This past week marked the end of all the election madness. A lot of money goes into elections, particularly presidential campaigns. That has always been the case. However, this time around, we were introduced to the presence of Political Action Committees, which operate outside each campaign but generally support one candidate and not the other. The really big PACs are often referred to as super-PACs.
The amount each candidate fundraises for his own campaign is about what we would expect. The human ability to fundraise is not going to evolve noticeably over the course of only a few years. But now that we have super-PACs, the scene changes considerably. A lot more money is going into and out of the presidential campaigns than before - unprecedented amounts. The presidential campaigns alone spent a total of about $2.6 billion! This, of course, was made possible in large part by some individual donors who each gave millions of dollars to super-PACs of their choice.
With people or companies that can so casually throw around huge sums of money, thus seemingly imparting a heavy influence upon elections, it can be easy to get discouraged when you want to help out a campaign. Sure, we can make our phone calls from home, we can visit door-to-door, or we can donate. But our donations seem like mere drops in a bucket. Also, some paid staff is needed to coordinate volunteers to give them the information they need to work with such as who to call and who to visit. The people who gather and organize all this information for the campaign offices to hand off to their volunteers might need to be paid as well. Basically, even the volunteering is driven by money to some extent.
So the question again, is, what could we possibly do for the campaign of our choice when there are these super-PACs and major donors whose influence and behavior could render our effect to be irrelevant? The answer is we could do plenty. If you call from home or visit door-to-door, there's a good chance that you may have convinced multiple undecided voters who happen to be registered as members of your party. Let's say you managed to convince 10 people, including yourself. Basically, you only need 10% of the electorate to even lift a finger if all the other volunteers are similarly effective. For those of you who've been canvassing over the course of several days or weekends, convincing 10 people would appear to be quite feasible.
About 120 million people voted in the presidential election. With $2.6 billion spent, that translates to about $22 per vote. For those of you who donated, that's really not so daunting - especially if you've been donating over the course of a few months. If you managed to donate more than $200 over the course of the whole campaign, you not only cast your own vote but you theoretically influenced several others to vote similarly.
You may not have made headlines like the super-PAC donors but those of you who volunteered or donated gave it your best shot and you did indeed have a direct effect on the election and you were a big help, even if your candidate did not win. Four years from now, there might be even more money going through the presidential election but it will not be 10 times as much. You will still have an effect on the election. Perhaps not individually, but certainly collectively. Remember, the legions of small-time volunteers and donors are nothing more than a great multitude of individuals. Think globally, act locally.
Mark 12: 38-44
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