Since the Democratic Party is supposed to represent blue-collar working people. And everybody wants to say that Trump is run by billionaires, and yet we know that they’re still counting votes in places like California.
We know that China produces 10 times more steel than the United States.
We know that sanctions didn’t do one bit to weaken the economy of Russia.
Let’s talk about spending
Link to the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/harris-campaign-finances.html
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1gztbju
by spilledcoffee00
25 comments
Not sure what the question is, but basically Republican messaging resonated with more people than Democratic messaging in 2024.
FWIW if you include dark money, “billionaires” contributed very healthily to both parties, including the billionaire who owns what is now the world’s most popular Republican propaganda outlet.
This is ridiculous. That money could have helped a lot of people with a lot of things
Trump had been campaigning for the past 9 years. and arguably much longer when you see so many old interviews asking him if he is going to run for president. In that time frame he spent much more. Harris had 3 months to show the public who she is so yeah she had to spend because many people didn’t even know she was the candidate.
People are simple, they vote for height and the best teeth. Harris did poorly in the primaries for whatever fickle reasons people have in their lizard brain. Clearly she was not inspiring. They should have run a primary and allowed the public to vote on who they wanted, not told what they get.
Mismanagement
Because you can’t just spend your way out of selecting an unelectable candidate.
Two things: fear of transgender people and high grocery prices.
actually somebody finally figured this out it turns out a lot of people didn’t know she was brat
Because stoking irrational fears on the daily works better than that amount of money can counter
Sir this is an economics forum
If she had won, no one would care that she overspent.
So, there’s a lot of answers that are going to be irrelevant to your specific question – Which is around spending, yes?
Pertaining to spending; And let me be clear, this answer is not expressing support for either candidate but rather giving an honest and objective assessment of what the data says and is addressing JUST the financial aspects of Kamala’s loss.
**Problem 1: Efficiency**
One glaring problem that the Kamala campaign had (which, frankly deserves some explaining because at face value it’s shady) was that they outspent Trump’s two year campaign on campaign staffing 50 to 1 in 120 days.
Kamala Campaign Staffing Cost for 120 days: $500 something million dollars in 120 days
Trump Campaign Staffing Cost for 2 years: $10 million
-There hasn’t been any explanation as to why this was the case, but that alone tells you that the huge advantage she had financially she almost erased by overpaying staff to an extreme OR, someone got really rich off this campaign and money was maliciously funneled to one or a few individuals who are now loaded. Her brother in-law was heavily involved in her campaign and he has a record of incredibly shady misuse of state funds, though that could just be a coincidence
**Problem 2: Audience ROI**
Throughout the campaign the Kamala team ran A LOT of TV ads, but avoided most sit down interview scenarios (excluding Fox and CNN) and chose unusual venues (such as a special online stream by Oprah) that didn’t have the benefit of long term audience growth or dedicated listeners. They also chose TikTok over most other platforms to run ads on and pay influencers but the problem is a lot of the TikTok audience aren’t even old enough to vote.
The real problem however, is that all of these avenues that they chose – TV Ads, Oprah’s random online stream, are all the channels that literally have the least amount of eyeballs watching them. We are talking in the range of 500,000 to 800,000 on CNN, 1.5ish million on Fox, and even less then either of those on TV ads. All of those also cost a lot of money.
The Trump campaign, instead chose the largest audiences in the world with Joe Rogan’s podcast, Logan Paul, Jake Paul, The Nelk Boys or whatever they’re called, Theo Von, Dr. Phil, all of which have several millions of listeners (Trump’s JRE podcast had 30 million listeners in 24 hours) – All of this cost Trump zero dollars, only travel which is pennies in the grand scheme of a campaign budget. So it was just a far more effective use of money and energy.
**Problem 3: Celebrities**
I’m not sure who on Kamala’s campaign staff thought that celebrity endorsements would help her at all, let alone advising her to spend millions of dollars to get them. However Kamala’s campaign spent at least $100 million to celebrities to get them to endorse her, while Trump’s campaign received far less celebrity endorsements, the ones they did receive were done for free. By all data available, those endorsements actually did more damage than good
Those are the top three reasons SPECIFIC to financial reasons that Kamala outspent Trump and still lost.
I’d love to hear your critique or thoughts or response.
Can’t wait to see how many faces get eaten by leopards
Since when do marketing dollars guarantee elections?
More people voted for Trump and against Kamala. A moderate $ spend advantage wasn’t enough to overcome it. Pretty straightforward.
> Since the Democratic Party is supposed to represent blue-collar working people
It does. There’s just some subset of billionaires who also support progressive policy.
Doesn’t help that Trump is literally insane and terrible for the economy. Even billionaires can see the pile of shit that he is.
> And everybody wants to say that Trump is run by billionaires
He’s owned by all kinds of people. Billionaires are just one of the special interest groups that lead his weak-willed little mind around.
> and yet we know that they’re still counting votes in places like California.
And?
> We know that China produces 10 times more steel than the United States.
And? Since when is manufacture of base materials the sign of a healthy and advanced economy?
> We know that sanctions didn’t do one bit to weaken the economy of Russia.
They did quite a lot to weaken Russia. They just didn’t end the war.
> Let’s talk about spending
Bad topic for Republicans, given they badly outstrip almost all democratic competitors on the deficit spending and debt front.
Their candidate was awful and their messaging was even worse.
I have to admit that watching both sides make claims of election fraud while simultaneously denying the other’s side accusation of it is just the pinnacle of how fucked up politics in this country have gotten.
Because Democrats don’t lie and use a foreign and domestic media propaganda machine, their billionaires don’t own media conglomerates, conservatives own most mainstream media sources now and their leader is not a head of a Fuhrer-cult. The cult is capturing more and more followers just as innNazi Germany. independents are falling under spell of Nazi Christian nationalism. Hitler was seen as chosen by God to save Germany, Maga feels same way about Trump, Hitler was seen as infallible, as is Trump
Simple non-political answer. Spending money on political advertising no longer buys votes like it used to.
Algorithms made to boost engagement/profits and programmed polarizing misinformation backed by billions.
The truth is that there are groups of voters that will never vote for a woman for president and that’s what the democrats are up against. They can spend all the money in the world and certain groups of voters just won’t ever vote for a woman. Add to that the fact the democrats have largely ignored the concerns of a large segment of middle class voters and this is what you get.
Are you including the nonstop propaganda flowing from Xitter, Fox and the like? Bc that had a huge impact that people on the left hurrying to point fingers need to take more seriously.
Billionaires who want Earth and society to survive vs Billionaires who want total control at any cost to society and the world.
The only ads I saw for Harris were on YouTube asking for money, I saw no Trump ads on there. It was the $40 that she asked for via text too.
Like give me money is how people campaign for their daily drug fix not how you run for office.
So I think their ads could have done better, I think her huge rally’s in places she would have won could have been spent in places like Fulton county Georgia and Atlanta.
Fulton county has a huge ev factory going in, the chips act plants, manufacturing, etc.
All while delivering a message of making it easier for struggling Americans.
An open primary and Biden stepping aside would change it too bc more time to define oneself.
Kamala was a bad candidate. High unfavorability ratings. Never vetted by voters on a national level because her 2020 campaign went no where. Never broke with unpopular administration she was a part of. Lacks charisma too, her attempts to sound like Obama were not good. Short campaign.
That money could have helped a lot of people with a lot of things
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