When are political donations worth it?

I wish I knew! But here are some speculative recommendations

Like (I guess) most academics, I think it would be really bad if Trump won the election: it’s extremely risky to have a US president who does crazy things like try to stay in power after being voted out. It would be especially bad if his power were effectively unchecked, due to Republicans controlling both the House and Senate. Given the stakes, it seems like it could be extremely worthwhile to donate money to try to prevent this bad outcome from happening. But I wish I knew more about where best to donate to this end (and how strong the evidence was that extra money would help).

The Presidential Election

Harris has already raised a billion dollars, raising questions about whether additional funds would really have much value. (I assume that additional ad buys, for example, have steeply diminishing returns past a certain point of saturation.)

The good folks at Make Trump Lose Again claim that there is low-hanging fruit that official campaigns tend to miss. This seems surprising a priori — you would think the campaigns have strong incentives to win! — but then again, competence can be rarer than we would like, and they have anecdotal reports of outsider strategies being “received positively by experts.” Supporting those smaller organizations trying out novel strategies (e.g. expat GOTV efforts) seems more promising to me than piling on to the official campaign’s coffers. So theirs seems the best advice that I’ve come across so far. But I’d feel better about it if there were more independent sources of expert analysis available. Such analysis seems massively undersupplied at present.

Note that MTLA also offer advice for (hopefully) high-impact political volunteering.

Down-ballot races

Matt Yglesias has a helpful post on The candidates who need your money the most (summarized on the EA Forum in ‘How to give effectively to US Dems’), with a consolidated donation page here.

The latest NY Times polls suggest that Dems have little hope of holding the Senate; but there is a chance to keep it out of Republican hands by supporting Nebraska independent Dan Osborn (also endorsed by Yglesias here).

State/local races

You might have distinctive knowledge worth sharing about local candidates, which makes them usually worth supporting. The lower stakes are presumably balanced out by a greater chance of extra funds making a difference to the outcome. In my case, I’ve been supporting Jay Shooster for the Florida state legislature: he’s an all-round good guy (kidney donor, cares about animal welfare and sensible AI regulation, plus standard Dem virtues like being pro-choice), and looks to be in a close race. He’s also very young, and I think could do a lot of good if he ended up rising through the party ranks to higher office later in his career.

Conclusion

If you’re aware of other helpful analyses to identify potential high-impact political donations, please share them in the comments. Failing that, feel free to share your own best guesses! (Including which races are plausibly a better bet than just donating to straightforwardly life-saving charities through GiveWell or the like.)