I agree that Protect Our Future should be a lot more explicit about its agenda. While the Valerie Foushee campaign was successful the Carrick Flynn campaign failed and likely failed for reasons like distrust of PAC money.
It’s unclear to me why the strategic decision of Protect Our Future to be this untransparent was made. Given the amount of money they spend, it was likely that it will get some public attention and the transparency made it look a bit shady.
Clear public-facing criteria would likely be helpful. It makes it clear to the media how Protect Our Future chooses its candidates. It also makes it clear to other politicians what they would need to do to get support from Protect Our Future. Given that politicians do spend a lot of time on fundraising, making it more clear to them what they would need to do to get support from Protect Our Future would likely be good.
Having a blog that publishes posts about candidates they decided to support and also on legislative movements that they care about it would likely be a good move while costing very little compared to the amount of money that Protect Our Future spends.
This comment seems to be generating substantial disagreement. I’d be curious to hear from those who disagree: which parts of this comment do you disagree with, and why?
Not sure but I think the Flynn campaign result was more likely an outcome of the fundamentals of the race: a popular, progressive, woman of color with local party support who already represented part of the district as a state rep and helped draw the new congressional district was way more likely to win over someone who hadn’t lived there in years and had never run a political campaign before.
Andrea Salinas got 36% of the vote while Carrick Flynn got 18%. I think it’s pretty clear, that Flynn would have gotten more votes if he wouldn’t have been perceived by the press as being funded by ill-intentioned corporate money.
Whether that would have been enough to get double the amount of votes is unclear but I don’t think the available data suggest that this isn’t in the realm of what would have been possible.
Well to be fair I didn’t say it was impossible, just that the outcome probably had more to do with the fundamentals of the race. It may have had a negative effect yes, but plenty of candidates win in races despite being supported by all kinds of PACs and having negative press about it.
Having more connections within the state for support and donations and highlighting those would have helped blunt negative attacks about PAC funding, for example.
I strongly agree. SBF and Future Fund don’t seem to have any track record in party politics. Given the massive reputational risks to EA that might not be easily fixable, I think their political advocacy should be closely scrutinized and possibly slowed to build up more capacity before engaging.
My perception is informed by the Flynn campaign, which seemed to have important failures. Local political leaders criticized the campaign for failing engage with local media and elected officials. They spent more an $800,000 on an attack ad calling the eventual winner of the race a “lobbyist for a corporation accused of driving up drug prices”, but many EAs now believe that claim was “very misleading”. They received plenty of negative local media coverage. They did manage to secure a $1M donation from a PAC aligned with Nancy Pelosi, and building relationships with mainstream Democrats seems to be part of the strategy in supporting Foushee. This could be a useful strategy, but also risks associating EA with corrupt big money party politics.
I’ve signed up for fundraising emails from the EA Donor Network organized following the Flynn campaign. They’ve recommended two candidates so far, Victoria Gu and Seth Magaziner in Rhode Island, both with single paragraph explanations of why the candidates are worth supporting. When I emailed back looking for more information about why we should donate to these candidates, I received a response to my first email but not a second. To be clear, I’m not really looking for an explanation via private emails—I’d like EA political work to adopt the same standards of transparency and rigorous analysis that have powered EA success in other domains.
For onlookers, just to comment on one small piece of this, in early Oct 2022, SBF gave signals of updating/backed off on his spend (“billion dollar donation figure”).
I agree that Protect Our Future should be a lot more explicit about its agenda. While the Valerie Foushee campaign was successful the Carrick Flynn campaign failed and likely failed for reasons like distrust of PAC money.
It’s unclear to me why the strategic decision of Protect Our Future to be this untransparent was made. Given the amount of money they spend, it was likely that it will get some public attention and the transparency made it look a bit shady.
Clear public-facing criteria would likely be helpful. It makes it clear to the media how Protect Our Future chooses its candidates. It also makes it clear to other politicians what they would need to do to get support from Protect Our Future. Given that politicians do spend a lot of time on fundraising, making it more clear to them what they would need to do to get support from Protect Our Future would likely be good.
Having a blog that publishes posts about candidates they decided to support and also on legislative movements that they care about it would likely be a good move while costing very little compared to the amount of money that Protect Our Future spends.
This comment seems to be generating substantial disagreement. I’d be curious to hear from those who disagree: which parts of this comment do you disagree with, and why?
Not sure but I think the Flynn campaign result was more likely an outcome of the fundamentals of the race: a popular, progressive, woman of color with local party support who already represented part of the district as a state rep and helped draw the new congressional district was way more likely to win over someone who hadn’t lived there in years and had never run a political campaign before.
Andrea Salinas got 36% of the vote while Carrick Flynn got 18%. I think it’s pretty clear, that Flynn would have gotten more votes if he wouldn’t have been perceived by the press as being funded by ill-intentioned corporate money.
Whether that would have been enough to get double the amount of votes is unclear but I don’t think the available data suggest that this isn’t in the realm of what would have been possible.
Well to be fair I didn’t say it was impossible, just that the outcome probably had more to do with the fundamentals of the race. It may have had a negative effect yes, but plenty of candidates win in races despite being supported by all kinds of PACs and having negative press about it.
Having more connections within the state for support and donations and highlighting those would have helped blunt negative attacks about PAC funding, for example.
I strongly agree. SBF and Future Fund don’t seem to have any track record in party politics. Given the massive reputational risks to EA that might not be easily fixable, I think their political advocacy should be closely scrutinized and possibly slowed to build up more capacity before engaging.
My perception is informed by the Flynn campaign, which seemed to have important failures. Local political leaders criticized the campaign for failing engage with local media and elected officials. They spent more an $800,000 on an attack ad calling the eventual winner of the race a “lobbyist for a corporation accused of driving up drug prices”, but many EAs now believe that claim was “very misleading”. They received plenty of negative local media coverage. They did manage to secure a $1M donation from a PAC aligned with Nancy Pelosi, and building relationships with mainstream Democrats seems to be part of the strategy in supporting Foushee. This could be a useful strategy, but also risks associating EA with corrupt big money party politics.
I’ve signed up for fundraising emails from the EA Donor Network organized following the Flynn campaign. They’ve recommended two candidates so far, Victoria Gu and Seth Magaziner in Rhode Island, both with single paragraph explanations of why the candidates are worth supporting. When I emailed back looking for more information about why we should donate to these candidates, I received a response to my first email but not a second. To be clear, I’m not really looking for an explanation via private emails—I’d like EA political work to adopt the same standards of transparency and rigorous analysis that have powered EA success in other domains.
For onlookers, just to comment on one small piece of this, in early Oct 2022, SBF gave signals of updating/backed off on his spend (“billion dollar donation figure”).
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2022/10/14/billion-dollar-slip-up-why-bankman-fried-is-rethinking-election-spending-00061809
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/14/sam-bankman-fried-backtracks-from-1-billion-political-donation.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-ftx-2022-midterms/671823/
This was picked up by 10-20 outlets, suggesting this was an active signal from SBF.