Really appreciated this post, Lincoln — especially how you put concrete multipliers on the relative value of different giving vehicles and timing. Having rough factors like that helps clarify tradeoffs that often stay abstract.
A few thoughts to build on your analysis:
General elections are usually harder to influence with money, since outcomes are mostly shaped by broad political winds, candidate strength, and the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) of each district (how strongly it leans toward one party).
Primaries, by contrast, can be far more sensitive to funding—especially open primaries without incumbents. Early, modest support can meaningfully affect who gets on the ballot. Helping incumbents avoid a primary challenge can sometimes be valuable as well.
On relational giving, there are three aspects worth considering:
Who gives and why it’s important to be known: Donations are most effective when the candidate (and/or their staff) understands who is giving and the motivation behind the gift. Bundling or giving through trusted connectors ensures the campaign knows who values their work and why.
Opportunities for education and relationship-building: Well-structured giving—such as through one-on-one meetings (which are surprisingly easy to get), small events, roundtables, or policy briefings—can create space to educate candidates on key issues and foster authentic, ongoing relationships.
The domain of giving: Whether the support comes via a 501c3, c4, PAC, or direct campaign contribution shapes not just the legal boundaries but also the potential for meaningful relational and educational engagement. As Lincoln indicates, direct campaign contributions (or the bundling of them) most directly incline the opportunity to build a relationship.
Finally, it’s worth reflecting on how central favorable policy change is to your cause area. For some issues—like animal welfare, AI safety, protein innovation (aka alternative proteins) or voting rights—policy seems to be the main lever. For others—like cultural change, or consumer behavior —private-sector or societal shifts may dominate. Aligning your giving vehicle with the true leverage point seems key.
Note: as context, I am a founder and president of two 501c4 lobbying organizations (Food Solutions Action and Americans for the Common Good) and a PAC.
This lands for me, and the line I keep returning to is the one where you catch yourself reducing the most numerous animals on Earth to a single word. That instinct to collapse is the whole problem in miniature.
Think about how we treat human health by comparison. We take one species and split it into twenty urgent priorities: heart disease, cancers, maternal mortality, road accidents,criminal justice , governance… We refuse to flatten ourselves, because every facet of our suffering feels vivid and worth its own field. With animals we run the operation in reverse. We take thousands of species, or at least the dozens we treat most negligently, and fold them into one comparable unit, then ask that single unit to compete for attention against everything else. The asymmetry in how we draw the lines tracks nothing about the underlying scale of suffering. It tracks only how much we let ourselves care.
And the reason is a predictable bias, not a mystery. We value the pain of beings who look and sound like us, and our concern falls off sharply with distance: from our race, our gender, our nation, our species. It’s scope insensitivity pointed at the moral circle itself. The chickens fracturing under their own weight and the feeder fish eaten alive are not suffering less than we would. People have tried to put numbers on this, and even the conservative welfare estimates imply aggregate suffering that dwarfs almost anything else we fund. The beings are just far enough from us that the figures don’t move us the way they should. Their ordinary day likely holds more pain than our worst one.
This is where your AI point matters more than the discourse admits. The moral circle we draw right now is the training example a more capable intelligence learns from. If we build systems while modeling the lesson that distance and unfamiliarity justify discounting a being’s pain, we are encoding the template that gets applied to us the moment we are the less powerful ones. How we treat what we can ignore today is the precedent for how we get treated when we can be ignored. That is not a footnote to the long-term future. As you say, it may be most of it.
Thank you for refusing to look past them.