I don’t know him, but I really want Carrick in Congress. I think donating to his campaign is a not-unreasonable thing to do as a hits-based-giving-opportunity, since it would be great for him to be in the House...
...but I don’t think most readers of this post would appreciate how unlikely he is to win. People who would be great politicians often aren’t great candidates. Unless there’s relevant private information (e.g., he’s expecting endorsements from major Democrats), it’s quite unlikely that Carrick—whose name isn’t known in the district and who doesn’t have government experience—will get more votes in the Democratic primary than the candidates with name recognition, state government experience, and endorsements from many state government officials. (And if he doesn’t win, marginal performance in a failed House primary isn’t very helpful to future pursuits.) I wish I knew how Carrick plans to win: I wish we lived in the world where you could win elections just by dazzling voters with your policy chops, but we don’t.
I’m an elections junkie. I wish I could vote for Carrick, and I really hope he wins. But I would not feel comfortable recommending others donate or volunteer until his campaign gives us reason to believe that he has a real chance.
Edit, 2.5 days later. I still think Carrick’s chances are pretty low and that some people in these comments are excessively optimistic due to misweighting the relevant factors (which is ok—not everyone needs to be knowledgeable about elections—but skews the sentiment in these comments). And I still have meta-level concerns about how we decide to pursue certain interventions (which I plan to share after the primary). But I now think that donating is a highly effective thing to do in expectation (although on balance I would rather give to the Long-Term Future Fund), because it seems quite high-value for Carrick to win.
I think Carrick has a decent shot, since he is running for a new seat (no incumbent), grew up in the district, has a compelling personal narrative (escaping poverty and then choosing a life of service), and doesn’t seem to be facing any extremely strong competitors. But, because he’s new to Oregon politics, he does need to raise a lot of money to attract the attention and support of local stakeholders and supporters.
Thanks for the question, JP, it’s always good to define those probabilities. I personally estimate his chance of winning to at least 30% (and going to 50%) due to Carrick’s fit, the unusually good fundraising, and the excellent campaign team. This is probably not one for people who want a definite win—it’s so much at play. However, I am very enthusiastic about Carrick’s potential for a very large impact and think it’s worth the shot.
By all accounts, Carrick is also tall, attractive, and charismatic, as well as US-born and other relevant demographic factors. I’d personally be substantially lower on his probability of winning otherwise.
Disclosure: my partner is working on Carrick’s campaign. But I also chose to donate $2900 before she was involved with the campaign. I was persuaded by the fact that small dollar donations are particularly useful in elections, which have individual donation caps. Also, if you’re primarily interested in funding longtermist projects, I don’t think there’s much need for small dollar donors in other domains given how much big donors are focusing on LT.
I think Carrick has at least a 20% chance based on conversations with relevant domain experts. He’s leading in fundraising, which I expect to continue. Fundraising is more important to electoral success the more obscure the race is, and house primaries are the most obscure federal elections there are. He also got ~10k Twitter followers in a few days and has 10x more than Salinas (his top competitor IMO). I know Twitter isn’t real life, but it speaks to a strong network and savvy comms, which matter a lot in campaigning.
Salinas was appointed to her state rep position and has never won a competitive election. She has strong endorsements, and I think is still probably the candidate most likely to win based on name recognition, endorsements, and political experience.
FWIW, I worked for a successful state house campaign and have volunteered on a few other campaigns.
Here is a synopsis from Primary School, a newsletter focused on democratic primaries. It’s kind of annoying to dig through their posts for the hard to see “see full post” button so I’m copy and pasting them.
EDIT FEC Update 2/5/2022
Carrick Flynn says he raised $430,000 in the first 10 days. Salinas only raised $174,000 in two months. Money isn’t everything in campaigns but that is kind of low for Salinas.
-- Tl;dr: Salinas seems like a strong candidate and solid progressive who is supported by the local party. I’d be interested in seeing her first fundraising numbers when they are out.
1/27/2022
OR-06 ″Oregon Medical Board member Kathleen Harder raised $129,000 in the two months since she announced her campaign, which means she’s going to be a real part of this ever-widening field of candidates. In addition to her, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, and dueling pro-cryptocurrency self-funders Matt West and Cody Reynolds, a new candidate has entered: State Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon. Leon, who is in her second term in the state house, was mentioned as a potential candidate for this seat when it was first drawn, but stayed quiet about any plans until people just assumed she wasn’t interested. That likely includes the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who endorsed Salinas last month. Leon, an immigrant herself, has been fantastic on immigrant rights issues, and has fought to include the undocumented in Oregon’s Medicaid program. But her launch and campaign website have so far been light on the policy details, and she hasn’t taken any stances in inter-party fights that would make her allegiances more clear.
