This is an excellent post, one slightly subtle point about the political dynamics that I think it misses is the circumstances around BoldPAC’s investment in Salinas.
BoldPAC is the superpac for Hispanic House Democrats. It happens to be the case that in the 2022 election cycle there is a Hispanic state legislator (Andrea Salinas) living in a blue-leaning open US House of Representatives seat. It also happens to be the case that given the ups and downs of the political cycle, this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year. So just as it’s basically happenstance the the EA community got involved in the Oregon 6th as opposed to some other district, it’s also happenstance that BoldPAC was deeply invested in this race. It’s not a heavily Hispanic area or anything, Salinas just happens to be Latina.
If it was an Anglo state legislator holding down the seat, the “flood the zone with unanswered money” strategy might have worked. And if there were four other promising Hispanic prospects in the 2022 cycle, it also might have worked because BoldPAC might have been persuaded that it wasn’t worth going toe-to-toe with Protect Our Future. Now what’s true is POF was able to massively outspend BoldPAC but that became a diminishing marginal returns dynamic. Salinas had enough money to make it a competitive race not because there is some deep-pocked anti-EA lobby that was out to get Carrick Flynn, his aspirations just collided with another agenda by coincidence.
So even though Salinas won by a pretty hefty margin, I think the counterfactual in which he wins does not require particularly large changes.
Now of course weird shit is going to potentially stand in your way in any race you try to run in. But I think it underscores the fact that if EA wants to play in electoral politics it will ultimately be important to have more candidates running in more races, even if that means less superpac spending per candidate.
Where to even start here? Nearly every fact in this post is wrong, the interpretation of events is backwards, and the conclusion is contrarian, wrong and frankly fairly ugly.
It’s not a heavily Hispanic area or anything
OR-6 contains the most populated areas of three counties in western OR with the highest Hispanic populations (map from wikipedia). It also contains towns like Woodburn, which is 57% Hispanic or Latino.
By the way, Rep. Salinas and Rep. Leon are actually both Latina, and I believe both are the children of immigrant farm workers. That’s a substantial constituency in the Willamette Valley and they’ve always been under represented in government.
Salinas had enough money to make it a competitive race not because there is some deep-pocked anti-EA lobby that was out to get Carrick Flynn, his aspirations just collided with another agenda by coincidence.
This isn’t how it was. The timeline tells a pretty clear story. Here’s what happened:
First, Flynn-aligned super PACs spent a ton of money in the race and made it the country’s most expensive primary.
Then, Nancy Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC announced they were spending $1m to support Flynn, around April 10. Their first expenditure was 4⁄12, as you can see here.
Nearly every other candidate in the race quickly released a statement denouncing House Majority PAC for funding in a primary. They held a joint press conference and presumably candidates worked private channels as well.
It wasn’t until 10 days later that BoldPAC made its first expenditure in the race, on 4⁄21as you can see here.
So it’s pretty easy to interpret this. BoldPAC’s spending is pretty clearly reactive to House Majority PAC. House Majority tried to knock out a Latina front-runner and BoldPAC spent to counter them. Salinas was already the front-runner (or neck and neck) when BoldPAC made it’s first expenditure. And they only spent in the last weeks of the race, against a ton of Flynn-aligned super PAC spending.
By the way, as an aside, the final chapter here is that Protect our Future PAC went negative in May—perhaps a direct counter to BoldPAC’s spending. (Are folks here proud of that? Is misleading negative campaigning compatible with EA values?)
So anyway, the idea that Flynn would have won if only BoldPAC hadn’t made an ad buy in the last weeks of the race is pretty strained at best. Generalizing from there to say, gosh, if “it was an Anglo state legislator” leading the race Flynn might have won is totally spurious and an ugly backwards interpretation of the racial politics at play. What you saw was Congressional leadership aligned PACs having a dispute—everything else aside, who can say in that case a different PAC wouldn’t have made a counter instead.
