BUYING AN ELECTION

I don’t even know how you would explain to future generations what has taken place over the last decade. So much context is needed just to tease out the simplest bits. One of the threads I think of most, partly because it keeps reemerging, is the insistence that one, anyone, can just buy an election.

TRUMP

Just about everyone can recall that the losing side of the 2016 US presidential election, and all their surrogates and supporters, insisted (and still do to this day) that the results and thus the elected president were illegitimate. You’ll also recall that everyone was so certain of this and of the culpable parties that they launched an industrial-scale investigation into Russian meddling. Early on in the Meuller investigation, as it came to be known, there were leaks of various details of what was being investigated and also reports and disclosures from implicated social media companies. And, of course, with what was said to be a civilization deranging scandal, overflowing with libertine perversions of every flavour and scent, the media lapped it all up. In September of 2017, for example, it was reported that “Hundreds of fake Facebook accounts, probably run from Russia, spent about $100,000 on ads” to get Donald Trump elected in 2016. The “information operation” run by a St. Petersburg-based troll farm, we were told, used its dodgy social media accounts to purchase and run “some 3,000 ads between June 2015 and May 2017.”

Some of us wondered if all of this made any sense. We all knew, afterall, that everyone claiming to be hostile to Trump had been seen spending seemingly all of their time keeping the evildoer's name in perpetual reverberation via the 24hr news, regular broadsheet exposés, weekly magazine think-pieces, celebrity interviews, government press briefings, late night talk shows and comedy skits, and more. It was quite nearly wall-to-wall Trump. All of this, most agreed, had to have amounted to not less than a half a bazillion dollars of in-kind campaign advertising. By contrast, 470 accounts spending a total of $100,000 on 3,000 ads over two years, which included periods both long before and long after the election, didn’t seem like the heavy thumb on the scale of democracy that investigators demanded. In fact, it seemed like nothing at all in terms of a counterweight to all the songs, dances, emergency warnings, and exposed opprobrium arriving every hour on the hour attempting to take down Trump.

Still, authorities of every sort explained it was all very technical and sophisticated and Russian, and Trump supporters so muddleheaded and easily manipulated, obviously, that this effort simply must have resulted in the dastardly warping of millions of minds. In his refutation of Lennon and McCartney, Special Council Robert Meuller demanded money, in fact, can buy you love — but maybe only if you're the most detestable creature to have ever lived. Regardless, the $100 grand ad spend executed by three millennials in Moscow, or whatever, remained the most compelling evidence for 2016 election interference I ever came across. And I believed this was somehow plausible; that was, until I was later convinced otherwise by many of these same voices.

BLOOMBERG

Just a few years later, in 2020, came the Bloomberg presidential election run. That year, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg spent an unprecedented $1 billion (of his own money) to try and secure the Democratic nomination. That sum amounted to more than the entire rest of his competition combined, which included the $340 million spent by another billionaire, Tom Steyer, but also the funds from and donations to every other well-known and well-connected person in the running, including: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, Cory Booker, Marianne Williamson, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, Joe Sestak, Wayne Messam, Beto O’Rourke, Tim Ryan, Bill de Blasio, Kirsten Gillibrand, Seth Moulton, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Mike Gravel, Eric Swalwell, Richard Ojeda, and (my personal favourite) Andrew Yang. That's a lot of money and a truly tremendous disparity.

More shocking than the sum, perhaps, was the fact that the presidential hopeful managed to spend all that cash and in just four months! For an appreciation of the scale of that achievement, in 2016 Hillary Clinton spent a combined total of $586 million throughout her entire primary run-up and then her general election campaign as well, over the period of a year and a half. Despite the colossal spend, Bloomberg didn't make it very far and ended up dropping out and endorsing Biden. In his new role as a backer, Bloomberg then turned around and spent $100 million on ads in Florida to support the Democrat campaign when polling there suggested that state was shifting from Democrat-leaning to being closer to a toss-up. And what did all that money — one thousand times what crypto kids from Russia spent on social media-based election interference — do to sway a very close race in just one state? Less than nothing. Biden and the Democrats wound up losing Florida by hundreds of thousands of votes. Money ≠ love.

So what is that, $100k over years could swing a whole federal election but $100M in a month couldn't swing one state? How do these adjacent stories jive? I could never see how they did. Of course, it could all be more complicated than my simple mind was able to resolve; but no one ever appeared to even attempt painting a picture, however abstract, showing how these realities cohere. From my vantage point it just seemed folks moved on to the next thing. And then we arrived in 2024.

HARRIS

Four years from his outlandish waste of resources, the Harris-Walz campaign sought to make a name for themselves by far outdoing Bloomberg's splurge. When she was eventually put up, Kamala Harris raised a record breaking amount of money — a sum amounting to roughly double what Obama brought in for his storied 2008 run. And then, from start to finish, over the span of only three and a half months, the Harris team somehow managed to burn through around $100 million a week or more than $1.5 billion in total. But the story is much wilder than the mere obscenity of the raw figure (and the fact that it appears to have done nothing at all.)