Leon may not even be the only candidate entering—AI researcher Carrick Flynn has filed to run. While assorted professors and researchers run for Congress all the time without anyone noticing, Flynn spent years as a relatively public-facing part of a well endowedAI-related public policy program, so he probably knows more than a few rich people.”
Originally I read this last sentence as him being more knowledgeable than rich people about AI, but now I’ve realized they probably meant he likely knows a bunch of deep pocketed individuals.
1/18/2022 ″...FEC records that say that Matt West’s the one who self-funded $437,000 and raised $182,000, while Reynolds self-funded $2,000,000 and only raised $10 elsewhere.”
10/13/2021 ″State Rep. Andrea Salinas is considering running for the new OR-06, a safely Democratic district containing the cities of Salem and Corvallis, as well as a significant chunk of the Portland suburbs. Salinas, first appointed to her suburban house seat in 2017, made it to House leadership just a couple years later, and has spent her time in office functioning as a solid progressive: She’s supported efforts to create a public option for Oregon (because “getting to some kind of single payer system is the best thing we could do..for all people in the US”), allow prisoners to vote, and give agricultural workers overtime pay. The local Democratic establishment clearly likes her if they appointed her to office, and to leadership not long after, so she’ll be a considerable force in the primary should she run. She also helped draw the new district, so the odds of it being at least somewhat optimized for her are pretty high.”
I won’t comment on their endorsements or strategy, but I will say that even if Carrick is a longshot it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s a bad use of marginal dollars.
Conditional on the campaign not having major relevant private information (e.g., expecting major endorsements), my instinct is about 5% (and my off-the-cuff low-research median estimate of his vote share is 10%). However, there’s so little public information so far that (in a prediction market, very roughly) I probably wouldn’t buy above 1% or sell below 20%.
He has several times more funding and twitter followers then his next nearest rival. There’s more compelling media on his website and social media, including his video. His campaign team is unusually strong. Good credentials for congress (Yale Law, experience designing policy, grew up near the district) and a compelling life story. Also, good policies on pandemics and otherwise. So he’s got better than one in five.
See Peter Gebauer’s comment above — do you think Carrick has a better chance than these competitors? Two crypto millionaires, two state reps, and a county commissioner. The three candidates with publicly available fundraising info now have $129K, $600K, and $2M (see above for which is which).
Seems like a tough field where Carrick would not be the favorite, but I don’t know much about the base rates here. Does anybody know more about the outcomes of similar races, preferably for Congressional seats between state politicians and well-credentialed political outsiders?
I was looking at the finances here, rather than at the banks of the crypto self-funders, which are admittedly larger. Carrick’s ad is better than theirads. This one who has lent himself $2M has had like five previous failed runs, including runs with various minor parties—I don’t think he has a serious chance. Carrick’s funding position is much better than the two state reps. His story, team and social media presence is probably better than all opponents. He’s not some sort of dark horse candidate.
Based on what people have said here, I think Carrick sounds like a great candidate who would make a wonderful representative. However, my impression from loosely following primaries from time to time is that local reputation matters a lot. Self funders tend not to do well because they tend not to have real local support. Does Carrick have a strong base of support or message to compete against the likes of a popular progressive state rep like Salinas (I don’t believe we have fundraising numbers from her yet)? If anyone knows of a race where a similar candidate won in similar circumstances, I’d love to hear about it.
The first similar race that comes to mind for me is when Cenk Uygur ran in California in 2020. Cenk moved to the district to run for an open seat and had large financial support from his fanbase built running a progressive independent media outlet known as The Young Turks. But he only got around 6% of the vote with $1.7 million spent. Granted, there are a couple of differences here: California has Top Two/jungle primaries which means all candidates are on the same primary ballot; it was a special election which tends to have lower turnout; Cenk tends to be pretty abrasive; he never lived in the district before; the election was in a swing district; and Cenk had controversial misogynistic past blog posts from years ago when he identified as a conservative Republican and was hit hard in the media over it. He was running against a woman state rep with local party support who ultimately won the primary (although she ultimately lost the general election by a few hundred votes). I wasn’t able to find numbers for what she spent in the special election primary but she got over $5 million in all of 2020 so maybe less than half of that?
I agree that Carrick loses to Salinas on some dimensions. He also beats her on some dimensions, like story, ads and social media. I think both have reasonably good chances.
I was trying to quantify your verbal claims via my intuition of what people might mean when they say those words, and it turns out I did pretty well! ;)
I don’t know him, but I really want Carrick in Congress. I think donating to his campaign is a not-unreasonable thing to do as a hits-based-giving-opportunity, since it would be great for him to be in the House...
