Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.
> if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to ... They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
This is the crux. You give money to both candidates, while you frame the issue in terms of things voters don't immediately recoil at and don't work to understand. The part that IS population-facing you dress it up in dishonest language that makes the average person who disagrees think they mustn't have the average viewpoint. For example Faceboot's recent semi-successful lobbying to require OSs to betray their users.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
Using a new york post article to dismiss the insurgent left on grounds of experience is one way to describe it I guess. Schumer and Jeffries have decades of experience between them and the Democratic party has the lowest approval in its history among its base. Kat Abughazaleh is more in step with where that base is on foreign and domestic policy, ignore the progress her wing of the party is making at your peril. There will be more Abughazalehs and Mamdanis in the future because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents instead of more technocratic hand wringing combined with the bloodiest period of foreign policy since Vietnam.
>> because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents.
You sure about that?
How does letting 20+ homeless people die in freezing temperatures deliver them public services like shelter when severe weather bombards the region? Or get the roads properly plowed out and the garbage taken care of after a horrible blizzard? Mamdani already failed in delivering even the most basic of services to its constituents. How do people not realize this is the guy they were voting for?
Its also one thing to talk about delivering public services to the constituents. Its quite another to explain how you intend to pay for such luxuries when the city and the state already have copious amounts of duplicitous public services that would cover such initiatives already. Why would you need a free grocery store when there are hundreds of free food shelfs and non-profits that offer free meals in the city?
The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.
I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.
And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.
There was a really amusing article in Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago which pointed out that most of the really big donors just sprayed money at a unicause indiscriminately and that Michael Bloomberg was the only one that showed any sign of investing rationally.
I mentioned that to my wife and she of course rolled her eyes because it seemed so self-serving to her. (Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about how much better The Economist was than Bloomberg Businessweek and how I finally canceled my subscription to the latter when they hired genius financial writer Matt Levine [1] to write a whole issue boosting crypto in a 200% cringe writing style just before the FTX scandal broke)
[1] ... sent him an email about how sorry I was for him!
If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about.
Of course the media tending toward "every election is super close, impossible to call, tune in tomorrow" before the election and "it was so obvious he'd win" afterwards doesn't help.
it's not necessarily straightforward that "more fundraising => win" because "better candidate => more fund raising". Like definitely if a candidate gets people excited they are going to raise more small money donations and some big donors are sensible, though of course one senseless whale can blow out the numbers. [1]
Note Clinton and Harris outraised Trump by large margins in 2016 and 2024
[1] as someone who has run third party candidates for office I am going to push back on some of the discourse around access because in most places the restrictions aren't that bad and if you find it hard to get enough signatures on the ballot and find it hard to get at least some money from donors you are going to find it hard to get votes
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.
The candidate doesn't own you anything and cannot receive donations directly anymore. Thus you get to pull the corruption, illegal, or indirect, less effective, cards.
Supporting the candidate to get him elected is much different.
Throwing money at a Republican primary candidate in Illinois is probably as ineffective as it would be in New York. The big cities are just too deeply Democratic.
That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent.
But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.
It's the same strategy they used in 2024 to a great effect: if you are against the crypto industry we will attack you. Not support the other candidate, but just attack you.
The intention is to not waste money on supporting candidates, but to attack those that challenge the crypto industry.
It's a very unique strategy in US politics that has been deployed quite successfully at varying times (Bill Clinton, uber, airbnb). Now with the elites being so brazen about their opulence they're taking it to the extreme.
Sure but like… he’s just some fucking guy on a tech comment thread (as are we all). You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes? Nah. The people who won wouldn’t take their money. It had to be those losers.
This is not a story about people being bad at bribing, it’s a story about The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes. Not necessarily because they took crypto money, more because shit policy positions usually come in sets, and we’re not into it.
I mean that receiving election funding generally just correlates with winning and it doesn’t cause winning.
