Buying IBM.
The way I see it, when we talk about money in politics, there are actually two separate crises — money as a corrupting influence (the “millionaires and billionaires”) and money as just a lazy fucking habit — and the second is worse.
Spend any amount of time with someone running any kind of electoral program, and they’ll probably ask you the same exact questions — can you donate money, can you send us your volunteers, can you make calls / send mail / knock doors / buy ads — and what this really boils down to is just throwing money at a numbers game. Sure, every now and then something will crop up with an incredible conversion rate (mass texting in 2020), but they invariably collapse to the same overall levels of return as everything else. Truly great mass market sales channels are inherently unstable, whether they’re eroded by scammy exploits, tuned out by audiences, or eventually just priced according to their actual value. It doesn’t matter if a sales channel is good, or if your ad is good. Those things help, but ultimately, it’s about finding the right combination of conversion rates and prices across channels to cover the right demographics, and throwing enough money at the problem to make the numbers work. When record voter turnout looks like 60%, and a midterm election can see rates as low as 30%, this strategy starts to make sense. Shifting an un-winnable district from 90-10 to 80-20 might seem like a waste of resources, but if it shifts a statewide race by .01%, that might be all you need. The really seasoned operatives, with the most insight into the numbers, know that there’s always more water to be wrung from the stone. It’ll just take a few more million dollars. Don’t have that on you? Maybe you’re just not really committed. Fuck you.
This is almost the entirety of campaign work; sure, there’s a real vision somewhere, but the message most voters will actually hear will be focus-grouped and A/B tested to death by the time it shows up in a preroll ad on YouTube. And I don’t mean to say there aren’t real differences between candidates (they’re astronomical!) or even reasons to be enthusiastic, but the lesson to draw from sub-50% voter turnout isn’t that people don’t care, and just need to be sold harder. It’s that no one has given them a real reason to care yet. Issues consistently poll higher than politicians. If you can’t sell your product without running sensationalized ads or sending 20 million unsolicited texts, maybe your product is actually shit. And if it isn’t, it’s clear that you don’t really believe that.
The classic thing to say is, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” And when someone in a nice suit shows you the numbers, it’s hard to argue, even when you know there ought to be a better way. Because if you stick to your gut, and you fail, you’ll have nothing to defend yourself with. If the IBM purchase isn’t cutting it, well, you can always spend a little more money. It’s about fear, and shame, and from them, the death of creativity. No one in politics is the carpenter polishing the back of the chest of drawers.
I can think of two politicians charting a slightly different path. But Donald Trump, poster-in-chief and the king of earned media, isn’t selling you anything original, he’s just the IBM sales rep who will do a line of cocaine with you in the boardroom, and Bernie Sanders, for everything he’s ushered in with the innovation of small-dollar-donor-led campaigns, might as well be selling you an IBM PC Compatible. It’s still just money.
And that’s the thing. It’s that second problem, the lazy habit of throwing money at the numbers, that makes the first problem possible. You can’t buy something unless it’s for sale.