How I'm Running
Money and Politics
A big political truthism is that money wins political campaigns. Establishment parties bankrolled by the largest corporations and the richest individuals blow hundreds of thousands of dollars every election cycle on advertisements and consultants. They orchestrate grand publicity campaigns that are, in theory, expertly designed to sway voters. According to common wisdom, candidates who don’t raise obscene amounts of money simply don’t have a chance… right?
Except, there’s a funny little ‘gotcha’ to all of this: the relationship between money and elections is a little complicated. Based on research, money seems to merely predict where support is, rather than actually be the cause of election victories. And that’s not the only thing disrupting old beliefs about political campaigns. America’s political demographics have shifted over the past decade: 53% of voters today aren’t registered under either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Nearly 41% of Americans outright identify themselves as independents. What’s more, the 2024 election cycle saw Dan Osborn, a complete newcomer in Nebraska running as an independent on a worker-centered platform, nearly take an incumbent’s seat in the Senate race.
Our political landscape is constantly changing. Resonating with voters is what matters, and there’s no way to game the system with regard to what kinds of ads will sway them. Thus, no amount of money can ‘buy’ an election, by itself.
Far more important than raw money is the relevance of a candidate’s platform, their ability to connect with voters, and the spread of their message. The reason political winners tend to have huge amounts of fundings is that big donors are good at identifying the stronger candidates. That allows them to throw money at them to gain favors in Congress later. The thing is, I’m not interested in letting the rich and powerful gain even the illusion of influence over me. Rather than raise loads of money to splurge on fancy dinners, wasteful fundraisers, or those incredibly annoying TV ads that flood the air on election season, I intend to use it to facilitate my time spent traveling the district and engaging with as many of you as humanly possible. I intend to spend it as frugally as I can, maximizing the value out of every dollar entrusted to me so I can do one thing, and one thing only: give everyone in this district a chance to get to know me and my platform.
Millions of Americans, myself included, are sick of ‘business-as-usual’ politics. What’s more, I have a novel method of running for office that doesn’t risk ‘splitting the ticket’ if there are several other promising candidates besides me. And it relies on the fact that people who believe enough in a candidate to donate, even just $5, are overwhelmingly likely to follow through and vote for them.
The Strategy
The long and short of it: donations of $5 or more show that someone is serious enough to follow through and vote for a candidate. I’ll publicly list the total number of individual contributions I’ve received at all times. If I don’t meet my support goal by a certain deadline, and there’s a risk of me ‘splitting the ticket’ by continuing with a 2026 bid, I’ll give all my supporters the chance to vote whether I step down. I’ll also pledge that, if the vote is for me to bow out, I will distribute remaining unspent campaign funds to the other candidates in proportion to the way my supporters ask for. This gives you all the opportunity to back a candidate like me without worrying about whether your votes and money will be wasted. Because I’ll be straight with you: I’m not interested in wasting anyone’s time, money, or voting power. If we don’t have ranked choice voting in America by law, then I’ll run my campaign in such a way as to make it happen. Protecting peoples’ voting power means that much to me. And I’m confident enough in what I have to offer that I think I’ll have more than enough support by the deadline.
If you’re interested in the mathematical details that make this strategy work, read on.
Voter turnout in Texas 1st Congressional District in the last two non-presidential elections was about 220,000 voters. The halfway point is 110,000 votes, which would be enough to make for a close race. Probability-wise, a candidate who reaches 130,000 votes here in such an election is guaranteed to win. It’s also well-documented that voters who donate to a particular candidate’s campaign are overwhelmingly likely to vote for them on election day. Since studies show that between 7% to 28% of voters actually donate at all, we can choose a reasonably difficult contribution rate of 15% to say that I probably need around 19,500 individual contributions for a guaranteed win. This is very much above previous performance, as our district’s current Representative won his 2022 contested election with only 860 individual itemized contributions, of which 235 of them came from the same source: WinRed. And, if we assume that his $25,000 worth of unitemized individual contributions were no more than $5 each, that only gives another 5,000 individual donors. That’s less than 6,000 total, after making generous assumptions.
