Running a successful campaign for US federal office requires support from a business. The candidate’s campaign committee is the business responsible for executing on the strategy and tactics to get elected. Today we’ll start looking at the elements of a successful campaign by an incumbent in the House of Representatives. Specifically, we will look at the Representative from the 14th district of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).

The criteria we use to determine a whether or not a campaign was successful is very simple: “Did the candidate win?” We know the 2022 AOC campaign was successful because the incumbent representative (AOC) still holds that office after running in the 2022 election cycle and winning the election.

The graph above shows the monthly expenditures made by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress committee. This committee is registered with the Federal Election Committee (FEC) and follows the reporting requirements set out by the FEC’s rules regarding candidate committees. The data used in this post is sourced from the FEC and analyzed by me using custom data tools I wrote to make strategic campaign decisions.

A few things jump off the graph. The administrative, salary, and overhead expenses line is consistently the highest expense category over the entire two-year election cycle. There is a wide range in this category, with the lower monthly expenditures during the off-year August-February months. The spend is under $300k per month during this time, with the low of $240k in February 2022, and the local high at $285k in September 2021. This implies a lower bound to the expenditures for Administrative/Salary/Overhead expenses is about $250k/month to keep personnel on the campaign.

Next item off the graph is the Solicitation and Fundraising Expenses line. Expenditures in this category are front-loaded in the election cycle. The committee spent $1.276M on fundraising expenses in the first four months of the election cycle. This expense category sharply decreases after April 2021 and flattens by the end of the year. The election year itself sees solicitation and fundraising expenses trend lower. The committee may have raised “enough” money through its solicitation efforts to sustain itself through the election. Next time we will look at the impact of this expense on fundraising efforts. This is a good point to return to. A successful campaign should be able to understand its return on investment in this category. A successful campaign should also be able to understand if its fundraising efforts are actually successful in a statistically meaningful way.

Administrative, Salary, and Overhead expenses tick up during the spring and summer months in the election year. The chart I made doesn’t go into the level of detail I'd like here. The committee uses credit cards and pays the monthly balance as it comes due. Next time I’ll look into the data regarding what goes onto the credit card.

Finally we come to the Advertising Expenses. This is an interesting one because there is a limited amount of time the ad spend is significant, if it is not hidden on the monthly credit card bill. It’s striking that the advertising expenses are really only significant in October of the election year. The committee spent over $400k on advertising in October 2022, the month before the election. What factors led to the decision to spend that amount of money just before the election? Why not spread it over a longer period of time? Do other campaigns follow this pattern?

More questions arise every time out. Now that I have a great tool for exploring this data, I am better able to spend my time analyzing the strategy behind winning campaigns through insights into campaign finance. I’m going to make this tool available eventually.

There are a lot of different directions to go now that there is a wealth of data available to make decisions and find successful campaign markers. Next time I’d like to focus on where the AOC campaign compares with some historical markers and some current benchmarks. I’d like to look at the historical NY-14 district candidates versus the AOC campaign committee, and then look at the AOC campaign committee as compared with the rest of the US House of Representatives. I’ll also look at where the AOC committee compares with US Senate campaigns.

Make sure you subscribe to The Keys Report to get all the strategic analysis on US federal election campaigns.

Governor Ron DeSantis made major moves in his campaign staff throughout July. Now that August is over, it’s clear the staff wasn’t the problem, the strategy was. Worse, DeSantis signals resistance to change his strategy to become President of the United States.

Strategic analysis frameworks like PEST, Porter’s Five Forces, SWOT, and others are tools strategists use to understand their goals and environment well enough to identify a competitive advantage and then execute on it. The pros of using structured analysis for strategic thinking include:

• Mapping the competitive landscape.

• Identifying opportunities to engage with customers.

• Presenting clearly defined problems, and developing solutions to those problems.

A good strategist will likely use a few frameworks to develop a campaign strategy. Each framework points out different aspects of the problem space and potential solutions. Unfortunately, these frameworks don’t force a strategist to discharge their biases before sitting down to work.

The DeSantis campaign, and perhaps Ron DeSantis himself, suffers from cognitive inertia, preventing him from creating a campaign strategy that really works. Changing the people on his staff will not avail him on the campaign trail if the strategy, platform, and messaging are the same as before. The weakness of all strategic analysis frameworks is a biased and encumbered strategist. I’m not talking about an overt, or conscious bias. I’m talking about the blind spots, the biases we don’t even know we have. Ron DeSantis is a human like the rest of us. He is subject to the same frailties and fragilities as the rest of us. Cognitive inertia is one of those fragilities. Before his campaign staff can shed the action inertia, the encumbrance around doing things, DeSantis needs to shed the cognitive inertia, the encumbrance of thinking things. Cognitive inertia hides itself; strategists suffering from cognitive inertia don’t realize they suffer from cognitive inertia.

Cognitive inertia falls into three broad buckets, according to Giovanni Gavetti. They are:

• emotional traps

• dangerous analogies

• framing lock-ins

If you’ve been paying attention to Ron DeSantis whenever he’s in front of a live mic, you know there is a lot of sand in these cognitive inertia buckets.

