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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
Not if you correct for incumbency. The thing people want to talk about is that money buys elections.
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
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.
Money doesn’t buy elections. Someone gets shocked about this every cycle when the overwhelmingly-funded toast sandwich lands with a thud.
Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.
You can trust that people with money are frugal and only spend when they expect to see a return.
If the region was going to go that way anyway, then the lobbying was wasted spend. So what would you rather have as your truth: that the money was spent to overturn public will, or that it was a dumb error to spend that money in the first place? What does that say about the people who see the status quo as something worth preserving?
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.
Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.