ago [-]
Why would a candidate compromise their platform like that if they aren't going to lose without those donations and won't even lose if the money is spent against them?
mmahd7456 2 days ago [-]
Throwing money at a Republican primary candidate in Illinois is probably as ineffective as it would be in New York. The big cities are just too deeply Democratic.
lern_too_spel 1 days ago [-]
It's a primary. They put money against one Democrat in the hopes that some other Democrat who doesn't know about regulating crypto grifts will win.
ETH_start 1 days ago [-]
"Regulating crypto grifts" is a nice euphemism for prohibiting mutually voluntary economic interactions involving digital currency, and putting open source developers in prison:
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."
lern_too_spel 1 days ago [-]
"Mutually voluntary economic interactions" is a nice euphemism for scams. Yes, the people who get hoodwinked in a scam enter into these agreements voluntarily, but we as a society want to discourage scammers because we don't want to deal with the economic cost of people losing their life savings. We also don't want to incentivize sanctioned countries to build ransomware industries propped up by naive economically illiterate people buying into decentralized ponzi schemes.
ETH_start 24 hours ago [-]
Going after scams was never the issue. Actual scammers were prosecuted, and no one objected to that. In fact prosecutions against scammers have recently ramped up, and people in crypto are ecstatic that those individuals are finally facing justice. The issue was that under the previous administration more than 20 startups were being targeted without evidence of fraud, while regulators were pushing rules so overbroad that they would have made vast areas of DeFi presumptively illegal before any misconduct occurred.
As for this resort to national security justifications for the clampdown:
The countries the U.S. sanctions are sanctioned because they are authoritarian hellholes that strip their citizens of their rights in the name of national security. That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security. Indicting a software developer for money laundering because he released open source code that allows people to transact privately on a blockchain is so beyond the pale that it's hard to believe this is what the officials in charge believe in.
And this approach to risk management is objectively ruinous. It's because North Korea strips its people of freedom in the name of security that its economy is smaller than Kansas'. We shouldn't emulate that.
lern_too_spel 21 hours ago [-]
> Going after scams was never the issue. Actual scammers were prosecuted
Anybody who tells you to buy crypto is either a scammer or somebody being scammed. There clearly aren't enough prosecutions.
> That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security
The freedom to be scammed has never been protected, nor should it be.
ETH_start 14 hours ago [-]
So now you want to classify any advocacy for crypto as an investment a scam and prohibit it. That would be a massive infringement on the First Amendment and basically a repudiation of any principle associated with a free society.
Is this kind of censorship law what you meant by a Democrat "regulating crypto"?
Arainach 2 days ago [-]
Is there a writeup of the objectives of lobbying/spending here? Are specific bills/topics proposed for the upcoming session?
shagie 1 days ago [-]
Chicago is the home of the Chicago commodities exchange... and like New York has a bit of influence over businesses dealing with banking taking place in New York, so too does Illinois have influence over the regulations around the question of commodities and related markets.
Note that this election has no impact over the current congress. Senators and Reps won't be seated until January.
2 days ago [-]
buddhistdude 2 days ago [-]
"The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries"
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
Quinner 2 days ago [-]
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
DFHippie 2 days ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 2 days ago [-]
What? Are you trying to say their spending had no effect because their spending had no effect?
KellyCriterion 2 days ago [-]
..could be a built-in feature of the matter?
:-D
stuaxo 23 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a good thing.
BurningFrog 2 days ago [-]
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
lagniappe 2 days ago [-]
>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
bombcar 2 days ago [-]
Having been involved in some political campaigns and movements, I totally believe that nobody knows the ROI on where the dollars are going.
BurningFrog 11 hours ago [-]
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!
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
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.
ozgrakkurt 2 days ago [-]
“Good investment” is looking a bit suspicious there
BurningFrog 17 hours ago [-]
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!
lern_too_spel 1 days ago [-]
Good. I vote against anybody who is supported by crypto pacs as one of my top priorities in primaries. Unfortunately, Schiff beat Porter for the Senate seat in California, but happily the grifting Rishi Kumar continues to lose every seat he runs for.
jmyeet 2 days ago [-]
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
I Will never understand why US allows this kind of political intervention.
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
Pesky thing called the First Amendment.
culi 1 days ago [-]
If Mongolia pays a bunch of US citizens to vote for some candidate that promises to push the US towards militarily supporting Mongolia, do you think the First Amendment supports that?
