I had chatgpt analyze this paper on US House of Representatives. It finds that doubling spending for incumbents actually has ~no effect and in general you get about 4.5% increased win probability from doubling spending. You get the biggest gains for challengers with little name recognition. It also turns out that incumbents spend about $3M on a race and challengers spend about the same as well. So we’re talking about $3M to gain 4.5% extra chance of winning a house seat.
The paper goes on to explain that increases in spending faces increasingly diminishing returns.
To answer the question bluntly. I’ll just define past a certain point as 50% more than average spending. About 5% of races are “close” based on my crude metric of a margin of victory of less than 3 points.
Also, my criticism basically don’t apply (and in fact, I think we should be spending more money on) things like ballot initiatives and specific campaigns. I’m also much happier about things like primaries than general elections. If you are donating to just a generic race, even if it’s close, I don’t think there is actually enough evidence that one party is much better than the other.
A lot of money is spent on politics already. Unless there is very very specific issues of EA concern, I don’t think it’s worth donating to. There are tremendously good donation opportunities out there and political ads or Beyonce concerts aren’t among them IMO.
First, sorry for the late reply. I thought I had sent it but it was still in autosave.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659#bibr25-21582440241279659
I had chatgpt analyze this paper on US House of Representatives. It finds that doubling spending for incumbents actually has ~no effect and in general you get about 4.5% increased win probability from doubling spending. You get the biggest gains for challengers with little name recognition. It also turns out that incumbents spend about $3M on a race and challengers spend about the same as well. So we’re talking about $3M to gain 4.5% extra chance of winning a house seat.
The paper goes on to explain that increases in spending faces increasingly diminishing returns.
To answer the question bluntly. I’ll just define past a certain point as 50% more than average spending. About 5% of races are “close” based on my crude metric of a margin of victory of less than 3 points.
Also, my criticism basically don’t apply (and in fact, I think we should be spending more money on) things like ballot initiatives and specific campaigns. I’m also much happier about things like primaries than general elections. If you are donating to just a generic race, even if it’s close, I don’t think there is actually enough evidence that one party is much better than the other.
A lot of money is spent on politics already. Unless there is very very specific issues of EA concern, I don’t think it’s worth donating to. There are tremendously good donation opportunities out there and political ads or Beyonce concerts aren’t among them IMO.
I think we just agree. Don’t donate to politics unless you’re going to be smart about it