Thus, my goal is to reach 13,000 unique individual donations by August 1st, 2026, which is 2/3 of the way into the election year. That would more than double the number of individual contributors Nathaniel Moran pulled in for his 2022 race and be all the proof anyone needs for me to continue running to serve you all. And as a reminder, donations don’t need to be large at all: just $5 would be more than enough to prove that a donor was serious enough to vote for me. By that point, I would almost have reached the statistical requirement for a neck-and-neck race against Nathaniel Moran, and would be 2/3 of the way to a statistical ‘guaranteed’ win. Those of you following these developments would then be able to rest assured by that point that, regardless of actual funds generated, there’s enough buy-in from others like you to vote for me on election day. If I don’t reach that goal in time, and there are multiple other candidates vying for attention, those of you who contributed will absolutely have the chance to vote whether I step down and disburse the unspent campaign funds to the remaining candidates, in proportion with how you choose.
I keep repeating that guarantee because
Money matters, to an extent. But, belief and confidence from voters matters so much more. That’s the kind of campaign I intend to run. Not one based on raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars to try and trick people about my actual viability, or to try and badmouth my opponents, or to enjoy an extravagent fundraiser-paid vacation throughout the campaign season. Rather, I want to run a campaign based on simply meeting with as many of my neighbors here as I can and finding out whether they like what I have to offer. Nothing more, and nothing less. And if they can provide enough funding to my team to pay off the campaign expenses, even better. To that end, I’ll never ask anyone to donate more than once. No matter how many times they donate, they can only give me a single vote, and that vote is what matters most. Money isn’t the point: rather, it’s your belief in me. And belief comes from people, not cash. Besides, at $5 per donation? That means 13,000 donors will be contributing a total of $65,000 at a minimum. That would be plenty to cover my frequent traveling across the district and the expenses of my small team.
I’m running my campaign exactly the way I intend to run my time in office: factual, efficient, with ingenuity, and without corruption or deception. Because I’ll keep these numbers posted publicly, you can rest assured that you’ll know exactly how competitive and viable of a candidate I really am throughout the whole election season. And hopefully, that only bolsters belief in what I’m doing even further.
A Closer Mathematical Look At Money And Campaign Victory
This is mostly for the math enjoyers, like me. If numbers stress you out or bore you, you can skip this. It’s just a closer look at how statistics lead to money’s ability to predict campaign wins and losses.
To better understand exactly how ‘money predicts successful candidates’, let’s take the 2024 election cycle as an example. 369 races for the House of Representatives took place; that means each race had 369 winners and 369 losers. Of the 369 losing candidates, 79 of them (about 21%) didn’t spend a single dollar. The only conceivable reason for this is that they didn’t even bother trying. Also of the 369 losing candidates, another 133 of them (about 36%) didn’t even spend a full $100,000. If we consider that only 51% of all campaign spending is covered by individual donations, this means these candidates likely pulled around $50,000 in individual contributions. Put another way: if we assume that each donor was only allowed to donate $2 to a candidate (a very unlikely scenario), this means that 57% (nearly 3/5) of the losing candidates couldn’t muster the paid support of even 25,000 people in their district.
Why does this matter? Simple: the average Congressional District in the United States has a population of 760,000 people. Given voter turnouts hovering around 50% in recent elections, only about 380,000 will actually vote. If we’re making the (very unlikely) assumption that every $2 equates to 1 donor, then it makes perfect sense as to why these candidates lost. Those 25,000 donating voters only make up about 6.6% of the total 390,000 participating voters. Following the harder-to-meet 20% ‘voters-vs-donors’ rate, that translates to roughly 33% voter support. And that’s being incredibly generous in our assumptions about converting money to donors. Breaking down the candidates who lost, 21% of them didn’t even try (not even $1 spent), and another 36% of them just didn’t resonate with voters. This is verified by reviewing the election results for these races, which generally show between a 20-point and 40-point difference between the winning and losing candidates.
Looking at this example, we can see very easily how money was more predictive than causative. This all reinforces the core idea behind my strategy here. By spreading the word through as many effective media sources as possible, I can explain my ideas and let the contribution count (even if it’s all in the form of $5 contributions) be proof of my performance and viability, rather than the misleading variable of total funds raised.