Stop Throwing Your Money Away on Politicians

It is October 21. Kamala Harris has raised record amounts of money. It hasn’t mattered much–it was a tossup election from the moment we finally got Biden to step aside for her and give Democrats a chance and it remains a tossup election today. Leaving beside the depressing nature of that fact, it’s just true. She has all the cash she can use and she is spending it. Yet people are still giving. This is stupid. There is no way to spend that money between now and the election. Even outside the question of the efficacy of all that money–and like the race to defeat Susan Collins, we have clearly reached the point of maximizing returns–it is simply too late to move that money through this election cycle for anything that means anything at all. I doubt at this point it even makes sense to give to downballot candidates, though perhaps on the margins I could be convinced. The consultants and their targeted advertising to get you to give more money–and let’s be clear, that’s what your money is going toward here–are going to tell you that you have to give just this much more or TRUMP WILL WIN, but don’t do that, at this point it just isn’t true.

The real issue of course is that because we liberals lack any kind of institutions to build toward political engagement. we have individualized everything. Yes my friends, we are all neoliberals now. What was once collective is now entirely individualized. We are anxious, so we open our wallets to the grifting consultant class. The focus now should be on GOTV efforts in your local communities. That’s how you build community and political solidarity. You and your friends figuring out which older or disabled residents of your communities need to get to the polls, now that’s useful political action. Telling your 18 year old disinterested family members how to vote and who to vote for, that’s valuable. Talking to people, that’s useful. And it has to be on what matters to them, not on your anxieties about Trump, about which they very well may not care. Remember that organizing starts where people are at, not where you are at.

I have said it before and will continue to say it–spending your hard-earned money on national elections is just flushing it down the toilet, especially with already well-funded campaigns and late in the cycle. But since we have torn down every institution that brought liberals together, from the union hall to the social club to the liberal Protestant church, we have nothing but our anxiety.