We previously talked about how there is more at stake per seat than ever and that the traditional way of spending money is already undergoing change and likely to see even more radical changes over the next couple of years.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions, namely, who, where and how does one spend election money.

Fifty years ago, when NBC, CBS and ABC were in some sort of gatekeeping role, it would be difficult to place an advertisement around elections that didn’t meet their standards. The Federal Election Campaign Act, for example, makes it illegal for a foreign national or a foreign organization or government to try to advertise for elections.

This kind of act would be much easier to enforce fifty years ago, not only as ABC, CBS, and NBC were not likely to break any such rules, but even if someone just went near the rules, it’s pretty hard to imagine Walter Cronkite, going to commercial break spouting something such as “and now a word from our sponsors over at the Society for Socialism…” or anything similar without mass outrage.

The comparative lack of choices in advertising, and the general barriers to getting a media organization up and running back then that even had the potential to reach a million people or more kind of ensured that we had a very good idea as to who was trying to influence our elections through their money.

Today, those barriers are gone. Anyone, including this rube, can start a website and hit the publish button. If you would just like to place an ad on some other site, it’s very easy to hide who you actually are.

Confounding things further, in the old days, it would be pretty hard to imagine that graffiti over a Vote for Eisenhower Billboard would have much of an effect. Today, the equivalent a somewhat innocuous article on a more traditional news page can be besieged with a dozen comments coming from cyber armies around the world, presumably with fake but polished Facebook accounts, and it would be very hard to tell those people apart from disgruntled people or random trolls domestic or abroad.

Entire websites can easily be either funded for or actually run by groups of people that are not American and don’t have America’s interest at heart. Zero Hedge, a financial site with a bearish slant, that has hundreds of thousands of readers (or at least used to have that), is pretty much assumed to be a Russian propaganda front.

The reality though, is even ignoring the Russian Elephant in the room, it’s clear that anyone, anywhere can try to influence elections in the United States, and since the previous means for reaching a bunch of people at once are becoming less effective, we’re losing, to an extent, the ability to have gatekeepers for better or worse.

Our ability to consume information is also no longer bound by location. Getting, for example the Manchester Guardian (now just called The Guardian) delivered to your door in St. Louis, Missouri was probably damn near impossible 30 years ago. Now, you can get this respected, well left of center newspaper every day from anywhere with an internet connection. They in some way too are trying to influence the discourse.

There are so many new sites springing up constantly, it’s hard to tell what the goal is beyond what is stated.

The traditional gatekeepers still have some power, as in who gets invited to debates, who gets media coverage in general, but this is eroding at a rapid rate.

Lastly, the final factor that truly confounds everything, and I think is a force multiplier on the above three factors is the “hidden” marketing.

This can of course extend to election advertising.

Many of these methods of course have been well known for a while.

There’s the product placement method, as seen here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1743720/

Relevant to product placement, is the opposite, where you affiliate an infamous star with the brand of your rival, for example, luxury bag designers sending competing products to MTV Reality Starlet “Snooki”

It would be possible to imagine some sort of sketch or show where a pantomime-villain type on a tv show or a sketch is deliberately associated with out of fashion brands and also has a poster of a candidate someone wants to undermine.

People know about the concept of astroturfing, or fake grass roots organizations. Sorting through what is an astroturf, what’s a legitimate grass-roots organization that just happened to be founded by a billionaire and what’s started from the ground up is hard to tell. All three organizations need some money after all.

We’ve had gaming of google search results to influence auto-fills, and there are strategies that I’m probably too dumb to realize are being used (possibly successfully!) on me right now!

The net result is simply dizzying, elections everywhere will be influenced by people from all corners of the globe, in all manners necessary, and with the stakes so high it will be non stop.

The final part of this series will talk about McCain-Feingold, McCutcheon vs. FEC, why none of that would even matter today, and ideas for dealing with this new world.

So this first post could be typical of future posts, in that this will be a multi part series. Each of the initial topics presented may appear disparate, and the initial material covered will seem only vaguely related. Along the way, we will bring in new topics, and try to hopefully tie it all together. There will be relatively few policy prescriptions, because solving most of these problems is simply hard, and my certainty on them isn’t quite high enough.

We will start this with one obvious point. The cost of running for office has gone up over time, and is extraordinarily expensive now and will continue to stay that way for at least the immediate future. You could credit some of this to the laws (or lack thereof) around campaign finance reform, or you could credit court rulings. These factors though might have only reduced the trend, but certainly not eliminated it.