Starting with emotional traps, DeSantis is certain woke will destroy the world. There is no room to misinterpret his stance. At last week’s Republican Primary Debate, he says:

“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history.”

As you may recall, DeSantis insists slavery was beneficial to black people. This is approximately the most anti-woke thing one could possibly say, confirming his commitment to wipe woke ideology out of this timeline. And then you get headlines like this:

NBC News says Ron DeSantis was booed at a vigil for Jacksonville shooting victims. After saying slavery conferred benefits to black people, DeSantis had to show up at a historically black college to condemn the type of behavior his own rhetoric encourages. I hope the point is obvious. Ron DeSantis falls into the emotional trap of thinking woke ideology is the problem without questioning what impact he has on the situation. Not only his own impact, but the impact of other people like him. People such as his donors and voters.

Regarding dangerous analogies, DeSantis is a highlight reel. One of his favorites is to “start slitting throats”. He used this a couple times recently. The Hill has two of them.

Analogical reasoning is a powerful tool for mapping candidate solutions from a source problem to a target problem. The target problem is the problem you want to solve right now. In DeSantis’ case, the target problem is actually two problems. The twin problems of winning an election and governing a nation. Slitting throats may seem like an extremism pulled from hyperbole. However, dangerous analogies reveal the breadth of candidate solutions the strategist has available. Dangerous analogies reveal the prior experience of a strategist. Where would Governor DeSantis have pulled this analogy? From his experience in the United States Navy, where he was the legal advisor for SEAL team one. I don’t know exactly what SEAL team one does, but if it’s anything like SEAL team six, I understand where he got the analogy. I also understand DeSantis is not a SEAL, he was in JAG.

The problem is that winning an election and governing a nation aren’t fundamentally like the problems that can be solved by “slitting throats on day one” in the Navy. The analogy is dangerous because he’s not solving the same problem. In fact, slitting throats is probably the last thing that should come out of his mouth. DeSantis using this analogy shows that he can’t yet comprehend or articulate the two problems he faces right now. He reveals a limited breadth of experience in solving a wide range of problems. This is where a good strategist collaborates with others to eliminate the blind spots. A good strategist works on ideas with others to make sure other perspectives are included and aligned.

It’s hard to be a successful strategist though, when all strategists are susceptible to framing lock-in. This is Ron DeSantis to a tee. He is trying to out-Trump Donald J. Trump and failing in every way. Trump voters don’t want a more extreme, less fun Trump, but who raised his hand when asked if he would support Trump should Trump become the GOP POTUS nominee?

There he is. DeSantis doesn’t know how to position himself in the entire campaign, and struggles still in showing support for Trump. Why Trump? Why keep supporting the person he’s trying to unseat? DeSantis can differentiate himself from the pack by developing a strategy that resonates with voters and donors alike, or he can keep ignoring the elephant in the room. Though he changed key staff members on his campaign, the mindset is the same. There has been no evolution or change in messaging since he replaced Generra Peck as campaign manager. Peck is now a strategist on the campaign, but who knows for how long.

DeSantis needs to shake free of the Trump sphere of influence, and bring a staggeringly large block of voters and donors with him. The way to do that is not through strict adherence to destroying every bit of wokeism in the nation. He needs to change his mindset and tune in to what people are thinking about. Just in the state of Florida, he picked a fight with the state’s largest employer over treating their employees with dignity and respect. The Florida insurance industry is in crisis as insurance companies flee his state. And the recent incident mentioned above where DeSantis had to show his face in front of black people after saying slavery was beneficial to slaves once again shows no change in strategy.

Framing lock-ins are illusions held by the strategist. Those illusions resist negative feedback like what I wrote above. Negative feedback runs against the cognitive inertia in place. Preservation of the illusion is too important for the strategist to question, so unsatisfying outcomes are attributed to other causes, such as a poorly performing campaign manager, or a bad press photo, rather than the true underlying cause. Ron DeSantis is deep in a framing lock-in and he does not have people around him capable of pulling him out. Rather, they look for continued hints that his campaign is gaining momentum. According to RealClearPolitics 2024 Republican Presidential Nomination polling data, the campaign is not gaining momentum. In fact, DeSantis is polling lower this week than last.

There are remedies for these cognitive inertia. I’ll cover those in the coming weeks.

I don’t mean to pick on Governor Ron DeSantis. I write these articles because I expect better of a man with his background, education, work ethic, and service to our country. Some day Ron DeSantis may be President of the United States, but it won’t be in January 2025.

What do you think? Where can Ron DeSantis improve his campaign strategy? What should he do to engage with the voters and donors more productively? Let me know in the comments!

I realize I may have got a jump start on the campaign finance discussion last week. Though it was the first post on campaign finance, I jumped right into talking about committees and expenditures and talking about data in aggregate. That’s fine for someone close to the material like me. Most people aren’t as close to the material and lack a frame of reference for the narratives derived from fundraising and expenditure data. I’d like to reach a broader audience than campaign finance nerds, and make a more meaningful impact than dazzling people with meaningless numbers.

