About 10 days before the November 2016 election, Hillary Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Michigan, or Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, or Florida, or Arizona, or anywhere else where we needed to get votes. She was in California, at yet another in an endless stream of big-dollar fundraisers. She had already raised almost double what Donald Trump had, but it didn’t matter. Her consultant-driven machine needed dollars to pour into useless TV advertising that pumped more dollars into those consultant’s pockets.
It was a waste of time, a waste of resources, a waste of our dollars, and utterly ineffective as a strategy to earn votes. She didn’t need that money, even ending the campaign with money in the bank. But it’s what campaigns were supposed to do, right? Raise money from the people with money, from the very same wealthy individuals who had created our skewed and broken economic system.
I’ve been to those fundraisers. Many of those wealthy individuals think they’re wealthy because of their innate intelligence, and aren’t shy about telling candidates what to do, what to say, what to believe, and what to focus on. It inevitably distorts. It ties candidates in knots. It dilutes their message. Just look at the mess that is Kamala Harris’ campaign to see that in action.
The two most coherent on-message campaigns are the two campaigns that are most small-dollar centric: Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’. And all you have to do is look at Warren’s upward trajectory in the polling to see that focusing on face-to-face campaigning and policy-proposing works. She’s now literally the frontrunner, ahead of Joe Biden in the polling composite, having built that support one selfie and one policy proposal at a time.
Having seen that success, and confident in the power of her small-dollar fundraising army, Warren has now taken the next step, and it’s a good one: If she wins the Democratic nomination, she won’t do big-dollar fundraisers in the general election, either. She had previously said she would. “Either you think democracy works and electing a president is all about going behind closed doors with bazillionaires and corporate executives and lobbyists and scooping up as much money as possible. Or you think it’s about a grass-roots, let’s build this from the ground up.” Good.
Update: If you want to see how obnoxious being big-dollar-donor focused can be, read about Joe Biden’s fundraising woes here and here. “[S]enior campaign officials told leading Biden fundraisers, or bundlers, that the campaign is looking to boost the number of its fundraising events.” Because that’s what Biden needs—even more time away from actual campaigning...