There’s pretty solid research on how to use money effectively in campaigns, and some low-quality, underexplored research that suggests even better options than what the RCTs suggest. So if the lit says donations make no difference it’s very likely that either campaigns are spending their money poorly, or it’s just poor quality research. So you could simply donate the money to campaigns that plan to spend it effectively.
What are you thinking of? (The only thing that I’ve heard works to change minds is deep canvassing, and I’m not aware of campaigns doing this.)
you could simply donate the money to campaigns that plan to spend it effectively.
Can your name a couple?
It would not be correct to dismiss the political science consensus as bad research. And regardless of whether some spending is effective, the fact is that spending more doesn’t causally affect congressional candidates’ prospects.
+1 to @BlueFalcon’s response below, and I would also add that:
There is indeed research that deep canvassing is effective, but the set of things that you can spend $ on to change people’s minds (“persuasion”) is only a very small subset of things that you can spend $ on in campaigns. For instance, spending $100 to ensure that a voter who already supports you turns out to the polls and votes does not change any minds but does net 1 vote.
There are thousands upon thousands of RCTs compiled over at Analyst Institute on how campaigns can effectively spend $. I shouldn’t share anything too specific, but the research ranges on anything from messaging in a social media ad, timing of certain campaign expenditures, voter persuasion, etc.
Separately from all of the above: I think it is also true that from a donor’s perspective, it is probably difficult to tell which campaigns are spending $ effectively. This is likely a combination of the following factors:
Most effective $ allocation will differ based on the candidate, party, demographic, district, etc.
Campaigns are (perhaps understandably) reluctant to discuss campaign strategy with basically anyone
There is no (publicly-shared) “impact evaluation” for campaigns
Many campaigns may in fact not be spending $ effectively because campaign staffing is extremely talent bottlenecked, and the Peter Principle probably holds strongly in many campaigns (esp smaller ones)
Love the Analyst Institute, which has done herculean amounts of work on figuring this stuff out.
Curious why you think there’s an extreme talent bottleneck for campaign staffing. My impression is they may be hiring the wrong people (i.e. too many people with lots of “experience” but not enough with experience on a modern campaign), but I suspect most decently well-funded campaigns could get the kind of people they wanted if they in fact wanted the right people.
Hmm, I should probably be more specific in defining what I mean by “talent bottleneck in campaigns.” There is probably less of a bottleneck for large campaigns at the presidential/gubernatorial/senate level; I would estimate that on smaller races from House and non-gubernatorial state-level races downward, there is:
A shortage of campaign staffers who have a skillset in campaign management / strategy—I would argue that campaign management / strategy is sufficiently distinct from non-profit / industry / other organizational management / strategy to warrant categorizing as a bottleneck
A shortage of staffers who are highly-skilled in field / organizing. There seem to be a large number of people who are moderately-skilled at this, but a shortage of people who are highly-skilled (weakly-held opinion derived from my personal experience, so I could be wrong about this one)
There is probably not a shortage of people who have the skills for data or digital work, but there is a severe lack of funding + pay is not competitive for these roles in smaller races. There may be a shortage of people with experience working with campaign-specific tools such as VAN or Action Network, but I don’t think this is a bottleneck necessarily as these can be easily picked up if you have certain technical skills
To your point above, there is probably also an information problem in the campaign staffing job market in the sense that:
Prior work history on campaigns seems to be an extremely poor indicator for whether someone is actually good at working on a campaign
There are no good credential / educational indicators that would predict whether someone would be good at a campaign role; this may have changed somewhat with some of the orgs listed below but does lead to things like a severe bias toward hiring from elite schools in Democratic circles (which I think is very bad)
I have a weakly-held belief that most campaign management does not actually know how to hire, so even if they did have funding, they would probably not ask the right questions or do the right outreach to get talented campaign staffers hired
Some of these issues do seem to have gotten better in recent years with the advent of organizations/programs like the NDTC, Arena PAC, Movement School, various apprenticeship/bootcamp programs, etc. There are probably also conservative / Republican analogues to these programs, but I have no clue what they are as I don’t work on that side of the aisle.
Hmmm....what specific skills are the people getting hired in management and field roles missing? If you can break that down further maybe it’s possible to screen for those specific skills. And digging a bit further into this, how do you know the management problem is with the CMs and not the candidates? At the lower levels, you have this weird situation where you get the top job (candidate) by just showing up, but then there’s actually a selection process for the second in command, run by the person who got their job by just showing up.