One curious factor is that every bit of polling and election intel suggested the election, in effect, was over before it started in all but seven swing states where the outcome was considered a coin toss. To contrast, the 2016 and 2020 elections were each considered to have 13 such highly competitive states (or places to pour all your donor dollars if you were seeking to have that money do the most good for your cause.) So, again, in 2016 someone like Clinton spent less than half of the Harris war chest, did so over 74 weeks (not in 15 like Harris), and likely spread that out across twice as many states. Still, it is said the Harris crew dispensed with approximately $600 million just producing ads and buying space for them on television and online — again, for a fraction of the Clinton audience and within a far narrower timeline. And, as we all witnessed, there was seemingly no appreciable impact. (One may wonder how Bloomberg’s example, of failing to tip the jump-ball that was Florida in 2020 with a $100,000,000 spend, led those same folks to deploy less funds in each swing state despite far more cash on hand... Could it be that we've finally demonstrated that dollars do not translate into votes?)

The Harris-Walz campaign, however, had far more money than this that they needed to spend: still almost a Bloomberg-run sum remaining. As such, the team was inexplicably doing things like dropping six figures to construct a temporary, one-time podcast set (for a podcast with little audience and that virtually no one saw.) Or, in another case, they forked over $2.5 million on a production to hire staff and build an elaborate set and put together a scripted and polished town hall with the inimitable Oprah (who says she was paid nothing for the event, which is a real problem) and a coterie of A-list Hollywood celebrities — that would only land a million or two views over the span of a whole month. And they conducted many such orchestrations, forking out many millions to friends and allies.

(They did this while the competition was instead having unscripted and unedited long-form conversations on the most popular podcasts on the planet, at none of the expense, while picking up as many views in a single hour. On Youtube alone Rogan’s three-hour podcast with Trump, which was just two guys chatting in an existing studio and absent appearances by Meryl Streep or Mariah Carey, almost doubled in 24hrs the viewership of any game of the World Series or NBA finals — and shortly receiving something on the order of 50 million total views. Were there another 25 or 50 million on Spotify and Apple podcasts, where there are no view numbers made public? Probably...)

Even with all that, I don’t know how the Harris-Walz campaign could have conceivably spent the remainder of their donations. If they spent $50 million on the sort of events above, where did the remaining, what, $850 million go? To consider this another way, Jimmy Donaldson, the famous Youtube personality better known as MrBeast, has made a career out of giving away huge sums of money in the form of cash, technology, automobiles, and real estate. He also has a serious philanthropic project distributing cash, clothing, food, and even critical medicine and surgery to people in war zones and others living in desperate poverty around the globe. In over a decade, from age 15 to 26, he has gifted just $80-$100 million — despite regular single offerings of, for example, one hundred homes or a private island or jet… That’s how hard it is to give away only a tenth of what the Harris-Walz campaign appeared to accomplish in, really, just a matter of days. And, of course, not only was the election lost, and the biggest names (or so they tell us) didn't collect multimillion dollar cheques, but no hospitals were built, no village had all their elders’ cataracts dealt with or amputees given new limbs, and they didn’t feed all the nation’s poorest kids for a month… Right. In fact, they did less than nothing because, and here’s the kicker, they are now seeking further donations because, as it turns out, they went $20 million over budget, with staffers and vendors claiming they have yet to be paid. Zoinks!

So where the heck did all that money go? By my math, even if they bought ten private jets, had a hundred staff each paid a million dollars, to spend three months zooming around all day doing nothing but throwing mittfuls of Jacksons, Grants, and Benjamins from cockpit windows, I don’t know how you would burn through that kind of dough at that pace. Again, there were only seven states deemed to be determinative of the election and there were only a few weeks in which to spend. They could have taken a thousand people and paid each $1,000 a day to give away $10 million dollars in $100 grocery, pharmacy, and hardware store gift cards to 100,000 people across a dozen different towns every single day of the campaign. Doing so would have positively impacted more than 10 million people, garnered orders of magnitude more attention, and still burned through less than $1.2 billion. (And they could have spent the $300 million remainder on Taylor Swift concert and World Series tickets for their superfans or on fomenting dissent in Russia or whatever it is they enjoy doing...) None of that happened. Instead, America got some unseen events and interviews, a Harrison Ford cameo, and evidence that Kamala and her supporters grok basic humour less well than some infantile chat bots.

And at the same time, as if all the above did not happen, folks spent an inordinate amount of time insisting Elon Musk, who contributed $100 million of his own funds to support the Trump campaign, was having an improper and oversized influence on the election. You just cannot make this stuff up!

Maybe next election someone will try to burn a trillion dollars in ads and endorsements in just one day. Until then, the question remains: Would a trillion bucks be enough even to turn just one swing state? I mean, is there any reason at all to suspect that it would? Is there reason to suspect Harris or Clinton or Bloomberg would have done less well with no spending? Someone should probably figure this out.