Thread by @studentactivism

This entire thread is bullshit, but this tweet in particular is specifically bullshit. When I donate to a campaign, I'm giving money not just to win a specific election, but to build power for progressive politics more generally. And paying staffers well is a part of doing that.

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/1398124916004773893

I donated to the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in IDAHO last cycle. Why? Because I wanted to support grassroots progressive politics in the state where my grandfather was a progressive activist. (Also she had a cool tee shirt. But mostly the other thing.)

I was adding my drop to the bucket so she could hire good staff and pay union vendors and distribute lit and provide opportunities for young volunteers. And I don't think I'm all that unusual for having done so.

People donate to candidates they are pretty sure are going to win, and pretty sure are going to lose, all the time. Part of that is trying to shift the needle. But part of it is supporting the candidate, and the campaign.

A candidate with good, experienced, competent, committed staff isn't just more likely to win, they're more likely to be effective after the election, too.

And a candidate with good, experienced, competent, committed staff who don't happen to be children of wealth and privilege has other advantages as well—again, both before and after the election.

And of course spending more money on good staff and less on, say, consultants, or polling, or advertising, or lawn signs, is a reflection of a candidate's approach to electoral politics, not just a signal of their virtue as an employer.

So the narrow version of @bendreyfuss's argument—that there's a "right" amount of money to spend on staff, and that spending either more or less than that amount is a lamentable tactical error—is just fatuous silliness. It's just a false claim, untethered to reality.

What a campaign spends on staff is an indication of its ethos—not in a simpleminded "spending more is always better" way, but in the sense that how a campaign spends money reflects its philosophy, vision, and values.

I've never been paid campaign staff, and there's a lot I don't know about how campaigns run. But I've been on the penumbras of enough campaigns, big and small, to know that @bendreyfuss is just making stuff up here.