Everyone wants to write checks to the winner, because they think they will win. But writing checks to some random candidate doesn’t result in them suddenly winning.
Why would a candidate compromise their platform like that if they aren't going to lose without those donations and won't even lose if the money is spent against them?
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
The aim is not to influence the election it is to own the person who wins the election. The less likely they are to win the cheaper it is, but higher the chances it is all for nothing.
Chicago is the home of the Chicago commodities exchange... and like New York has a bit of influence over businesses dealing with banking taking place in New York, so too does Illinois have influence over the regulations around the question of commodities and related markets.
"The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries"
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
Political campaigns certainly need money, but there are heavily diminishing returns pretty quickly. In races where all the candidates have money just throwing more in doesnt seem to accomplish much.
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
If Mongolia pays a bunch of US citizens to vote for some candidate that promises to push the US towards militarily supporting Mongolia, do you think the First Amendment supports that?
Or more accurately, imagine if the US had special rules and exceptions for dual citizens of Mongolia and the US that don't exist for any other country and then it allowed those dual citizens to push for certain candidates without having to be registered as a foreign lobby.
Now try substituting Mongolia with Russia or China.
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
They didn't throw the election per se, they just didn't try very hard to win a fight they could easily lose. Why burn bridges with a very important ally over something that might not end up being your problem?
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".
I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically
1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;
2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;
3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and
4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.
And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.
But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
Oh I agree she ran a better campaign given that there isnt ranked chocie voting. Im just stating that I am very unhappy that 25% of the dem electorate are looking for clown meme candidates. Thats by far the biggest lesson from her campaign, 25% of primary voters do not care about anything other than memeage. I cant say thats a good way to get competent politicians but it is now the world we live in.
> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.
Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them
This is what I've been saying to the people who blame the voters for Trump's win in 2024. Democrats knew how dangerous he was and how weak of a candidate he should have been and they still decided to skip the primary and run an unpopular candidate so late in the race after it became clear that Biden wasn't going to make it after the first debate. They met a serious and decisive moment with incompetence and the public is facing the consequences of that. They should be taking this all more seriously and doing introspection on the loss rather than blaming the voters.
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the results were identical to just one cycle ago where AIPAC wasn't a factor at all? I'm a politically engaged Illinois Democrat (to the point where I have precinct maps of CD7 and CD9 running for local political discussions), I understand what AIPAC was doing here. Unfortunately for your argument, it doesn't appear to have had any effect.
First, IL-7 was nothing like it was in 2024. What are you talking about? In 2024, a 14 term incumbent, Danny Davis, was seeking reelection. Now there's some noise here because IL-7 changed in the 2021 redistricting and became more Democratic but still, Davis is a long-time veteran.
Davis was a progressive but has a more mixed record on Israel funding and defence bills. He's concered with what he has called a "humanitarian crisis", which is more than most, but never gone so far as to use terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" AFAIK.
Davis faced challenges in 2024 but won pretty handily. One of his challengers wasa the future 2026 AIPAC chosen candidate, Melissa Conyears-Ervin. AIPAC indirectly (eg through UDP) spent millions [1] in the IL-7 Democratic primary and still came in third.
So, IL-7 in 2026 was a massively funded primary in an open field with no incumbent and 2024 was a 14 term incumbent seeking reelection without massive spending. In what way are they comparable?
Bonus question: if millions are spent to oppose a candidate and they still win, how can you say the results were "identical"?
Good. I vote against anybody who is supported by crypto pacs as one of my top priorities in primaries. Unfortunately, Schiff beat Porter for the Senate seat in California, but happily the grifting Rishi Kumar continues to lose every seat he runs for.
Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.
> if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to ... They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
This is the crux. You give money to both candidates, while you frame the issue in terms of things voters don't immediately recoil at and don't work to understand. The part that IS population-facing you dress it up in dishonest language that makes the average person who disagrees think they mustn't have the average viewpoint. For example Faceboot's recent semi-successful lobbying to require OSs to betray their users.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lefty-influencer-kat...