...but I don’t think most readers of this post would appreciate how unlikely he is to win. People who would be great politicians often aren’t great candidates. Unless there’s relevant private information (e.g., he’s expecting endorsements from major Democrats), it’s quite unlikely that Carrick—whose name isn’t known in the district and who doesn’t have government experience—will get more votes in the Democratic primary than the candidates with name recognition, state government experience, and endorsements from many state government officials. (And if he doesn’t win, marginal performance in a failed House primary isn’t very helpful to future pursuits.) I wish I knew how Carrick plans to win: I wish we lived in the world where you could win elections just by dazzling voters with your policy chops, but we don’t.
I’m an elections junkie. I wish I could vote for Carrick, and I really hope he wins. But I would not feel comfortable recommending others donate or volunteer until his campaign gives us reason to believe that he has a real chance.
Edit, 2.5 days later. I still think Carrick’s chances are pretty low and that some people in these comments are excessively optimistic due to misweighting the relevant factors (which is ok—not everyone needs to be knowledgeable about elections—but skews the sentiment in these comments). And I still have meta-level concerns about how we decide to pursue certain interventions (which I plan to share after the primary). But I now think that donating is a highly effective thing to do in expectation (although on balance I would rather give to the Long-Term Future Fund), because it seems quite high-value for Carrick to win.
I think Carrick has a decent shot, since he is running for a new seat (no incumbent), grew up in the district, has a compelling personal narrative (escaping poverty and then choosing a life of service), and doesn’t seem to be facing any extremely strong competitors. But, because he’s new to Oregon politics, he does need to raise a lot of money to attract the attention and support of local stakeholders and supporters.
We should probably quantify “decent”. >10%? >50?
Thanks for the question, JP, it’s always good to define those probabilities. I personally estimate his chance of winning to at least 30% (and going to 50%) due to Carrick’s fit, the unusually good fundraising, and the excellent campaign team. This is probably not one for people who want a definite win—it’s so much at play. However, I am very enthusiastic about Carrick’s potential for a very large impact and think it’s worth the shot.
By all accounts, Carrick is also tall, attractive, and charismatic, as well as US-born and other relevant demographic factors. I’d personally be substantially lower on his probability of winning otherwise.
Disclosure: my partner is working on Carrick’s campaign. But I also chose to donate $2900 before she was involved with the campaign. I was persuaded by the fact that small dollar donations are particularly useful in elections, which have individual donation caps. Also, if you’re primarily interested in funding longtermist projects, I don’t think there’s much need for small dollar donors in other domains given how much big donors are focusing on LT.
I think Carrick has at least a 20% chance based on conversations with relevant domain experts. He’s leading in fundraising, which I expect to continue. Fundraising is more important to electoral success the more obscure the race is, and house primaries are the most obscure federal elections there are. He also got ~10k Twitter followers in a few days and has 10x more than Salinas (his top competitor IMO). I know Twitter isn’t real life, but it speaks to a strong network and savvy comms, which matter a lot in campaigning.
Salinas was appointed to her state rep position and has never won a competitive election. She has strong endorsements, and I think is still probably the candidate most likely to win based on name recognition, endorsements, and political experience.
FWIW, I worked for a successful state house campaign and have volunteered on a few other campaigns.
Here is a synopsis from Primary School, a newsletter focused on democratic primaries. It’s kind of annoying to dig through their posts for the hard to see “see full post” button so I’m copy and pasting them.
EDIT FEC Update 2/5/2022
Carrick Flynn says he raised $430,000 in the first 10 days. Salinas only raised $174,000 in two months. Money isn’t everything in campaigns but that is kind of low for Salinas.
--
Tl;dr: Salinas seems like a strong candidate and solid progressive who is supported by the local party. I’d be interested in seeing her first fundraising numbers when they are out.
1/27/2022
OR-06
″Oregon Medical Board member Kathleen Harder raised $129,000 in the two months since she announced her campaign, which means she’s going to be a real part of this ever-widening field of candidates. In addition to her, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, and dueling pro-cryptocurrency self-funders Matt West and Cody Reynolds, a new candidate has entered: State Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon. Leon, who is in her second term in the state house, was mentioned as a potential candidate for this seat when it was first drawn, but stayed quiet about any plans until people just assumed she wasn’t interested. That likely includes the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who endorsed Salinas last month. Leon, an immigrant herself, has been fantastic on immigrant rights issues, and has fought to include the undocumented in Oregon’s Medicaid program. But her launch and campaign website have so far been light on the policy details, and she hasn’t taken any stances in inter-party fights that would make her allegiances more clear.
