The question I got on the first and only call I’ve had with a billionaire Democratic donor was “what’s your cost per vote?” Think about that for a second.
This was 2018, we were scaling up the digital strategy for FRRC’s campaign to pass Amendment 4 & restore 1M+ voters in FL. They wanted to know the cost per vote. And that sent me down a rabbit hole. Because you *can* calculate it...and this has serious implications for democracy.
For example: using FB ads we know it costs about $12 to get someone who’s eligible under A4 to sign up and register to vote. From there, it costs about 3x to ensure they get their registration card so we can turn them out to vote = ~$40. Cost. Per. Vote.
You can also calculate the cost to *buy a law.* In half of US states you can pay a firm to collect all the signatures to put an initiative on the ballot for an avg of $1.2M. Then it cost $5k to poll-test the idea and if it polls high enough it’ll probably pass! So laws cost $1M+.
That’s the direct costs. An oligarch like Bloomberg has $60B. He could buy the laws and the elections *and* the endorsement and politicians and media coverage to get him there. He could single-handedly rewrite the laws in half of the country for a fraction of his net worth.
We don’t currently exist in a democracy and we delude ourselves into believing that we have one. Calling Congress and showing up to a hearing is marginal, struggling upstream against structural inequity of a system where a single oligarch can pay $2M to just buy a law regardless.
