Mo Money Mo Problems, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

February 28, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment

This week, the conventional wisdom was debunked, at least a bit.  For the Democrats, it seems, money is not enough to win an election, not even in Chicago.

Okay, that requires about a zillion qualifiers. Rahm Emmanuel didn’t actually lose the primary to be the Democratic candidate for mayor in Chicago.  He received more votes than any of his three competitors.  However, he did not get more than fifty percent of the total, so now he’s in a run-off with his closest rival, Jesus Garcia.

 

An incumbent who can’t get more than half the votes from his own party is in trouble.  An incumbent who can’t get more than half the votes from his own party when he was several times the campaign funds as his opponents might be toast.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in a Democratic primary recently.  Andrew Cuomo outspent his primary opponent by a factor of three or four, and yet she received a substantial vote. In 2008, all the smart money went to Hillary Clinton in her race against Barack Obama.  The money didn’t win the nomination for her.

These few examples don’t prove anything. However, in a time when the Koch Brothers threaten to pour close to a billion dollars into next year’s elections, when the Supreme Court’s (bad) decision on Citizens United is the law of the land, this does demonstrate that not all people can be bought with slick commercials and polarized media.

When I mentioned this to my colleague and co-conspirator, Mike Gold, he agreed.  He said (and I don’t know if this is an exact quote, but I think I capture his meaning and he can correct me if I don’t), “Money won’t buy an election, but too little money can lose one.”  He’s mostly right.

In 2012, Mitt Romney, his party and PACs spent hundreds of millions of dollars (as did Obama, of course), but he didn’t spend them well.  He hired consultants who didn’t know their shit, and he listened to people who were almost entirely like him.  It reminded me of the story from 1972, when a similarly insulated person (although not a candidate, just an observer) insisted that McGovern was going to win, because nobody that she knew was going to vote for Nixon.

The world is bigger than each of us.  The country is bigger than each of us.  To win a national election, one must consider what motivates people who are different.

Money can buy advertising and, unfortunately, it can buy pundits and media masters.  Money can flood the airwaves and the Internet with distracting and ridiculous side-issues (I don’t approve of plagiarism, for example, but I don’t really care of someone did it 30 years ago in college), while real people need jobs and healthcare and a planet that isn’t under threat from war and pollution.

Maybe it’s how the money gets spent.  Paying consultants might be useful, but it’s not enough.  To win, a candidate needs grassroots organizers to speak to voters one-on-one, to let them know the election matters and every vote matters.

In the end, what wins elections is getting voters to the polls.  The only way to get them to vote is to make it important, and, ultimately, thinly way to make it important is to listen to what they want.  Power doesn’t come from the top down, but from the bottom up.

Stay tuned to see if this will still be true in 2016.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, has never turned down a chance to vote.  Not even when it’s hopeless.  Sometimes especially when it’s hopeless.