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
Using a new york post article to dismiss the insurgent left on grounds of experience is one way to describe it I guess. Schumer and Jeffries have decades of experience between them and the Democratic party has the lowest approval in its history among its base. Kat Abughazaleh is more in step with where that base is on foreign and domestic policy, ignore the progress her wing of the party is making at your peril. There will be more Abughazalehs and Mamdanis in the future because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents instead of more technocratic hand wringing combined with the bloodiest period of foreign policy since Vietnam.
>> because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents.
You sure about that?
How does letting 20+ homeless people die in freezing temperatures deliver them public services like shelter when severe weather bombards the region? Or get the roads properly plowed out and the garbage taken care of after a horrible blizzard? Mamdani already failed in delivering even the most basic of services to its constituents. How do people not realize this is the guy they were voting for?
Its also one thing to talk about delivering public services to the constituents. Its quite another to explain how you intend to pay for such luxuries when the city and the state already have copious amounts of duplicitous public services that would cover such initiatives already. Why would you need a free grocery store when there are hundreds of free food shelfs and non-profits that offer free meals in the city?
You may have misunderstood my point.
I'm not discrediting anything except the notion that this was business as usual and the winners were as expected.
The article was simply the first I found as reference (could not remember the original source I read about this) and I make no comment on its bias.
This is starting to get into 2015 "nothing to see here, Donald Trump will never win" levels of denial.
I may be taking out some frustration on you undeservedly here.
The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.
> he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition
Money doesn’t buy elections. Someone gets shocked about this every cycle when the overwhelmingly-funded toast sandwich lands with a thud.
I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.
And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.
There was a really amusing article in Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago which pointed out that most of the really big donors just sprayed money at a unicause indiscriminately and that Michael Bloomberg was the only one that showed any sign of investing rationally.
I mentioned that to my wife and she of course rolled her eyes because it seemed so self-serving to her. (Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about how much better The Economist was than Bloomberg Businessweek and how I finally canceled my subscription to the latter when they hired genius financial writer Matt Levine [1] to write a whole issue boosting crypto in a 200% cringe writing style just before the FTX scandal broke)
[1] ... sent him an email about how sorry I was for him!
If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about.
Of course the media tending toward "every election is super close, impossible to call, tune in tomorrow" before the election and "it was so obvious he'd win" afterwards doesn't help.
> If you start looking at "candidate spend" vs "results" you get metrics that .... people don't want to talk about
Not if you correct for incumbency. The thing people want to talk about is that money buys elections.
See
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659
it's not necessarily straightforward that "more fundraising => win" because "better candidate => more fund raising". Like definitely if a candidate gets people excited they are going to raise more small money donations and some big donors are sensible, though of course one senseless whale can blow out the numbers. [1]
Note Clinton and Harris outraised Trump by large margins in 2016 and 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_in_the_2024_United...
[1] as someone who has run third party candidates for office I am going to push back on some of the discourse around access because in most places the restrictions aren't that bad and if you find it hard to get enough signatures on the ballot and find it hard to get at least some money from donors you are going to find it hard to get votes
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.
Not easy and effective post election .
The candidate doesn't own you anything and cannot receive donations directly anymore. Thus you get to pull the corruption, illegal, or indirect, less effective, cards.
Supporting the candidate to get him elected is much different.
> cannot receive donations directly anymore
Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.
Not all.
owe
Maybe it's a sign that your "pennies on the dollar" theory needs some work?
This bodes well for democracy. Hopefully things stay such that they can’t be bought. Once they can be we are in trouble.
Throwing money at a Republican primary candidate in Illinois is probably as ineffective as it would be in New York. The big cities are just too deeply Democratic.
It's a primary. They put money against one Democrat in the hopes that some other Democrat who doesn't know about regulating crypto grifts will win.
Pretty sure primary sending isn’t very helpful when it’s intended to change election results.
