Every new development in the financing of political campaigns has its good and bad sides. The Internet has democratized financial support, enabling candidates to tap directly into the grassroots. On the upside, that has allowed talented, vigorous, more ideologically consistent candidates to emerge even when they were not favored by the party establishment. On the downside, whereas campaigning and fundraising used to pull candidates in the populist and elitist directions at the same time, offering balance, today’s grassroots fundraising has made politics dumber, more demagogic, more paranoid, more hysterical, and more impractical and uncompromising. It has weakened both parties, to their electoral detriment.
However you strike that balance, however, one thing is an unambiguous downside: the flood tide of campaign fundraising requests, particularly by email. The volume of these email appeals has now reached a pitch that makes it impossible for anyone to even attempt to read them all. As Erick Erickson explains, this tactic has now passed the tipping point and is even crippling fundraising itself:
The New York Times ran a big story last week on how GOP online donations are down 12% even as GOP enthusiasm seems to be surging. The consultant class of the GOP is pushing the mythology that Google and Apple are flagging their emails because tech companies hate Republicans. I’ve spent a week on the phone with many Republican consultants, including those tied to campaigns whose emails make it to my inbox. They all tell me the same thing — the problem is not Google or Apple, but the GOP consultant class. . . .
I can tell from the volume I am getting from GOP consultants that they are abusing their email lists. . . . Email and SMS spam are driving away small dollar Republican donors. The candidates are now reaping what their consultants have been sowing.
This is a cleaned-up version of his radio show rant:
At some point, this is the same tragedy-of-the-commons and collective-action problem that besets so many aspects of the Republican Party these days: people out for their own interests who are not trying to work as if they belong to a coalition. In fundraising, as elsewhere, if the party is unable to impose any internal discipline for the good of the party, its voters, and its political movement, it will continue to underachieve its ends.