Using a new york post article to dismiss the insurgent left on grounds of experience is one way to describe it I guess. Schumer and Jeffries have decades of experience between them and the Democratic party has the lowest approval in its history among its base. Kat Abughazaleh is more in step with where that base is on foreign and domestic policy, ignore the progress her wing of the party is making at your peril. There will be more Abughazalehs and Mamdanis in the future because those politicians are actually interested in delivering public services to their constituents instead of more technocratic hand wringing combined with the bloodiest period of foreign policy since Vietnam.

There was a really amusing article in Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago which pointed out that most of the really big donors just sprayed money at a unicause indiscriminately and that Michael Bloomberg was the only one that showed any sign of investing rationally.

I mentioned that to my wife and she of course rolled her eyes because it seemed so self-serving to her. (Last night we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about how much better The Economist was than Bloomberg Businessweek and how I finally canceled my subscription to the latter when they hired genius financial writer Matt Levine [1] to write a whole issue boosting crypto in a 200% cringe writing style just before the FTX scandal broke)

[1] ... sent him an email about how sorry I was for him!

Not easy and effective post election .

The candidate doesn't own you anything and cannot receive donations directly anymore. Thus you get to pull the corruption, illegal, or indirect, less effective, cards.

Supporting the candidate to get him elected is much different.

Maybe it's a sign that your "pennies on the dollar" theory needs some work?

They are saying that was a bad strategy and not the usual one. I have no idea to what extent that’s true.

He means in politics you don't need to bet on the winning horse, you can just bribe him after he wins. Or bet on both.

The aim is not to influence the election it is to own the person who wins the election. The less likely they are to win the cheaper it is, but higher the chances it is all for nothing.

It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.

Having been involved in some political campaigns and movements, I totally believe that nobody knows the ROI on where the dollars are going.

Political campaigns certainly need money, but there are heavily diminishing returns pretty quickly. In races where all the candidates have money just throwing more in doesnt seem to accomplish much.

Pesky thing called the First Amendment.

A lot of rich people were afraid democracy would change the world but it turns out those with money will always have the power.

And this is not an American thing every country has its lobbying industry.

They didn't throw the election per se, they just didn't try very hard to win a fight they could easily lose. Why burn bridges with a very important ally over something that might not end up being your problem?

That's a long way of saying "Kat ran a better campaign".

I have criticisms of her campaign, specifically

1. She was a carpet-bagger (as you said). She moved in Illinois in 2024 I believe;

2. She initially ran in a district she didn't live in. I believe she initially lived in IL-7 but ran in IL-9 and moved there at some point;

3. She chose to primary a relatively good candidate, Jan Shakowsky. My working theory is she was trying to fly under AIPAC's radar by primarying a relatively pro-Palestine candidatei; and

4. She essentially advocated for going to war with China over Taiwan for literally no reason. Nobody in her district cares about this. You can blame that in part on having a bad foreign policy advisor but the buck stops with the candidate.

And despite all of that and millions being spent against her by pro-Israel groups she still got ~30% of the vote and came second.

But as for "better candidates", I'm sorry but my advice is "run a better camapign".

In his victory speech, Biss credited J Street. So still Israel, just not AIPAC specifically.

Did you miss the part where I said that the AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated PAC spending never mentions Israel?