I like the idea of political contributions going to charity, though I can’t help thinking about the game theory implications here:
If I (a left-leaning person who prefers charity to political donations) felt strongly that much more money would come in on the Democrat side, I imagine I’d route my usual donation through this platform under the Republican candidate.
I guess it’s difficult to imagine an actual Republican contributing to this platform unless they preferred giving to charity anyway. Arguably this platform would then only deplete the funds of one candidate (the Democrat), with much of the funds intended for charity in the first place. But still, to be clear, this would be a net positive contribution IMO.
The issue you point out can be mostly resolved by saying that half of a pledges contributions will go to their chosen candidate no matter what—but this has the unfortunate effect of decreasing the amount of money that gets sent to charity. My guess is that it’s not worth it (though maybe doing some nominal amount like 5% is worth it (so as to discourage e.g. liberals who care mostly just about charity from donating to the Republican candidate).
I see now that this and a couple other points were mentioned in Repledge++. One more I would add to the list:
‘Relative advantage’ in cash vs percentage terms could be a sticking point. In the case of a $10M/$8M split, giving $2M/$0 to the respective candidates seems unfair to candidate B, because $2M is infinitely more than $0 in percentage terms. Say this money was going to ad buys, instead of running 100 vs 80 ad spots, candidate A now runs 20 spots vs zero for candidate B, and is the only candidate on the airwaves.
I would argue that a fair split would be $1.111M vs $0.889M, but I’m not sure that supporters of candidate A would agree.
Of course, if you assume that the platform is only a tiny fraction of total campaign contributions this is much less significant, but still worth a thought.
Yeah—I think it’s unlikely that Pact would become a really large player and have distortionary effects. If that happens, we’ll solve that problem when we get there :)
The broader point that the marginal dollar might be more valuable to one campaign than to another is an important one. You could try to deal with this by making an actual market, where the ratio at which people trade campaign dollars isn’t fixed at 1, but I think that will complicate the platform and end up doing more harm than good.
I like the idea of political contributions going to charity, though I can’t help thinking about the game theory implications here:
If I (a left-leaning person who prefers charity to political donations) felt strongly that much more money would come in on the Democrat side, I imagine I’d route my usual donation through this platform under the Republican candidate.
I guess it’s difficult to imagine an actual Republican contributing to this platform unless they preferred giving to charity anyway. Arguably this platform would then only deplete the funds of one candidate (the Democrat), with much of the funds intended for charity in the first place. But still, to be clear, this would be a net positive contribution IMO.
Yeah, there are various incentives issues like this one that are definitely worth thinking about! I wrote about some of them in this blog post: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/incentives-in-the-election-charity-platform/
The issue you point out can be mostly resolved by saying that half of a pledges contributions will go to their chosen candidate no matter what—but this has the unfortunate effect of decreasing the amount of money that gets sent to charity. My guess is that it’s not worth it (though maybe doing some nominal amount like 5% is worth it (so as to discourage e.g. liberals who care mostly just about charity from donating to the Republican candidate).
Yeah, I can see that. I would add the option to just donate your money to charity.
Also, how would it deal with minor-party candidates? Which major-party candidates would a minor-party donation cancel out, if any?
I see now that this and a couple other points were mentioned in Repledge++. One more I would add to the list:
‘Relative advantage’ in cash vs percentage terms could be a sticking point. In the case of a $10M/$8M split, giving $2M/$0 to the respective candidates seems unfair to candidate B, because $2M is infinitely more than $0 in percentage terms. Say this money was going to ad buys, instead of running 100 vs 80 ad spots, candidate A now runs 20 spots vs zero for candidate B, and is the only candidate on the airwaves.
I would argue that a fair split would be $1.111M vs $0.889M, but I’m not sure that supporters of candidate A would agree.
Of course, if you assume that the platform is only a tiny fraction of total campaign contributions this is much less significant, but still worth a thought.
Yeah—I think it’s unlikely that Pact would become a really large player and have distortionary effects. If that happens, we’ll solve that problem when we get there :)
The broader point that the marginal dollar might be more valuable to one campaign than to another is an important one. You could try to deal with this by making an actual market, where the ratio at which people trade campaign dollars isn’t fixed at 1, but I think that will complicate the platform and end up doing more harm than good.