How Much Was Your Ballot Worth in 2014?
Amateur Socialist at Angry Bear asked me about how much was being spent per vote in 2014, and did the due diligence of finding me a spreadsheet showing how many ballots were cast per state. Ask and ye shall receive.
Based on that data, here’s a rough-and-ready calc of how much was spent on each ballot. Have your way with it…
Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
Hey Steve, thanks for doing what I was too lazy to learn how to do π
Still eye popping but I note it likely excludes all the state and proposition money. Yes? Here in Austin the pros and cons spent a small fortune on a local transportation funding proposition.
We can’t afford a proper (non bank oriented) stimulus but this is somehow a necessity. Ok then.
And as I asked in the other thread, I wonder how much gets spent to sell something else we buy about this often, say cars or cellphones or computers (for some people). Do GM/Ford/VW/Toyota spend $17/vehicle in direct marketing expense? More? What about Apple/Samsung/HP/Lenovo?
I bet the high profile governor’s races would have popped these numbers significantly. FL and KS are 2 that come to mind besides the TX race. Such as it was.
A great deal of this money is wasted, well, I suppose if you’re a printer or a producer, or someone who profits off political advertising waste is in the eye of the beholder.
I did a very unscientific survey at my post office over several election cycles. About 85% of the election material went directly into the recycling – didn’t make it out the door of the post office. We’ve had some tight Congressional races over the years and our state legislative districts have been battlegrounds with lots of money from Art Pope.
I don’t have a television but from what I hear most folks seem to hate political advertising and find every way they can to avoid it. I’ve read a few studies on the effectiveness of political advertising and they seem to come down on the side of diminishing returns as the dollars go up.
I see two problems with all this money sloshing around. First, the constant search for dollars and the fact that so much money comes from big donors clearly gives the impression that there’s corruption (screw you Justices Kennedy and Roberts and hooray for Posner who is increasingly enlightened in this area). The second effect may be even more insidious and that is the purchasing of media opinion. Even nominally Democratic leaning talking heads like Mark Shields are mouthing Republican talking points – the media makes a great deal of money off political advertising, at some point that has to have an effect on attitudes and outlook.
Perhaps the worst thing is the way it has degraded even those messages. I know in the last month before election day I was deleting 30-50 fundraising emails daily, the vast majority of which essentially conveyed one message: “We are being out spent blah blah % or yadda yadda millions by the RNC/Kochs/Club for Growth etc.” They don’t even bother with the policies being advocated, just insist I help them spend at parity. Mostly to bother other people for money apparently.
Now if we could figure out how to get an initiative passed that required spam emailers to reimburse receivers for unwanted messages based on the bandwidth used without the subscribers permission…. π But that’s a topic for another thread.
“…- the media makes a great deal of money off political advertising, at some point that has to have an effect on attitudes and outlook.”
An astute observation. Couple that with the fact that the media is itself a collection of corporate entities the primary aim of all is to make a profit and to lower its own tax obligations. The media has never been an objective observer of political behavior going back to our earliest political activists. Wasn’t it A. Hamilton who put up money to get the NY Post off the ground so that he would have as loud a voice as was NY’s Gov. Clinton’s at the time? While the phenomenon is an old one it seems to have gathered undue influence with in this age of electronic communications and corporate ownership of that industry.
“As geologists cover the earth prospecting for oil, so politicians cover the electorate prospecting for hidden hatreds and identities.”
From a collection of essays written in 1955&1962 called “Radical Right”
I would simply add the phrase, “and the contributions it can generate”.
I subscribed to a Right Wing site while doing research for a post at STPO. I’m being inundated with e-mails. There are the usual pleas for money to stop the march of the dreaded Liberals but it seems like the main point of the Right wing machine is to scare the crap out of the constituency in an effort to sell them anything and everything. It’s a pitch for snake oil refined to high art.
Richard Viguerie, one of the founders of today’s Right, was first and foremost a direct mailer. Karl Rove cut his teeth on direct mail campaigns. The foundation of the Right is the idea of selling fear for the purpose of selling. Democrats have unfortunately bought into the premise that elections are exercises in acquiring market share.
The political philosopher Michael Sandel writes about our shift from a market economy to a market society. Until and unless we can shift the focus of electoral politics back to basic concepts of citizenship and the common good we will be fighting a battle on terrain that favors both plutocrats and the least common denominator.
“One measure of the success of a society is how engaged its citizens are in contributing to the common good” Daniel Levitin.
“at some point that has to have an effect on attitudes and outlook”
Chomsky really did explain it well in Manufacturing Consent. It’s about hiring. If you’re interviewing someone for a reporting position and they say they’re hot to go after your biggest advertisers, really: that must have an effect on even the most steely-eyed editor.
Sometimes I wonder what the flow path of all those billions is. Several questions come to mind.
1) It seems to me that pouring money into PR and advertising might be an ideal way to divert some to pay for other services you don’t want on the books. TV ad production, for example, is so expensive that an additional $20k here and there would be lost in the noise. Printing and design costs could easily be padded, too.
2) does this flash flood of advertising appreciably boost the economy? diverting cash from the wealthiest donors into the pockets of information workers, door to door flyer deliverers, voice actors and so on? Is there any way the Irish Elk antlers of advertising might have a *gasp* progressive effect?
3) and of course, we may wonder if the advertising has enough intended effects to be worth it to the buyers, or are the buyers just trapped into doing the Irish Elk tango because neither dares to back down?
Managed properly, getting them to escalate may be an inefficient but useful way to tap capital back into the grassroots economy. π
Noni
I once made the mistake of making a smallish dollar donation to some environmental or social justice organization (maybe the ACLU). Only to realize to my horror that I had maybe served to de-defund the Left. At least that portion of the Left that relied on direct mail to raise its funds. Because I got literally dozens of solicitations with obviously spendy printing costs mailed under at best a discounted non-profit maiing rate. The cumulative amount spent chasing another $25 or whatever rapidly mounted into a couple of hundred, not counting whatever it cost to buy/borrow that mailing list.
I seriously thought I should just send $10 to the NRA. After all the mail was just going to my PO Box and the recycle bin was right there. The only downside is that much of the money spent goes to people like Karl Rove anyway and even the paper is probably bought from Georgia-Pacific. Which is owned by the Koch Brothers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia-Pacific
(Yes every time you wipe your rear with Quilted Northern or wipe up a spill with Brawny you are contributing to the Right Wing Noise Machine).
Any way you look at it a huge amount of this fundraising whether by direct mail or phone or TV just sluices dollars into the consultants on both sides. Either find some way to donate direct or keep your wallet in pocket/purse.
As with so many things it’s important to keep some perspective. While the per voter numbers are kind of shocking in the tinier states the total election spending is actually dwarfed by say the US market for potato chips (iirc it’s about a $3B yearly clip).
John Oliver did a segment on his HBO program this weekend talking about the amount dropped on state sponsored lotteries ($68B yearly). This is a comparison that makes sense to me because depending on where you place your bet a contribution to a candidate is a perhaps similarly unrealistic “chance at a dream”.