I go back and forth on my opinion about hiring from elite schools. IME the schools are quite good at skimming the cream, so you will generally be stuck with less talented people if you don’t hire from there. OTOH the culture of elite schools is not the culture of most places in America and staffers’ failure to understand that seems to be a real problem. So idk what the solution is. Hire from elite schools, but only grads who grew up in the state you want them to work in, or a similar state? Hire from the top 10% state schools?
But maybe the inability to get elite school grads to run competent campaigns does point to the absence of skilled campaign managers. After all, these are people who have been quite good at responding to incentives from an early age, so why are they not sufficiently incentivized to understand local values?
I’d probably have to think harder about breaking down the specific skillsets; re: the comments above, hiring seems to be one of the skills that would fall into this subset. It would likely be slightly different for different management roles.
I agree with the weirdness in smaller races, but I think that this may be more of a culture issue than a talent issue—candidates should just learn to rein in their egos, step back, and realize that running a campaign is not a skillset that they have (and that they should let their staff handle it). I’ve worked with candidates who are very good about this, and it makes life much easier on a campaign.
Re: elite schools, I think the part of elite grads being disconnected from the reality of what happens in actual communities is probably true. But a bigger question may be, why hire at schools at all? I’m not sure that the set of skills one needs to be good at campaign roles is even weakly correlated to academic performance / admission to a top US university; people just seem to default to this as a proxy for hiring, and I don’t think it’s a good proxy.
Canvassing is the most cost-effective thing anyone’s run RCTs on, but other things (e.g. phone calls) do definitely move votes.
A lot of mass media stuff no one has really run good experiments, and political scientists seem to have a bias against doing the experiments because canvassing is more of a feel good story than “yes you can influence people’s decisions by impersonal corporate-feeling means”, but the little bit of research that has been done suggests print, radio, and tv are all more cost-effective than canvassing.
Mailers and robocalls are generally ineffective but that’s a far cry from “spending money doesn’t work”.
What are you thinking of? (The only thing that I’ve heard works to change minds is deep canvassing, and I’m not aware of campaigns doing this.)
Can your name a couple?
It would not be correct to dismiss the political science consensus as bad research. And regardless of whether some spending is effective, the fact is that spending more doesn’t causally affect congressional candidates’ prospects.
+1 to @BlueFalcon’s response below, and I would also add that:
There is indeed research that deep canvassing is effective, but the set of things that you can spend $ on to change people’s minds (“persuasion”) is only a very small subset of things that you can spend $ on in campaigns. For instance, spending $100 to ensure that a voter who already supports you turns out to the polls and votes does not change any minds but does net 1 vote.
There are thousands upon thousands of RCTs compiled over at Analyst Institute on how campaigns can effectively spend $. I shouldn’t share anything too specific, but the research ranges on anything from messaging in a social media ad, timing of certain campaign expenditures, voter persuasion, etc.
Separately from all of the above: I think it is also true that from a donor’s perspective, it is probably difficult to tell which campaigns are spending $ effectively. This is likely a combination of the following factors:
Most effective $ allocation will differ based on the candidate, party, demographic, district, etc.
Campaigns are (perhaps understandably) reluctant to discuss campaign strategy with basically anyone
There is no (publicly-shared) “impact evaluation” for campaigns
Many campaigns may in fact not be spending $ effectively because campaign staffing is extremely talent bottlenecked, and the Peter Principle probably holds strongly in many campaigns (esp smaller ones)
Campaign strategy shifts quickly
Love the Analyst Institute, which has done herculean amounts of work on figuring this stuff out.
Curious why you think there’s an extreme talent bottleneck for campaign staffing. My impression is they may be hiring the wrong people (i.e. too many people with lots of “experience” but not enough with experience on a modern campaign), but I suspect most decently well-funded campaigns could get the kind of people they wanted if they in fact wanted the right people.
