A number of people have asked me where money is best spent on elections, or whether it's better to give to the Great Slate (Federal races) or State Slate (state house races in key states). Working on a longer-form answer to this, but the basic idea is nobody can really tell
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We've all got a model in our heads of what this election is about, and wishful thinking about outcomes, but it's a country of 300+ million and real voters are just beyond weird. Also, some long shot candidates are diamonds in the rough, and some sure things are absolute turkeys
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The only proven way to predict who will do well in an election is to wait until after it's over. So the approach I've favored is a kind of general irrigation—you try to remove the limiting resource of campaign money and see what parts of the desert might bloom
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This year,
@askaphysicist has done an amazing job analyzing state races in particular to try to guess where our best chances lie. But we're fundraising as broadly as we can down that list because too often the 'moneyball' approach to politics becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.1 reply 1 retweet 13 likesShow this thread -
Basically, too much is at stake in 2020 to run people at a 6:1 fundraising handicap in a pandemic year, particularly in state races where vote margins are in the low thousands. Beyond that, I have no idea what we're doing—we're just trying something because it's an emergency
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Throughout this whole thing I've been inspired by what I saw in Hong Kong last fall. For a municipal election, they registered 386K new voters (out of 7M population), got 71% turnout, contested every seat, and won in a blowout because they knew it was their last, best chance.
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Our election has way more at stake, so we should also be making an extraordinary effort—and a lot of people are! The problem is our campaign funding system is so convoluted a lot of people don't know how to help effectively. So I'll write about that longer-form and link here.
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Like on the one hand, this is a really cool 50-state guide to US elections, put together by an expert. On the other hand, that expert literally had to eat a bug on national TV in 2016 because he was so wrong about the outcome. We're all flying blind here. https://election.princeton.edu/2020/09/01/new-pec-feature-our-fifty-state-guide-to-the-2020-election/ …
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