Friday, June 29, 2018

“The donor class”

“I think that a lot of Democratic politics has been about trying to find the least offensive cause to the donor class to rally people around while stepping on the fewest toes”: Jeff Beals, Democratic candidate in a New York congressional primary race, as quoted in the most recent episode of This American Life, “It’s My Party and I’ll Try If I Want To.”

[See also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.]

comments: 2

Pete said...

I wonder about the wisdom of chasing big donors. A huge war chest is good, but only if it’s used to pay for a big field organization, instead of a flood of TV ads. I think there’s clearly a saturation point beyond which buying more ads has little impact. At some point voters will just start tuning out the message. If the Democrats relied less on Wall Street for money (Hillary was probably even less clean in that area than Trump), they’d be much better off. Let the GOP be the exclusive party of Wall Street.

Michael Leddy said...

I think you’d find the TAL episode really interesting. Much of it is about the price to be paid, so to speak, when seeking big donors.