Leon may not even be the only candidate entering—AI researcher Carrick Flynn has filed to run. While assorted professors and researchers run for Congress all the time without anyone noticing, Flynn spent years as a relatively public-facing part of a well endowed AI-related public policy program, so he probably knows more than a few rich people.”
Originally I read this last sentence as him being more knowledgeable than rich people about AI, but now I’ve realized they probably meant he likely knows a bunch of deep pocketed individuals.
1/18/2022
″...FEC records that say that Matt West’s the one who self-funded $437,000 and raised $182,000, while Reynolds self-funded $2,000,000 and only raised $10 elsewhere.”
10/13/2021
″State Rep. Andrea Salinas is considering running for the new OR-06, a safely Democratic district containing the cities of Salem and Corvallis, as well as a significant chunk of the Portland suburbs. Salinas, first appointed to her suburban house seat in 2017, made it to House leadership just a couple years later, and has spent her time in office functioning as a solid progressive: She’s supported efforts to create a public option for Oregon (because “getting to some kind of single payer system is the best thing we could do..for all people in the US”), allow prisoners to vote, and give agricultural workers overtime pay. The local Democratic establishment clearly likes her if they appointed her to office, and to leadership not long after, so she’ll be a considerable force in the primary should she run. She also helped draw the new district, so the odds of it being at least somewhat optimized for her are pretty high.”
I won’t comment on their endorsements or strategy, but I will say that even if Carrick is a longshot it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s a bad use of marginal dollars.
Would you like to place numbers here? I’m at a pretty high probability personally, maybe more like 40% than your implied 5%.
Conditional on the campaign not having major relevant private information (e.g., expecting major endorsements), my instinct is about 5% (and my off-the-cuff low-research median estimate of his vote share is 10%). However, there’s so little public information so far that (in a prediction market, very roughly) I probably wouldn’t buy above 1% or sell below 20%.
(How did I imply 5%?)
He has several times more funding and twitter followers then his next nearest rival. There’s more compelling media on his website and social media, including his video. His campaign team is unusually strong. Good credentials for congress (Yale Law, experience designing policy, grew up near the district) and a compelling life story. Also, good policies on pandemics and otherwise. So he’s got better than one in five.
See Peter Gebauer’s comment above — do you think Carrick has a better chance than these competitors? Two crypto millionaires, two state reps, and a county commissioner. The three candidates with publicly available fundraising info now have $129K, $600K, and $2M (see above for which is which).
Seems like a tough field where Carrick would not be the favorite, but I don’t know much about the base rates here. Does anybody know more about the outcomes of similar races, preferably for Congressional seats between state politicians and well-credentialed political outsiders?
I was looking at the finances here, rather than at the banks of the crypto self-funders, which are admittedly larger. Carrick’s ad is better than their ads. This one who has lent himself $2M has had like five previous failed runs, including runs with various minor parties—I don’t think he has a serious chance. Carrick’s funding position is much better than the two state reps. His story, team and social media presence is probably better than all opponents. He’s not some sort of dark horse candidate.
Based on what people have said here, I think Carrick sounds like a great candidate who would make a wonderful representative. However, my impression from loosely following primaries from time to time is that local reputation matters a lot. Self funders tend not to do well because they tend not to have real local support. Does Carrick have a strong base of support or message to compete against the likes of a popular progressive state rep like Salinas (I don’t believe we have fundraising numbers from her yet)? If anyone knows of a race where a similar candidate won in similar circumstances, I’d love to hear about it.
The first similar race that comes to mind for me is when Cenk Uygur ran in California in 2020. Cenk moved to the district to run for an open seat and had large financial support from his fanbase built running a progressive independent media outlet known as The Young Turks. But he only got around 6% of the vote with $1.7 million spent. Granted, there are a couple of differences here: California has Top Two/jungle primaries which means all candidates are on the same primary ballot; it was a special election which tends to have lower turnout; Cenk tends to be pretty abrasive; he never lived in the district before; the election was in a swing district; and Cenk had controversial misogynistic past blog posts from years ago when he identified as a conservative Republican and was hit hard in the media over it. He was running against a woman state rep with local party support who ultimately won the primary (although she ultimately lost the general election by a few hundred votes). I wasn’t able to find numbers for what she spent in the special election primary but she got over $5 million in all of 2020 so maybe less than half of that?
I agree that Carrick loses to Salinas on some dimensions. He also beats her on some dimensions, like story, ads and social media. I think both have reasonably good chances.
I was trying to quantify your verbal claims via my intuition of what people might mean when they say those words, and it turns out I did pretty well! ;)