I keep going back and forth on this.
My first reaction was “this is just basic best practice for any people-/relationship-focused role, obviously community builders should have CRMs”.
Then I realised none of the leaders of the student group I was most active in had CRMs (to my knowledge) and I would have been maybe a bit creeped out if they had, which updated me in the other direction.
Then I thought about it more and realised that group was very far in the direction of “friends with a common interest hang out”, and that for student groups that were less like that I’m still basically pro CRMs. This feels obviously true for “advocacy” groups (anything explicitly religious or political, but also e.g. environmentalist groups, sustainability groups, help-your-local-community groups, anything do-goody). But I think I’d be in favour of even relatively neutral groups (e.g. student science club, student orchestras, etc) doing this.
Given how hard it is to keep any student group alive across multiple generations of leadership, not having a CRM is starting to seem very foolhardy to me.
It’s very much not obvious to me that EAs should generally prefer progressive democratic candidates in general, or Salinas in particular.
Speaking personally, I am generally not excited about Democratic progressives gaining more power in the party relative to centrists, and I’m pretty confident I’m not alone here in that[1].
I also think it’s false to claim that Salinas’s platform as linked gives much reason to think she will be a force for good on global poverty, animal welfare, or meaningful voting reform. (I’d obviously change my mind on this if there are other Salinas quotes that pertain more directly to these issues.)
There are also various parts of her platform that make me think there’s a decent chance that her time in office will turn out to be bad for the world by my lights (not just relative to Carrick). I obviously don’t expect everyone here to agree with me on that, and I’m certainly not confident about it, but I also don’t want broad claims that progressives are better by EA values to stand uncontested, because I personally don’t think that’s true.
To be clear, I think this is very contestable within an EA framework, and am not trying to claim that my political preferences here are necessarily implied by EA.