Hacker News

> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.

If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lefty-influencer-kat...

A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.

I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.

And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.

It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.

The article suggests something like 90% of their spend was intended to change results. Can you help me understand your comment? I don’t get it.

On those terms, they also wasted a lot of cash. 90% of it went to candidates who lost (or opposing candidates who won).

I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cryptocurrency-and-ai-...

They're concerned about regulation, as always.

Note that this election has no impact over the current congress. Senators and Reps won't be seated until January.

The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."

..could be a built-in feature of the matter?

:-D

>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.

Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.

“Good investment” is looking a bit suspicious there

I Will never understand why US allows this kind of political intervention.

I don't understand why they'd throw an election so the other pro-Israel side can win.

Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.

AIPAC was promoting the third place finisher. They opposed both Biss and Abugazeleh who finished first and second.

This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.

In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.

It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.

It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.