So even though Salinas won by a pretty hefty margin, I think the counterfactual in which he wins does not require particularly large changes.
So you think a late $1.5m spend representing around 10% of total independent spending flipped the race to produce a nearly 2:1 advantage for the winner? Everyone reading Matthew Yglesias’ posts in the future (here, or anywhere really) should approach whatever he says with more skepticism.
By the way, as an aside, the final chapter here is that Protect our Future PAC went negative in May—perhaps a direct counter to BoldPAC’s spending. (Are folks here proud of that? Is misleading negative campaigning compatible with EA values?)
I wanted to see exactly how misleading these were. I found this example of an attack ad, which (after some searching) I think cites this, this, this, and this. As far as I can tell:
The first source says that Salinas “worked for the chemical manufacturers’ trade association for a year”, in the 90s.
The second source says that she was a “lobbyist for powerful public employee unions SEIU Local 503 and AFSCME Council 75 and other left-leaning groups” around 2013-2014. The video uses this as a citation for the slide “Andrea Salinas — Drug Company Lobbyist”.
The third source says that insurers’ drug costs rose by 23% between 2013-2014. (Doesn’t mention Salinas.)
The fourth source is just the total list of contributors to Salina’s campaigns, and the video doesn’t say what company she supposedly lobbied for that gave her money. The best I can find is that this page says she lobbied for Express Scripts in 2014, who is listed as giving her $250.
So my impression is that the situation boils down to: Salinas worked for a year for the chemical manufacturers’ trade association in the 90s, had Express Scripts as 1 out of 11 clients in 2014 (although the video doesn’t say they mean Express Scripts, or provide any citation for the claim that Salinas was a drug lobbyist in 2013/2014), and Express Scripts gave her $250 in 2018. (And presumably enough other donors can be categorised as pharmaceutical to add up to $18k.)
So yeah, very misleading.
(Also, what’s up with companies giving and campaigns accepting such tiny amounts as $250? Surely that’s net-negative for campaigns by enabling accusations like this.)
Thanks for checking. I initially thought _pk’s claims were overblown, so it was helpful to get a sanity check. I now agree that the claims were quite misleading.
I at least do not want to be associated with claims at this level of misleadingness. I guess it’s possible that this is just “American politics as usual” (I’m pretty unfamiliar with this space). To the extent that this is normal/default politics, then I guess we have to reluctantly accede to the usual norms. But this appears regrettable, and to the extent it’s abnormal, my own opinion is that we should have a pretty high bar before endorsing such actions.
I don’t think we have to accede to that at all—it’s not like it’s useful for our goals anyway. What probably happened is sbf’s money hired consultants, and they just did their job without supervision on trying to push better epistemics. A reputation for not going negative in a misleading way ever might be a political advantage, if you can make it credible.
What’s the proportion of Hispanic people in OR-6? Based on the county data I’d guess it’s close to the national average of 18.7%. Someone should probably compute this.
I’ll just note that according to the link you posted, OR-6 has the highest % Hispanic representation in the state by nearly 5%.
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
We can answer this quantitatively.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic. Of 9 candidates who ran in OR-6, two, Salinas and Leon, are Hispanic, making Hispanics 22.2% of the candidate pool. So they were not particularly over- or under-represented in this race. It is slightly surprising that the strongest candidate in this race happened to be Hispanic, but 22.2% chances happen all the time. Obviously, referring to this as “chance” is in no way suggesting that Salinas won “by luck,” she’s clearly a skilled legislator.
Matt says that “this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year.” It seems like we have to consider four counterfactuals here:
1. Salinas didn’t run
I think it’s a safe assumption that people who vote for Hispanic candidates specifically because they are Hispanic and represent Hispanic issues are a subset of the Hispanic population.
Let’s say that the entire Hispanic vote in OR-6 went for Salinas (surely an overestimate), that this represents 17.4% of votes in this election, and that 2⁄3 of them would have switched their votes to Leon if Salinas hadn’t run. That would have given Leon an additional 6,000-7,000 votes or so, which would have been enough to beat Flynn if Salinas’s other votes were redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates.
