Hmm, I don’t know whether it wouldn’t have happened without EA funding, but seems pretty plausible to me. I think campaign donations are public so maybe we can just see very precisely who made this decision. I also think on the funding dimension a bunch of EA leaders encouraged others to donate to the Carrick campaign in what seemed to me to be somewhat too aggressive.
I do also think there was a separate pattern around the Carrick campaign where for a while people were really hesitant to say bad things about Carrick or politics-adjacent EA because it maybe would have hurt his election chances, and I think that was quite bad, and I pushed back a bunch of times on this, though the few times I did push back on it, it was quite well-received.
Bankman-Fried has provided Protect Our Future PAC with the majority of its donations. The group has raised $28 million for the 2022 election cycle as of June 30, with $23 million from Bankman-Fried. Nishad Singh, who serves as head of engineering at FTX, has donated another $1 million.
The PAC has spent $10.5 million, about half of the group’s independent expenditures through July 21, in support of Democrat Carrick Flynn in his unsuccessful primary bid in the highly funded Oregon 6th Congressional District race. Like Protect Our Future PAC, Flynn has stated that his “‘first priority is pandemic prevention.’”
The PAC spent nearly $940,000 against Flynn’s opponent, Oregon state Rep. Andrea Salinas. These expenditures represent the only instance in which Protect our Future PAC has spent money against a Democratic candidate.
The race has made for the third most expensive House Democratic primary in the country, according to the nonpartisan, nonprofit group OpenSecrets. By Monday, the Democratic race drew more than $13 million in outside money, OpenSecrets reported.
The vast majority of that — more than $10 million — was donated to Flynn’s campaign by a group backed by a cryptocurrency billionaire.
Hmm, I don’t know whether it wouldn’t have happened without EA funding, but seems pretty plausible to me. I think campaign donations are public so maybe we can just see very precisely who made this decision. I also think on the funding dimension a bunch of EA leaders encouraged others to donate to the Carrick campaign in what seemed to me to be somewhat too aggressive.
I do also think there was a separate pattern around the Carrick campaign where for a while people were really hesitant to say bad things about Carrick or politics-adjacent EA because it maybe would have hurt his election chances, and I think that was quite bad, and I pushed back a bunch of times on this, though the few times I did push back on it, it was quite well-received.
From this July 2022 FactCheck article (a):
From a May 2022 NPR article (a):