What’s helpful is donating to people who you already know are going to win so that they do you favors later on.
That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent.
But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.
The article suggests something like 90% of their spend was intended to change results. Can you help me understand your comment? I don’t get it.
They are saying that was a bad strategy and not the usual one. I have no idea to what extent that’s true.
It's the same strategy they used in 2024 to a great effect: if you are against the crypto industry we will attack you. Not support the other candidate, but just attack you.
The intention is to not waste money on supporting candidates, but to attack those that challenge the crypto industry.
It's a very unique strategy in US politics that has been deployed quite successfully at varying times (Bill Clinton, uber, airbnb). Now with the elites being so brazen about their opulence they're taking it to the extreme.
He means in politics you don't need to bet on the winning horse, you can just bribe him after he wins. Or bet on both.
Sure but like… he’s just some fucking guy on a tech comment thread (as are we all). You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes? Nah. The people who won wouldn’t take their money. It had to be those losers.
This is not a story about people being bad at bribing, it’s a story about The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes. Not necessarily because they took crypto money, more because shit policy positions usually come in sets, and we’re not into it.
I mean that receiving election funding generally just correlates with winning and it doesn’t cause winning.
Everyone wants to write checks to the winner, because they think they will win. But writing checks to some random candidate doesn’t result in them suddenly winning.
> The people rejecting candidates who were open to taking those bribes
The people voted for candidates who were openly taking bribes from other people.
> You don’t think the professional bribe guys know a thing or two about doing bribes?
Crypto bros know better and wont hire the professionals
On those terms, they also wasted a lot of cash. 90% of it went to candidates who lost (or opposing candidates who won).
Why would a candidate compromise their platform like that if they aren't going to lose without those donations and won't even lose if the money is spent against them?
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
The aim is not to influence the election it is to own the person who wins the election. The less likely they are to win the cheaper it is, but higher the chances it is all for nothing.
Is there a writeup of the objectives of lobbying/spending here? Are specific bills/topics proposed for the upcoming session?
Chicago is the home of the Chicago commodities exchange... and like New York has a bit of influence over businesses dealing with banking taking place in New York, so too does Illinois have influence over the regulations around the question of commodities and related markets.
https://nationaltoday.com/us/il/chicago/news/2026/02/24/cme-...
https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/commod...
Another bit is things like sports betting laws... and how they interact with prediction markets.
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/sports-betting-tax-beco...
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/illinois-regulators-say...
Furthermore a fair number of the largest crypto trading firms (DRW, Jump, Wolverine) are HQ’d in Chicago.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cryptocurrency-and-ai-...
They're concerned about regulation, as always.
Note that this election has no impact over the current congress. Senators and Reps won't be seated until January.
"The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries"
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.
What? Are you trying to say their spending had no effect because their spending had no effect?
..could be a built-in feature of the matter?
:-D
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
Having been involved in some political campaigns and movements, I totally believe that nobody knows the ROI on where the dollars are going.
Political campaigns certainly need money, but there are heavily diminishing returns pretty quickly. In races where all the candidates have money just throwing more in doesnt seem to accomplish much.
“Good investment” is looking a bit suspicious there
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
Nobody cares about crypto.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/aipac-israel-illino...
[2]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead...
[3]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-autopsy-gaza-...
I Will never understand why US allows this kind of political intervention.
Pesky thing called the First Amendment.
If Mongolia pays a bunch of US citizens to vote for some candidate that promises to push the US towards militarily supporting Mongolia, do you think the First Amendment supports that?
Or more accurately, imagine if the US had special rules and exceptions for dual citizens of Mongolia and the US that don't exist for any other country and then it allowed those dual citizens to push for certain candidates without having to be registered as a foreign lobby.
Now try substituting Mongolia with Russia or China.
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
They really interpret the First to protect lobbying and campaign donations?
I mean the Second as written also isn’t primarily about the right to pack heat, so it’s not that surprising.