That’s a pretty generous assumption in favor of the idea that Leon was a viable candidate in this counterfactual scenario, one that reasonable people could disagree on.
2. Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s assume Flynn’s votes would have been redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates. Then Salinas would still have won.
3. Salinas and Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s say once again that Leon would have received an additional 6,000-7,000 Hispanic votes, while the remaining voters would have been redistributed among the other candidates either evenly or in proportion to vote share. In this case, Leon would have been the frontrunner. Indeed, under this model, she could have received more like 1⁄3 of the Hispanic vote, with the remainder of the votes being split up equally, and been neck and neck with Reynolds. But reasonable people can probably still disagree on whether she’d have received even this much of the Hispanic vote.
4. Flynn had run in a district where his top competitor was white
Let’s say that Flynn had run in a different district where his top competitor had equal local appeal and political skill to that of Salinas. However, in this counterfactual district, the prospect of putting an additional Hispanic legislator in the Democratic caucus was not on the table, because Flynn’s top competitor was not Hispanic.
Matt is suggesting that, in this case, that competitor may not have been able to attract a big PAC spend of their own, and Flynn’s campaign funding, along with his qualities as a candidate, may have been sufficient to win him the election. I don’t read this as a dig against Salinas’s skill as a politician. I read it as an explanation for why she in particular, among other strong candidates in other districts, was able to attract over a million dollars in PAC spending of her own. Given that BoldPAC is an explicitly pro-Hispanic Democratic PAC, it seems like they themselves would agree that giving a strong Democratic Hispanic candidate extra funding to help them beat non-Hispanic rivals is exactly their agenda.
Flynn couldn’t help being from the district he was from, and in this election, there was an extremely limited supply (1) of explicitly EA candidates with a heavy focus on pandemic prevention. So the fact that he happened to be up against a main competitor who is Hispanic and could therefore attract this specific form of campaign financing does seem to be a matter of luck.
Analysis
It seems possible, but unlikely, that Flynn got “unlucky” in facing an unusually strong opponent. Salinas is clearly very good, and my guess is that in most contested primaries, there is at least one very skilled, appealing, and reasonably well-funded legislator in the running.
From the outside view, we ought to perhaps view an EA candidate as being basically a “random sample” of the candidate quality pool. As we can see in this election, vote distributions are long-tailed, and a randomly sampled candidate in a 9-candidate election will usually be lackluster. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to take a shot. I think we should not update overmuch on the strategy of “just throw money behind EA-aligned candidates.”
For the hypothesis that BoldPAC’s late-campaign spend turned a Flynn victory into a Salinas victory, we are sort of positing that Salinas’s skill and Flynn’s money had them neck-and-neck, but that Salinas could benefit from an influx of cash and advertising much more than Flynn because of diminishing marginal returns. On May 5th, Salinas and Flynn polled at 18% and 14% respectively. So around the time of the BoldPAC ad buy, this hypothesis might have seemed reasonable. Looking at the voting results and assuming we should have known at the time that Salinas would receive twice the support of Flynn is just hindsight bias. Going further and denying that Flynn could have won in any election at all is “totally spurious” and an “ugly” and “backwards interpretation” analysis is, well, the sort of that I deleted my Facebook account in order to avoid.
Almost none of this seems like secret info or hard to find. It seems like EAs could have been informed about the potential collision of the seat value to the relevant Hispanic movement. It seems healthier to discuss this during the campaign (and still proceed relentlessly). By the way, I suspect some of the absence of discussion and problematic norms around the past campaign is the ultimate result of defective discourse—where criticism of low quality is normalized. EAs are aware of this defect and as a result, when it matters, EAs don’t trust discourse on actual things that matter. Even if this suspicion was partly true, that would be really bad once you stop to think about it.
You support many candidates because you point out idiosyncrasies specific to each contest are large, which makes sense. So, isn’t there about 3 other EA candidates running? Should we talk about those?
