I’m down to the fifth big lesson I learned about American politics by running for office. I wrote last time about how politicians are deeply weird, but I insisted that this is because we made them that way.
That brings me to the electorate who selects these politicians, and why they so often do such a bad job of it.
Put simply, we are a nation of disengaged voters.
Why There Is So Much Money in Politics
One of the things I heard most often on the campaign trail was the complaint that there is too much money in politics. But I could tell people exactly why it’s there: because a candidate has to beat the voters’ doors down to even let them know he exists.
Seriously. I spent a lot of time at local Democratic Party meetings, where I talked to some very knowledgeable and engaged people, in audiences ranging in size from a dozen to maybe 60—in a district of 800,000 people. To win a primary, you need to reach tens of thousands of voters, and to win a general election, hundreds of thousands. To do that, you need radio and television ads and better yet, direct mail, which is the most expensive option. With my budget, I did one small radio ad, but mostly all I could afford was social media advertising. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t enough.
We do have local newspapers, and one of the pleasures of the campaign was getting to know the journalists in the area, who I got along with very well. They gave me some very good coverage that relayed my message accurately to their readers. If local news coverage were a major factor in the election results, I would have done well—better, at least, than I actually did. The problem is that the local papers just don’t have the mass readership they used to. But no worries, because I also had a website, to which I posted many videos introducing myself and explaining my agenda—which very few people visited.
One of my frustrations with the current era is that never in human history have we had such quick and easy access to information. We all carry supercomputers in our pockets that are connected wirelessly to a vast and constantly updated global network of information. It’s like science fiction—yet somehow, most people make little use of these advantages
That’s what the xkcd cartoon at the top of this article is about.