Or more accurately, imagine if the US had special rules and exceptions for dual citizens of Mongolia and the US that don't exist for any other country and then it allowed those dual citizens to push for certain candidates without having to be registered as a foreign lobby.
Now try substituting Mongolia with Russia or China.
chimeracoder 2 days ago [-]
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
8note 1 days ago [-]
Even still, this is money on how a private entity decides who its going to support for a future election.
None of these people are even running for government yet.
If the democratic party wanted to so something about it, they could, but the freedom of expression and association guarantees that a party that wants to have lots of money spent on ads an such can do it
kubb 2 days ago [-]
They really interpret the First to protect lobbying and campaign donations?
I mean the Second as written also isn’t primarily about the right to pack heat, so it’s not that surprising.
Henchman21 2 days ago [-]
Citizens United is an abomination. Its the reason we're in dire straits at present. It "legalized" bribery.
vkou 2 days ago [-]
Money is speech, and is sacred, but books with gay people in them aren't speech, and need to be carefully controlled.
wyre 2 days ago [-]
Citizens United cough
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
A case where the opposition claimed that under a correct reading of the Constitution they had the authority to ban books.
I don't like lobbying and campaign finance either, but people shouldn't pretend these are simple or absurd arguments.
polothesecond 2 days ago [-]
If donating money is free speech why don’t you try giving some to a group categorized as a terrorist organization
PearlRiver 2 days ago [-]
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.
ourmandave 2 days ago [-]
I don't understand why they'd throw an election so the other pro-Israel side can win.
t-3 2 days ago [-]
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?
HDThoreaun 2 days ago [-]
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
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.
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
I mean we can be honest here about how she performed. I just dont believe that you dont find it surprising that a carpetbagger with no experience and zero ground game got 26% of the vote and the winner only got 29%.
> Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender
All she needed to do was convince Simmons or Bushra to drop out and she wins. She didnt need any of the Biss or Fine votes
> But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.
If she got every of Amiwala's votes she literally wins by more than 1%
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
Fair enough. If she had taken every one of Amiwala's votes, she'd have won by ~2000 votes.
amavect 1 days ago [-]
>imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed
Approval makes the game theory too complicated imo. Too easy to think of cases where a voter leaves off someone because they want their favorite to win but then ends up with neither winning. STAR is the best but voters might be too stupid to figure it out. Really multi district is the best but unfortunately no chance of that happening it seems
amavect 1 days ago [-]
I think the threat of unapproved candidates winning would lower a voter's approval threshold to include other candidates. Increasing the approval threshold happens when the voter likes all of the candidates, in which case there isn't too much of a problem.
I really want to believe that ordinary people can handle STAR voting. Not too far from product reviews: most will initially vote 5, 4, or 0. As long as the system encourages more honest voting (instead of lesser-evil voting), it can help fix our corrupt political system.
Full agreement with multi district/proportional, but I don't know how to sell it to normal people (they want THEIR representative).
jmyeet 2 days ago [-]
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".
tptacek 1 days ago [-]
She had exactly the same policy profile on China and Taiwan as every other Democrat in congress and didn't change that until a bunch of tankies on Twitter jumped her about it, because she is susceptible to Twitter tankies, which is something you can't say about Fine or Biss, and is a small part of why Biss won.
Nobody in her district cares about her Taiwan position. It's not a real issue. But she made it one because Ryan Grim or Hasan Piker (I forget which) got mad about it. Because she's terminally online, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants a terminally online congressperson.
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
Oh I agree she ran a better campaign given that there isnt ranked chocie voting. Im just stating that I am very unhappy that 25% of the dem electorate are looking for clown meme candidates. Thats by far the biggest lesson from her campaign, 25% of primary voters do not care about anything other than memeage. I cant say thats a good way to get competent politicians but it is now the world we live in.
> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.
Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them
__loam 2 days ago [-]
This is what I've been saying to the people who blame the voters for Trump's win in 2024. Democrats knew how dangerous he was and how weak of a candidate he should have been and they still decided to skip the primary and run an unpopular candidate so late in the race after it became clear that Biden wasn't going to make it after the first debate. They met a serious and decisive moment with incompetence and the public is facing the consequences of that. They should be taking this all more seriously and doing introspection on the loss rather than blaming the voters.
tootie 2 days ago [-]
AIPAC was promoting the third place finisher. They opposed both Biss and Abugazeleh who finished first and second.
delecti 2 days ago [-]
In his victory speech, Biss credited J Street. So still Israel, just not AIPAC specifically.
tootie 1 days ago [-]
J Street is specifically anti-war, anti-settlement and pro-justice.