This is an excellent post, one slightly subtle point about the political dynamics that I think it misses is the circumstances around BoldPAC’s investment in Salinas.
BoldPAC is the superpac for Hispanic House Democrats. It happens to be the case that in the 2022 election cycle there is a Hispanic state legislator (Andrea Salinas) living in a blue-leaning open US House of Representatives seat. It also happens to be the case that given the ups and downs of the political cycle, this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year. So just as it’s basically happenstance the the EA community got involved in the Oregon 6th as opposed to some other district, it’s also happenstance that BoldPAC was deeply invested in this race. It’s not a heavily Hispanic area or anything, Salinas just happens to be Latina.
If it was an Anglo state legislator holding down the seat, the “flood the zone with unanswered money” strategy might have worked. And if there were four other promising Hispanic prospects in the 2022 cycle, it also might have worked because BoldPAC might have been persuaded that it wasn’t worth going toe-to-toe with Protect Our Future. Now what’s true is POF was able to massively outspend BoldPAC but that became a diminishing marginal returns dynamic. Salinas had enough money to make it a competitive race not because there is some deep-pocked anti-EA lobby that was out to get Carrick Flynn, his aspirations just collided with another agenda by coincidence.
So even though Salinas won by a pretty hefty margin, I think the counterfactual in which he wins does not require particularly large changes.
Now of course weird shit is going to potentially stand in your way in any race you try to run in. But I think it underscores the fact that if EA wants to play in electoral politics it will ultimately be important to have more candidates running in more races, even if that means less superpac spending per candidate.
Where to even start here? Nearly every fact in this post is wrong, the interpretation of events is backwards, and the conclusion is contrarian, wrong and frankly fairly ugly.
OR-6 contains the most populated areas of three counties in western OR with the highest Hispanic populations (map from wikipedia). It also contains towns like Woodburn, which is 57% Hispanic or Latino.
By the way, Rep. Salinas and Rep. Leon are actually both Latina, and I believe both are the children of immigrant farm workers. That’s a substantial constituency in the Willamette Valley and they’ve always been under represented in government.
This isn’t how it was. The timeline tells a pretty clear story. Here’s what happened:
First, Flynn-aligned super PACs spent a ton of money in the race and made it the country’s most expensive primary.
Then, Nancy Pelosi-aligned House Majority PAC announced they were spending $1m to support Flynn, around April 10. Their first expenditure was 4⁄12, as you can see here.
Nearly every other candidate in the race quickly released a statement denouncing House Majority PAC for funding in a primary. They held a joint press conference and presumably candidates worked private channels as well.
It wasn’t until 10 days later that BoldPAC made its first expenditure in the race, on 4⁄21 as you can see here.
So it’s pretty easy to interpret this. BoldPAC’s spending is pretty clearly reactive to House Majority PAC. House Majority tried to knock out a Latina front-runner and BoldPAC spent to counter them. Salinas was already the front-runner (or neck and neck) when BoldPAC made it’s first expenditure. And they only spent in the last weeks of the race, against a ton of Flynn-aligned super PAC spending.
By the way, as an aside, the final chapter here is that Protect our Future PAC went negative in May—perhaps a direct counter to BoldPAC’s spending. (Are folks here proud of that? Is misleading negative campaigning compatible with EA values?)
So anyway, the idea that Flynn would have won if only BoldPAC hadn’t made an ad buy in the last weeks of the race is pretty strained at best. Generalizing from there to say, gosh, if “it was an Anglo state legislator” leading the race Flynn might have won is totally spurious and an ugly backwards interpretation of the racial politics at play. What you saw was Congressional leadership aligned PACs having a dispute—everything else aside, who can say in that case a different PAC wouldn’t have made a counter instead.
So you think a late $1.5m spend representing around 10% of total independent spending flipped the race to produce a nearly 2:1 advantage for the winner? Everyone reading Matthew Yglesias’ posts in the future (here, or anywhere really) should approach whatever he says with more skepticism.
