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. The thread I think of the most, partly because it keeps reemerging, was the insistence that one, anyone, could just buy an election.

TRUMP

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 and 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, 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.” 

But that math never quite made sense, at least to some of us. 470 accounts spending a total of $100,000 on 3,000 ads over two years, long before and long after the election, didn’t seem like the heavy thumb on the scale of democracy it was framed as. And all of that was made more ludicrous when everyone claiming to be hostile to Trump could be seen spending seemingly all of their time keeping the man's name in perpetual reverberation in the news, broadsheet exposés, magazine think-pieces, celebrity interviews, government press briefings, late night talk shows and comedy skits, and more. All of this, most agreed, had to have amounted to not less than a half a bazillion dollars in free campaign advertising. Still, the $100 grand ad spend by three millennials in Moscow, maybe, or whatever, remains the most compelling evidence for 2016 election interference I've ever come across. And, like you, I was led to believe this infinitesimal investment had a real impact on the outcome of that country's federal election. Money can, or so everyone attested, buy you love — but maybe only if you are (by all popular accounting) the most detestable creature to have ever lived.

BLOOMBERG

Then, 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.

Astonishingly, the presidential hopeful managed to spend all that money 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 general election campaign, over the period of a year and a half. But 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 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 spent on social media-based election interference — do to influence a close race in just one state? Less than nothing. Biden and the Democrats wound up losing Florida by hundreds of thousands of votes.

HARRIS

Four years from that outlandish waste of resources, the Harris-Walz campaign sought to make a name for themselves by far outdoing Bloomberg’s splurge. Kamala Harris raised a record breaking amount of money that amounted 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. But the story is much wilder than the mere obscenity of the raw figure.

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 results were 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’re seeking to have that money do the most good.) 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 and buying ads for television and online for this narrow audience within this narrow timeline — and, as we all witnessed, with 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.)

Yet her campaign had far more money than this that they needed to spend. As such her team was inexplicably doing things like dropping six figures to construct temporary, one-time podcast sets (for a podcast virtually no one saw) or, in another case, $2.5 million on a production, to hire staff and build elaborate sets to put together a scripted and polished town hall with Oprah (who says she was paid nothing for the event, which is a real problem, but more on that in a sec) and a large coterie of A-list Hollywood celebrities — that would only land a million or two views over the span of a whole month. They conducted many such orchestrations, forking out millions to friends and allies, while her competition was instead having long-form conversations on some of the most popular podcasts on the planet, at none of the expense and with none of the curation, while picking up as many views every 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 receiving something on the order of 50 million total views. Were there another 25 or 50 million on Spotify and Apple podcasts? Probably...)

Even with all that, I don’t know how her campaign could conceivably spend the remainder of their campaign donations. If they spent $50 million on this sort of thing, where did the remaining, what, $850 million go? Even if you bought ten private jets, had a hundred staff each paid a million dollars to zoom around in those jets all day and throw mittfuls of Jacksons, Grants, and Benjamins from the cockpit window, I don’t know how you would burn through that kind of dough. Again, there were only seven states deemed to be determinative of the election and there was only a few weeks in which to spend.

To look at 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, homes and real estate. He also has a serious philanthropic project distributing cash, clothing, food, and even critical surgery to people in war zones and others living in 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, days. And, of course, not only was the election lost, and the biggest names tell us they didn’t collect million 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… nothing. 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? They could have taken a thousand people and paid each $1,000 a day to give away $10 million dollars in $100 grocery, hardware store, and game shop gift cards to 100,000 people across a dozen different towns every single day of the campaign. That would have positively impacted more than 10 million people, garnered orders of magnitude more attention, and at a cost of less than $1.2 billion over the same amount of time. (And they could have spent the $300 million remainder on a permanent drone swarm installation situated at Liberty Island in New York Harbor, simulating King Kong climbing up, swinging from, and beating his chest upon the Statue of Liberty.) None of that happened. Instead, America got a Harrison Ford cameo and evidence that Kamala and her supporters grok basic humour less well than some infantile chat bots. And, as if all the above did not happen, folks insisted 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 a burn a trillion dollars in ads and endorsements in just one day! But, the question remains, would that sum be enough even to turn just one swing state? I mean, is there any reason to suspect that it would?