Hmm, I should probably be more specific in defining what I mean by “talent bottleneck in campaigns.” There is probably less of a bottleneck for large campaigns at the presidential/gubernatorial/senate level; I would estimate that on smaller races from House and non-gubernatorial state-level races downward, there is:
A shortage of campaign staffers who have a skillset in campaign management / strategy—I would argue that campaign management / strategy is sufficiently distinct from non-profit / industry / other organizational management / strategy to warrant categorizing as a bottleneck
A shortage of staffers who are highly-skilled in field / organizing. There seem to be a large number of people who are moderately-skilled at this, but a shortage of people who are highly-skilled (weakly-held opinion derived from my personal experience, so I could be wrong about this one)
There is probably not a shortage of people who have the skills for data or digital work, but there is a severe lack of funding + pay is not competitive for these roles in smaller races. There may be a shortage of people with experience working with campaign-specific tools such as VAN or Action Network, but I don’t think this is a bottleneck necessarily as these can be easily picked up if you have certain technical skills
To your point above, there is probably also an information problem in the campaign staffing job market in the sense that:
Prior work history on campaigns seems to be an extremely poor indicator for whether someone is actually good at working on a campaign
There are no good credential / educational indicators that would predict whether someone would be good at a campaign role; this may have changed somewhat with some of the orgs listed below but does lead to things like a severe bias toward hiring from elite schools in Democratic circles (which I think is very bad)
I have a weakly-held belief that most campaign management does not actually know how to hire, so even if they did have funding, they would probably not ask the right questions or do the right outreach to get talented campaign staffers hired
Some of these issues do seem to have gotten better in recent years with the advent of organizations/programs like the NDTC, Arena PAC, Movement School, various apprenticeship/bootcamp programs, etc. There are probably also conservative / Republican analogues to these programs, but I have no clue what they are as I don’t work on that side of the aisle.
Hmmm....what specific skills are the people getting hired in management and field roles missing? If you can break that down further maybe it’s possible to screen for those specific skills. And digging a bit further into this, how do you know the management problem is with the CMs and not the candidates? At the lower levels, you have this weird situation where you get the top job (candidate) by just showing up, but then there’s actually a selection process for the second in command, run by the person who got their job by just showing up.
I go back and forth on my opinion about hiring from elite schools. IME the schools are quite good at skimming the cream, so you will generally be stuck with less talented people if you don’t hire from there. OTOH the culture of elite schools is not the culture of most places in America and staffers’ failure to understand that seems to be a real problem. So idk what the solution is. Hire from elite schools, but only grads who grew up in the state you want them to work in, or a similar state? Hire from the top 10% state schools?
But maybe the inability to get elite school grads to run competent campaigns does point to the absence of skilled campaign managers. After all, these are people who have been quite good at responding to incentives from an early age, so why are they not sufficiently incentivized to understand local values?
I’d probably have to think harder about breaking down the specific skillsets; re: the comments above, hiring seems to be one of the skills that would fall into this subset. It would likely be slightly different for different management roles.
I agree with the weirdness in smaller races, but I think that this may be more of a culture issue than a talent issue—candidates should just learn to rein in their egos, step back, and realize that running a campaign is not a skillset that they have (and that they should let their staff handle it). I’ve worked with candidates who are very good about this, and it makes life much easier on a campaign.
Re: elite schools, I think the part of elite grads being disconnected from the reality of what happens in actual communities is probably true. But a bigger question may be, why hire at schools at all? I’m not sure that the set of skills one needs to be good at campaign roles is even weakly correlated to academic performance / admission to a top US university; people just seem to default to this as a proxy for hiring, and I don’t think it’s a good proxy.
Political science consensus? Setting aside the generally poor quality of social science research, as noted in the recent replication crisis, Green and Gerber wrote a whole book on what works. See https://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Vote-Increase-Turnout/dp/0815736932/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OHCY3DHNYA8S&keywords=get+out+the+vote&qid=1651864901&sprefix=get+out+the+%2Caps%2C87&sr=8-1.
Canvassing is the most cost-effective thing anyone’s run RCTs on, but other things (e.g. phone calls) do definitely move votes.
A lot of mass media stuff no one has really run good experiments, and political scientists seem to have a bias against doing the experiments because canvassing is more of a feel good story than “yes you can influence people’s decisions by impersonal corporate-feeling means”, but the little bit of research that has been done suggests print, radio, and tv are all more cost-effective than canvassing.
Mailers and robocalls are generally ineffective but that’s a far cry from “spending money doesn’t work”.
Zach, can you provide a source that it is “about zero”?
Hmm, no. I retract my “about zero” and “political science consensus” claims until learning more.