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
jmyeet 2 days ago [-]
Did you miss the part where I said that the AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated PAC spending never mentions Israel?
tptacek 2 days ago [-]
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the results were identical to just one cycle ago where AIPAC wasn't a factor at all? I'm a politically engaged Illinois Democrat (to the point where I have precinct maps of CD7 and CD9 running for local political discussions), I understand what AIPAC was doing here. Unfortunately for your argument, it doesn't appear to have had any effect.
jmyeet 2 days ago [-]
First, IL-7 was nothing like it was in 2024. What are you talking about? In 2024, a 14 term incumbent, Danny Davis, was seeking reelection. Now there's some noise here because IL-7 changed in the 2021 redistricting and became more Democratic but still, Davis is a long-time veteran.
Davis was a progressive but has a more mixed record on Israel funding and defence bills. He's concered with what he has called a "humanitarian crisis", which is more than most, but never gone so far as to use terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" AFAIK.
Davis faced challenges in 2024 but won pretty handily. One of his challengers wasa the future 2026 AIPAC chosen candidate, Melissa Conyears-Ervin. AIPAC indirectly (eg through UDP) spent millions [1] in the IL-7 Democratic primary and still came in third.
So, IL-7 in 2026 was a massively funded primary in an open field with no incumbent and 2024 was a 14 term incumbent seeking reelection without massive spending. In what way are they comparable?
Bonus question: if millions are spent to oppose a candidate and they still win, how can you say the results were "identical"?
MCE got the same votes she did in the 2024 primary in 2026. It's not complicated; just get the precinct level results, give them to Claude, and tell it "put this on a map". Remember you'll need precinct results both from Cook County and Chicago. She played in exactly the same parts of the CD7 map that she did last cycle, and ranked the same.
Tell me what AIPAC had to do with that, given that AIPAC was not involved in her 2024 run.
Rendered at 07:51:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
> 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.
This seems like a falsifiable theory.
Find a candidate who is extremely anti-establishment. They want to break up all the big companies, do the thing DOGE was supposed to do and then return the money to the middle class, reform the healthcare laws to get the cost of healthcare under control at the expense of the big healthcare companies, etc. Then have them not change their positions for money. This should be popular, right? Run on a platform of peeling off all the leeches; the thing the majority of voters actually want.
Then the leeches won't give them any money, and then we get to find out what happens. Do they win because they're doing the thing the voters want or do they lose because they don't get any money?
I tried applying our argument while considering the validating [0] media coverage as a type of lobbying (in-kind donation. But I think this is being too reductive, and the two are really different types of support. We've seen candidates that are independently-wealthy outsiders come into political races trying to spend their way to legitimacy, and how they end up being portrayed.
[0] ie casting a character as a serious candidate regardless of whether they're judged as "good" or "bad"
(also, nit: "DOGE" did exactly what it was "supposed to" do. it would have taken a much different type of nuanced approach to actually trim fat to cut down spending while not being penny wise and pound foolish)
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lefty-influencer-kat...
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
I'm not discrediting anything except the notion that this was business as usual and the winners were as expected.
The article was simply the first I found as reference (could not remember the original source I read about this) and I make no comment on its bias.
This is starting to get into 2015 "nothing to see here, Donald Trump will never win" levels of denial.
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.
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!
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.
Not if you correct for incumbency. The thing people want to talk about is that money buys elections.
No. What is true is candidates and NGOs push this angle, and folks who lose elections like it as an explanation for why they aren’t represented.
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
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.
Money doesn’t buy elections. Someone gets shocked about this every cycle when the overwhelmingly-funded toast sandwich lands with a thud.
Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.
It’s not. Every piece of state and federal legislation I personally wrote language into passed before I was wealthy. Showing up is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Being decent and eloquent when you do is impossible for the rest.
I’ve donated to get power and gotten involved. The latter absolutely smites the former, to the point that donors are almost being taken for a ride outside a few idiot candidates who unfailingly lose.
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.
Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.
You can trust that people with money are frugal and only spend when they expect to see a return.
If the region was going to go that way anyway, then the lobbying was wasted spend. So what would you rather have as your truth: that the money was spent to overturn public will, or that it was a dumb error to spend that money in the first place? What does that say about the people who see the status quo as something worth preserving?
What’s helpful is donating to people who you already know are going to win so that they do you favors later on.
