Stealth meaning no announcement of campaigns and targets while elections are in progress? So that "gays are out to get me" can't be used in the election as an issue? How are people going to communicate and get the word out then?
Word of mouth. This is a small network of wealthy donors personally known to each other, who have enough money to affect local races.
Love the patronising tone, about gays voting for the "cutest" candidates. When would a contribution like that have to be reported, then?
Donations would have to be reported, but they don't have to be labeled as "for gay-friendly politicians". This isn't PAC money, it's from individuals.
Right -- Joe Homophobe in Kentucky may notice that his opponent is getting a lot of donations, but he's not going to recognize the names.
Does the candidate who receives the contribution need to report it in a way that can be discovered before the election?
7: If as you say it's a small number of wealthy donors, a list should be easy to prepare and diseminate.
This seems like the sort of thing that will be somewhat less effective now that there's been a prominent article about it. Ah, well.
Eh, I'm not sure what's so impressive about this. It seems like an early version of what Nordquist has done on the right. More power to them, obviously.
11 - Yes, but I'm glad that somebody on the left finally is doing it for our team.
Yeah, this is good work. It's a bit early to tell whether it's having any effect, but it sounds like the right idea. More broadly, if it is working, how depressing that our democracy is about what a group of a few dozen rich people decides to make happen.
11: It's effective political strategizing from the Democratic party, above and beyond "The Republicans have truly fucked the country for the last six years, kick them out." That's impressive.
More broadly, if it is working, how depressing that our democracy is about what a group of a few dozen rich people decides to make happen.
Ummm....
How did you think it worked before? Or is the issue that it's only "dozens"?
I realize that's how it works; I was taking this opportunity to note my upset.
I'm not convinced it can't be anticipated, publicized and made to backfire.
Glory in it. If you find a rich heiress, you'll be able save your other homeland just by shaking you moneymaker all the way into a marriage.
It's all your fault for not finding a sugarmama if we go to war with Iran, Ogged.
19: Demonizing Scaife has worked so well for the Democrats in the past, after all. I mean, I guess backlash is possible, but that doesn't make this a bad idea.
19: I'm not sure how it would backfire. Yes, you can make hay by saying "My opponent is taking gay money," but they still have the money.
19: Well only in the sense that all the other similar schemes can. I mean, a lot of political funding is tactical, and sometimes this can blow up in your face (particularly if exposed with just the right spin). Nothing new there. The smart thing about what this guy is doing is identifying a population who have largely failed to be tactical, and organizing them. In this sense they are just barely beginning to catch on to what their political opponents are very, very good at.
An asymmetry in the capacity to demonize?
19: There are no permanent victories in politics, assuming you face minimally competent opponents. If nothing else, they'll just adopt the portion of your policies they disagree the least with and shift the battle line. Every staffer who has to pore over a list of donors and try to guess whether or not they're part of the secret gay army isn't return reporter's phone calls or driving a voter registration bus or what have you.
This is good stuff. I also thought the use of the term "gay ick" in relation to the Ted Haggard incident and fallout thereof was... non-obvious and illuminating?
Yeah, Trimpa was the guy I wanted to know more about--Gill is just the dude with the money.
A gay cabal? Part of the strategy should be that anyone who opposes them will have stealth gay operatives touch them with their evil gay hands.
Actually, what I like about this kind of thing is that it suggests it *doesn't* have to be just rich people; that if the rest of us actually paid attention to local races and issue-oriented fundraising at the state and local level, we could make a pretty big difference.
BitchPhd is correct. A relatively small donation can greatly assist a local election. Moreover, we all have apathetic friends and aquantances who can be convinced to vote correctly with relatively little effort.
I think the part about "stealth" at the end, if correct, means that 30 is at least partially wrong. In other words, if it's quantity of money that ultimately makes a difference, those of us who aren't millionaires would need some way to coordinate (I don't think 'paying attention' really cuts it, here) in order to focus giving efforts at a local level -- but any effort to coordinate is going to be transparent, and therefore unstealthy.
Finally. Haven't social conservative activists been "packing" school boards with this sort of technique, perhaps at a cruder level?
I think I told this story on the blog before-- according to a friend in textbook publishing, TX and CA adopt books en masse, not district-by-district. The size of these markets gives de facto veto power to these state boards, which means that a few well-organized people in Texas pick what's too controversial for your child.
Somewhere before 30 and 32 lies the gold. These are $1000 donations they are talking about; campaign financing at this level rarely allows single contributions at any higher level. (I think some of California's go up to $2500.) So you have to be someone who can write a couple different $1000 checks and maybe swing a few $1000 friends. Not bazillionaire, but not you lot neither.
33: Yes, but that's a more grass-roots enterprise than the article is about. Not that there isn't national support, but it involves an organization on the ground. This is just putting money out there.
The next step in this arms race is datamining the public election finance records to discover these stealth funding campaigns.
Let's hijack this thread to talk about machine learning!
Or another entry in "how can you help the Democratic party make gains" - subscribe anonymously or as close to it as possible to as many Republican mailing lists as possible and report back lists of their talking points or planned points of attack.
Speaking of machine learning, scroll to the bottom of this report on eye tracking on web pages. Hilarity ensues.
37. They should have used someone other than Ogged as the test subject.
Ogged has never understood why they call them 'chip clips'."
Also, as far as 36 goes -- I'm pretty sure some people don't subscribe to Republican mailing lists for precisely the reason that they don't want to hear a steady stream of their talking points all day long. Tunnelling through that firewall might ... miss the point.
40. Either that or the female subject(s) had already slept with george Brett and didn't need to check out his package.
41: there are also presumably plenty of people who don't want to read emails about how hot George Brett is, and of course everyone looked at his package, wouldn't you, and by the way let's send $20k to defeat this asshole homophobe in East Bumfuck, TX. But yet commenters here are suggesting that the willingness of these other people to read such emails, that no doubt disgust them, makes the whole secret gay cabal thing pointless, because it will provoke an unstoppable backlash.
Yeah, Trimpa was the guy I wanted to know more about--Gill is just the dude with the money.
Trimpa might be nothing more than what he's introduced as being—a very clever lawyer and former lobbyist. This dude claims that recently a Texan lawyer who made is bread working for big tobacco more or less saved the world by preventing a large crop of dirty coal power plants from being built, even though he personally doesn't really care about the environment—his wife does, and he did it on her behalf.
43 -- maybe I should have just said "36 'you' s/b 'someone'", and that would have made my intention clear?
And anyway, no one is emailing me about how hot George Brett is. I can subconsciously notice that all on my own.
Oh, I wasn't trying to single anyone out - the you was meant in the spirit of "only you can prevent forest fires". Sorry if I was unclear.
if the rest of us actually paid attention to local races and issue-oriented fundraising at the state and local level, we could make a pretty big difference
Hey, we could organize a bunch of smart, politically-aware people to do that! And post about it on a blog those smart, politically-aware people read! And mark out the posts relating to that topic in a different color than the regular posts!
You could probably even find your own lawyer who used to work for big tobacco!
44 - If you're talking about the TXU buyout, it's a little more complicated than that. TXU wanted to build a gazillion coal-fired power plants in Texas and get them all approved before carbon caps (which everyone seems to think are inevitable) arrive. It was a good evil plan, but they got some unexpected pushback from local governments, and then a combination of gazillionaire private equity and the Environmental Defense Fund stepped in to make a buyout offer and kill most of the plants. It's not clear yet whether this was a big environmentalist victory or TXU riding out a busted flush.
I subscribe to the GOP mailing lists for the exact reasons in 36.