I wanted to see exactly how misleading these were. I found this example of an attack ad, which (after some searching) I think cites this, this, this, and this. As far as I can tell:
The first source says that Salinas “worked for the chemical manufacturers’ trade association for a year”, in the 90s.
The second source says that she was a “lobbyist for powerful public employee unions SEIU Local 503 and AFSCME Council 75 and other left-leaning groups” around 2013-2014. The video uses this as a citation for the slide “Andrea Salinas — Drug Company Lobbyist”.
The third source says that insurers’ drug costs rose by 23% between 2013-2014. (Doesn’t mention Salinas.)
The fourth source is just the total list of contributors to Salina’s campaigns, and the video doesn’t say what company she supposedly lobbied for that gave her money. The best I can find is that this page says she lobbied for Express Scripts in 2014, who is listed as giving her $250.
So my impression is that the situation boils down to: Salinas worked for a year for the chemical manufacturers’ trade association in the 90s, had Express Scripts as 1 out of 11 clients in 2014 (although the video doesn’t say they mean Express Scripts, or provide any citation for the claim that Salinas was a drug lobbyist in 2013/2014), and Express Scripts gave her $250 in 2018. (And presumably enough other donors can be categorised as pharmaceutical to add up to $18k.)
So yeah, very misleading.
(Also, what’s up with companies giving and campaigns accepting such tiny amounts as $250? Surely that’s net-negative for campaigns by enabling accusations like this.)
Yeah, bummer, not happy about this.
Thanks for checking. I initially thought _pk’s claims were overblown, so it was helpful to get a sanity check. I now agree that the claims were quite misleading.
I at least do not want to be associated with claims at this level of misleadingness. I guess it’s possible that this is just “American politics as usual” (I’m pretty unfamiliar with this space). To the extent that this is normal/default politics, then I guess we have to reluctantly accede to the usual norms. But this appears regrettable, and to the extent it’s abnormal, my own opinion is that we should have a pretty high bar before endorsing such actions.
I don’t think we have to accede to that at all—it’s not like it’s useful for our goals anyway. What probably happened is sbf’s money hired consultants, and they just did their job without supervision on trying to push better epistemics. A reputation for not going negative in a misleading way ever might be a political advantage, if you can make it credible.
What’s the proportion of Hispanic people in OR-6? Based on the county data I’d guess it’s close to the national average of 18.7%. Someone should probably compute this.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic
https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::9b2b545f-5cd2-4e0d-a9b9-cc3915a4750f
Wow, davesredestricting.org is a great tool, thanks for posting that!
I’ll just note that according to the link you posted, OR-6 has the highest % Hispanic representation in the state by nearly 5%.
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
We can answer this quantitatively.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic. Of 9 candidates who ran in OR-6, two, Salinas and Leon, are Hispanic, making Hispanics 22.2% of the candidate pool. So they were not particularly over- or under-represented in this race. It is slightly surprising that the strongest candidate in this race happened to be Hispanic, but 22.2% chances happen all the time. Obviously, referring to this as “chance” is in no way suggesting that Salinas won “by luck,” she’s clearly a skilled legislator.
Matt says that “this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year.” It seems like we have to consider four counterfactuals here:
1. Salinas didn’t run
I think it’s a safe assumption that people who vote for Hispanic candidates specifically because they are Hispanic and represent Hispanic issues are a subset of the Hispanic population.
Let’s say that the entire Hispanic vote in OR-6 went for Salinas (surely an overestimate), that this represents 17.4% of votes in this election, and that 2⁄3 of them would have switched their votes to Leon if Salinas hadn’t run. That would have given Leon an additional 6,000-7,000 votes or so, which would have been enough to beat Flynn if Salinas’s other votes were redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates.
That’s a pretty generous assumption in favor of the idea that Leon was a viable candidate in this counterfactual scenario, one that reasonable people could disagree on.
2. Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s assume Flynn’s votes would have been redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates. Then Salinas would still have won.
3. Salinas and Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s say once again that Leon would have received an additional 6,000-7,000 Hispanic votes, while the remaining voters would have been redistributed among the other candidates either evenly or in proportion to vote share. In this case, Leon would have been the frontrunner. Indeed, under this model, she could have received more like 1⁄3 of the Hispanic vote, with the remainder of the votes being split up equally, and been neck and neck with Reynolds. But reasonable people can probably still disagree on whether she’d have received even this much of the Hispanic vote.
4. Flynn had run in a district where his top competitor was white
Let’s say that Flynn had run in a different district where his top competitor had equal local appeal and political skill to that of Salinas. However, in this counterfactual district, the prospect of putting an additional Hispanic legislator in the Democratic caucus was not on the table, because Flynn’s top competitor was not Hispanic.
Matt is suggesting that, in this case, that competitor may not have been able to attract a big PAC spend of their own, and Flynn’s campaign funding, along with his qualities as a candidate, may have been sufficient to win him the election. I don’t read this as a dig against Salinas’s skill as a politician. I read it as an explanation for why she in particular, among other strong candidates in other districts, was able to attract over a million dollars in PAC spending of her own. Given that BoldPAC is an explicitly pro-Hispanic Democratic PAC, it seems like they themselves would agree that giving a strong Democratic Hispanic candidate extra funding to help them beat non-Hispanic rivals is exactly their agenda.
Flynn couldn’t help being from the district he was from, and in this election, there was an extremely limited supply (1) of explicitly EA candidates with a heavy focus on pandemic prevention. So the fact that he happened to be up against a main competitor who is Hispanic and could therefore attract this specific form of campaign financing does seem to be a matter of luck.
Analysis
It seems possible, but unlikely, that Flynn got “unlucky” in facing an unusually strong opponent. Salinas is clearly very good, and my guess is that in most contested primaries, there is at least one very skilled, appealing, and reasonably well-funded legislator in the running.
From the outside view, we ought to perhaps view an EA candidate as being basically a “random sample” of the candidate quality pool. As we can see in this election, vote distributions are long-tailed, and a randomly sampled candidate in a 9-candidate election will usually be lackluster. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to take a shot. I think we should not update overmuch on the strategy of “just throw money behind EA-aligned candidates.”
For the hypothesis that BoldPAC’s late-campaign spend turned a Flynn victory into a Salinas victory, we are sort of positing that Salinas’s skill and Flynn’s money had them neck-and-neck, but that Salinas could benefit from an influx of cash and advertising much more than Flynn because of diminishing marginal returns. On May 5th, Salinas and Flynn polled at 18% and 14% respectively. So around the time of the BoldPAC ad buy, this hypothesis might have seemed reasonable. Looking at the voting results and assuming we should have known at the time that Salinas would receive twice the support of Flynn is just hindsight bias. Going further and denying that Flynn could have won in any election at all is “totally spurious” and an “ugly” and “backwards interpretation” analysis is, well, the sort of that I deleted my Facebook account in order to avoid.
This is a great comment, you may want to consider making it a top level post on the forum so more people will see it.
Thoughts:
Your writing is really good! Wow!
Almost none of this seems like secret info or hard to find. It seems like EAs could have been informed about the potential collision of the seat value to the relevant Hispanic movement. It seems healthier to discuss this during the campaign (and still proceed relentlessly). By the way, I suspect some of the absence of discussion and problematic norms around the past campaign is the ultimate result of defective discourse—where criticism of low quality is normalized. EAs are aware of this defect and as a result, when it matters, EAs don’t trust discourse on actual things that matter. Even if this suspicion was partly true, that would be really bad once you stop to think about it.
You support many candidates because you point out idiosyncrasies specific to each contest are large, which makes sense. So, isn’t there about 3 other EA candidates running? Should we talk about those?
My comment has some underlying ideas that are good, but is really badly written, and I retract it.