The intention is to not waste money on supporting candidates, but to attack those that challenge the crypto industry.
It's a very unique strategy in US politics that has been deployed quite successfully at varying times (Bill Clinton, uber, airbnb). Now with the elites being so brazen about their opulence they're taking it to the extreme.
This is not a story about people being bad at bribing, it’s a story about The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes. Not necessarily because they took crypto money, more because shit policy positions usually come in sets, and we’re not into it.
Everyone wants to write checks to the winner, because they think they will win. But writing checks to some random candidate doesn’t result in them suddenly winning.
The people voted for candidates who were openly taking bribes from other people.
> You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes?
Crypto bros know better and wont hire the professionals
But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.
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."
As for this resort to national security justifications for the clampdown:
The countries the U.S. sanctions are sanctioned because they are authoritarian hellholes that strip their citizens of their rights in the name of national security. That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security. Indicting a software developer for money laundering because he released open source code that allows people to transact privately on a blockchain is so beyond the pale that it's hard to believe this is what the officials in charge believe in.
And this approach to risk management is objectively ruinous. It's because North Korea strips its people of freedom in the name of security that its economy is smaller than Kansas'. We shouldn't emulate that.
Anybody who tells you to buy crypto is either a scammer or somebody being scammed. There clearly aren't enough prosecutions.
> That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security
The freedom to be scammed has never been protected, nor should it be.
Is this kind of censorship law what you meant by a Democrat "regulating crypto"?
https://nationaltoday.com/us/il/chicago/news/2026/02/24/cme-...
https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/commod...
Another bit is things like sports betting laws... and how they interact with prediction markets.
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/sports-betting-tax-beco...
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/illinois-regulators-say...
They're concerned about regulation, as always.
Note that this election has no impact over the current congress. Senators and Reps won't be seated until January.
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
:-D
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
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!
I won't spend hours chasing down such studies. If you're interested, ask an AI for references!
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
Nobody cares about crypto.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/aipac-israel-illino...
[2]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead...
[3]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-autopsy-gaza-...
Or more accurately, imagine if the US had special rules and exceptions for dual citizens of Mongolia and the US that don't exist for any other country and then it allowed those dual citizens to push for certain candidates without having to be registered as a foreign lobby.
Now try substituting Mongolia with Russia or China.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
None of these people are even running for government yet.
If the democratic party wanted to so something about it, they could, but the freedom of expression and association guarantees that a party that wants to have lots of money spent on ads an such can do it
I mean the Second as written also isn’t primarily about the right to pack heat, so it’s not that surprising.
I don't like lobbying and campaign finance either, but people shouldn't pretend these are simple or absurd arguments.
And this is not an American thing every country has its lobbying industry.
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.
> Kat had a thing she needed to do in order to be a contender
All she needed to do was convince Simmons or Bushra to drop out and she wins. She didnt need any of the Biss or Fine votes
> But even with every one of Amiwala's votes, she still had no chance.
If she got every of Amiwala's votes she literally wins by more than 1%
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
I really want to believe that ordinary people can handle STAR voting. Not too far from product reviews: most will initially vote 5, 4, or 0. As long as the system encourages more honest voting (instead of lesser-evil voting), it can help fix our corrupt political system.
Full agreement with multi district/proportional, but I don't know how to sell it to normal people (they want THEIR representative).
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".
Nobody in her district cares about her Taiwan position. It's not a real issue. But she made it one because Ryan Grim or Hasan Piker (I forget which) got mad about it. Because she's terminally online, and everybody knows it, and nobody wants a terminally online congressperson.
> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.
Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
Davis was a progressive but has a more mixed record on Israel funding and defence bills. He's concered with what he has called a "humanitarian crisis", which is more than most, but never gone so far as to use terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" AFAIK.
Davis faced challenges in 2024 but won pretty handily. One of his challengers wasa the future 2026 AIPAC chosen candidate, Melissa Conyears-Ervin. AIPAC indirectly (eg through UDP) spent millions [1] in the IL-7 Democratic primary and still came in third.
So, IL-7 in 2026 was a massively funded primary in an open field with no incumbent and 2024 was a 14 term incumbent seeking reelection without massive spending. In what way are they comparable?
Bonus question: if millions are spent to oppose a candidate and they still win, how can you say the results were "identical"?
[1]: https://chicagocrusader.com/la-shawn-ford-wins-7th-district-...
Tell me what AIPAC had to do with that, given that AIPAC was not involved in her 2024 run.