Citizens United is an abomination. Its the reason we're in dire straits at present. It "legalized" bribery.
Money is speech, and is sacred, but books with gay people in them aren't speech, and need to be carefully controlled.
Citizens United cough
A case where the opposition claimed that under a correct reading of the Constitution they had the authority to ban books.
I don't like lobbying and campaign finance either, but people shouldn't pretend these are simple or absurd arguments.
If donating money is free speech why don’t you try giving some to a group categorized as a terrorist organization
A lot of rich people were afraid democracy would change the world but it turns out those with money will always have the power.
And this is not an American thing every country has its lobbying industry.
I don't understand why they'd throw an election so the other pro-Israel side can win.
They didn't throw the election per se, they just didn't try very hard to win a fight they could easily lose. Why burn bridges with a very important ally over something that might not end up being your problem?
AIPAC was promoting the third place finisher. They opposed both Biss and Abugazeleh who finished first and second.
In his victory speech, Biss credited J Street. So still Israel, just not AIPAC specifically.
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
>imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed
Ranked choice still succumbs to a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
Approval voting works better and simpler, and STAR voting works even better though with more complexity. https://www.equal.vote/beyond_rcv_zine
That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".
I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically
1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;
2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;
3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and
4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.
And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.
But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
Oh I agree she ran a better campaign given that there isnt ranked chocie voting. Im just stating that I am very unhappy that 25% of the dem electorate are looking for clown meme candidates. Thats by far the biggest lesson from her campaign, 25% of primary voters do not care about anything other than memeage. I cant say thats a good way to get competent politicians but it is now the world we live in.
> But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".
I know this is wishful thinking but itd be nice if politics had just a little bit of substance instead of purely being a popularity contest where competence at governing is irrelevant.
Also Kat still lost. If the progressives backed one of the local candidates they likely win, so its hard to really say she ran such a great campaign. She blew it for them
This is what I've been saying to the people who blame the voters for Trump's win in 2024. Democrats knew how dangerous he was and how weak of a candidate he should have been and they still decided to skip the primary and run an unpopular candidate so late in the race after it became clear that Biden wasn't going to make it after the first debate. They met a serious and decisive moment with incompetence and the public is facing the consequences of that. They should be taking this all more seriously and doing introspection on the loss rather than blaming the voters.
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
Did you miss the part where I said that the AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated PAC spending never mentions Israel?
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the results were identical to just one cycle ago where AIPAC wasn't a factor at all? I'm a politically engaged Illinois Democrat (to the point where I have precinct maps of CD7 and CD9 running for local political discussions), I understand what AIPAC was doing here. Unfortunately for your argument, it doesn't appear to have had any effect.
First, IL-7 was nothing like it was in 2024. What are you talking about? In 2024, a 14 term incumbent, Danny Davis, was seeking reelection. Now there's some noise here because IL-7 changed in the 2021 redistricting and became more Democratic but still, Davis is a long-time veteran.
Davis was a progressive but has a more mixed record on Israel funding and defence bills. He's concered with what he has called a "humanitarian crisis", which is more than most, but never gone so far as to use terms like "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" AFAIK.
Davis faced challenges in 2024 but won pretty handily. One of his challengers wasa the future 2026 AIPAC chosen candidate, Melissa Conyears-Ervin. AIPAC indirectly (eg through UDP) spent millions [1] in the IL-7 Democratic primary and still came in third.
So, IL-7 in 2026 was a massively funded primary in an open field with no incumbent and 2024 was a 14 term incumbent seeking reelection without massive spending. In what way are they comparable?
Bonus question: if millions are spent to oppose a candidate and they still win, how can you say the results were "identical"?
[1]: https://chicagocrusader.com/la-shawn-ford-wins-7th-district-...
Good. I vote against anybody who is supported by crypto pacs as one of my top priorities in primaries. Unfortunately, Schiff beat Porter for the Senate seat in California, but happily the grifting Rishi Kumar continues to lose every seat he runs for.