The simple issue is, as a society we have grown more prosperous on aggregate, over our history across any meaningfully long time frame. Our population has increased. The distribution of wealth has changed, but as technology has gotten better each of us on average can produce more. The number of legislators at the federal level has not increased nearly as fast, and we’ve had 435 people in the house and 100 in the senate that can vote for as long as I have been alive. Each of those individuals, plus the president, which there is still one of, has more influence compared to fifty or sixty years ago. Every budget vote contains greater weight. A decision to change the tax rates by one percent has a bigger amount of revenue associated with that than fifty years ago. Even issues that are not obviously finance issues, such as, legalizing or prohibiting certain activities is a decision that will influence the outcome. Footnotes in bills today would have at least merited more of a debate fifty years ago, and things that merited more of a debate today might have been entire bills back then. It’s no surprise as such that so much money is flowing into these campaigns and the seats are often contested so fiercely

There is simply put, a ton at stake, more than ever. This seeps down to every level. A casino proposal in a state will be fiercely lobbied not only at the state level, but also potentially at the city level. And when such things are fiercely lobbied for, that often means campaign dollars one way or another if the race is even slightly expected to be competitive.

We have numbers that back this of course. This only goes back over twenty years, but you can easily enough see the general trend just looking at the non-green coloring: https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/cost.php?display=T&infl=Y

I think we have now said enough about how money is absolutely rolling into these campaigns. The next question is where exactly does it go?

Some of the campaign funds go to the same places they always have, the grass roots efforts. Campaign funds hiring part time workers, in conjunction with pizza and other amenities for an army of fresh-eyed, idealistic high school and college kids who are sealing envelopes, knocking on doors, manning phone centers, and the like. I have no idea how much this has changed, but one of the limiting factors of course is the number of volunteers available for such an endeavor, not just the cost of renting the office space and whatever else is needed to do their job.

The bigger piece of money, of course, involves spending on advertising. Some of these strategies have remained relatively timeless as well. A yard sign is a yard sign is a yard sign, for example. The bigger piece of advertising, however, for the biggest races, has been television. In the past this meant purchasing the local advertising rights on an affiliate and pounding the market with ads. Election season was often a boon to some of these markets in competitive races, and the cost of running a race was often driven by some strange quirks. Take the state of New Jersey, as a prime example. It’s a small, but relatively populous state. It is not one of the five most populous states or anything, but has easily been one of the most expensive to run a race in, in competitive races in the past. Why is that, do you ask? Simply put, New Jersey has no major TV market of its own, but instead, a big chunk of the population would be dependent on New York City networks for their news and such, with most of the remaining chunk being covered by Philadelphia markets, which are both massive population centers and therefore very expensive to advertise on. So to run a traditional television advertising campaign, you’d have to reach out to not just one but TWO major media markets and buy ads on each of them, many of which, would reach people not even living in that state.

One of the big winners in all of this of course were the networks and the affiliates during election season as they raked in that dough. In a related story, it behooved the networks to paint races as close and up for grabs for all sorts of reasons, but at least one of these reasons was very self-serving.

As I write this, the first pattern we talked about, about elections being already expensive and gradually more expensive, continues. The second pattern, however, of people consuming Television by sitting down and watching whatever NBC shows come on as they air and certainly not missing that key 8:30 slot to watch Seinfeld or whatever, has not continued.

Simply put, the way we watched television has dramatically changed. First it was TiVo and DVR. Now it’s Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime. People simply are now not only choosing these formats for convenience, but also to avoid
Even in new forms of media, the option to watch something when you want AND pay a premium to avoid ads in the form of something like YouTubeRed has significantly changed the value of a 30 second video spot. Even live sports, once considered somewhat immune to these trends is getting somewhat crushed by a growing number of cord-cutters, who are simply opting out of the experience altogether. ESPN is down something like 12 million subscribers over the last six years.

As we are accelerating through this crossroads of elections mattering more than ever from a monetary standpoint, and the changing of how we consume content, there are bigger questions to answer regarding the future of this experiment we call democracy.

This whole concept of a blog seems like it belongs a decade ago, but here we are joining the party at least ten years too late. From a selfish standpoint, I hope the ideas I talk about here are read by people smarter than me who can poke holes, or provide additional info, or generally just sharpen my thinking. For the reader, this will be an ambitious(?) attempt to try to talk about things that I haven’t read, or, more specifically, take concepts that people are talking about, and provide synthesis that is unique at least as far as I know. The content will aim to avoid having a political viewpoint, as there are no shortage of opinions out there, but often discuss topics that don’t always go along typical partisan lines, and try to be at least somewhat original.

Lastly, it’s part of my 2018 resolution to stop only passively consuming content, and aim to be active in some way, shape or form. I  have no idea where this path will take me, but expect probably about two pieces of content a week somewhere in the arena of 500-1000 words. I will necessarily break up some of my longer thoughts into more digestible bites.