To provide context for a discussion about campaign finance, we should start with a candidate for US federal office. A candidate is someone that wants to win an election to serve in the United States House of Representatives, Senate, or serve as President of the United States. Typically a person that wants to run in an election campaigns for that position by identifying or developing a platform of aspirations and initiatives that appeal to a broad set of voters. The candidate campaigns on their platform by finding out where the voters are and appealing to their interests. The candidate needs to raise money to spend on the materials appealing to the voters, so the candidate needs to solicit donors. Voters and donors may be the same set of people, or different sets of people. On Election Day the voters vote and a winner is declared by tallying the votes for each candidate. In most districts, a candidate wins when they have the most votes. Some districts have different rules, for example a candidate may have to win by obtaining a majority of votes (>50.0%). The office of the President of the United States is decided by the famous electoral college.

Between the time a person decides they want to win an election and Election Day, that person has to generate enough money through campaign donations or contributions to pay for their expenditures. Though we won’t go into detail now, expenditures come in two varieties: operating expenditures and independent expenditures. A candidate may hire people to campaign with them. They may advertise their platform in a newspaper, on tv, or on the internet. They may pay people to make those ads. Between staff, advertising, administrative fees, travel, and many other expenses, a federal election campaign can be a costly endeavor. Maybe a candidate has second thoughts when they come to this realization.

Maybe the potential candidate wants to test the waters. Testing the Waters is an optional phase for a candidate in the election cycle. Testing the waters is a phase where a candidate explores the feasibility of becoming a candidate [Congressional Candidates and Committees Campaign Guide, October 2021, pg. 1]. Two super easy ways to evaluate feasibility are:

• Set up a web site with polling functionality. Take out an ad in the local paper, or link to the poll on social media. Leave a leaflet in local restaurants with your site and poll. See the results. Designing a poll is not a trivial thing, and you should hire a professional polling consultant if you want actionable results. See if the voters respond to you and your message. See if you can get some percentage of the social media likes and shares as the incumbent or other competition. This should be relatively affordable in 2023.

• Get an outside perspective. Speak with a consultant or coach about the qualities exhibited by candidates seeking such an office. US federal offices are prestigious positions with a huge amount of influence over every citizen’s life. The character traits, skills, and politicking required to succeed are identifiable and people can be coached on improving those qualities. Does a candidate have what it takes to run an aggressive campaign before getting to office? Maybe, maybe not. Better to find out early before sinking a ton of money into a doomed campaign.

A candidate starts campaigning as soon as they raise $5,000 and do any of the following:

• Make or authorize statements that refer to themselves as candidates (“Smith in 2024” or “Smith for Senate”);

• Use general public political advertising to publicize their intention to campaign;

• Inform the media (either directly or through an advisor) that they will announce their candidacy on a certain date;

• Raise more money than what is reasonably needed to test the waters or amass funds (seed money) to be used after candidacy is established;

• Conduct activities over a protracted period of time or shortly before the election; or

• Take action to qualify for the ballot.

Testing the waters is testing the waters for a reason. The $5,000 limit on raised funds is a very low limit for federal office. The intent is to quickly and easily test the viability of a campaign and then declare yourself a candidate or not.

Once the testing the waters period ends, a candidate must

• register with the FEC as a candidate (FEC Form 2 Statement of Candidacy).

• designate and register a principal campaign committee.

• begin filing reports. The first report includes all fundraising and expenditures incurred while testing the waters.

Here is how we get to the discussion on committees. A committee is a campaign vehicle for a candidate. This why it is natural to discuss spending by committee when looking at each candidate. That candidate spends on their campaign through their committee.

Next time I will cover the FEC Form 2 Statement of Candidacy, committee structure, and starting a campaign.

In the mean time, have you seen any interesting political advertisements lately? I’m always looking for some good ones. For subscribers only, if you see any political advertisements you think someone should know about, screenshot them and send them to keysreport@substack.com.

My interest in campaign finance and US federal elections comes from connecting the dots that all aspects of life are inherently political. I’m not talking about the radical increase in the number of people screaming into the internet void about their particular issue. I’m talking about the undeniable fact that regardless of your issues, there exists someone, somewhere, that will pay insane amounts of money to either keep the status quo, or dramatically change the status quo. If you don’t think this is the case, you might want to remove your rose-colored glasses.

Let’s look at an example so we’re all on the same page. This excellent Reuters article notes US Data Privacy Laws to enter new era in 2023. It’s about data privacy legislation and the impact of a “harms-based” approach versus a “rights-based” approach. Why is this important? Look no further than World War 2, when Nazis collected data on the population and, based on that data, carried out the most heinous crimes in the history of our species. This continued throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s through the communist regime in East Germany. Genocide and thoughtcrimes are potential outcomes from poorly regulated data privacy controls. Elected officials are responsible for this legislation and its outcomes.

How did these officials come to be elected? Someone wanted them elected. Not merely the voting public. Someone. Possibly, probably, a group of someones. Now, let me assuage your fears right now that this is some lunatic fringe conspiracy theory author. We don’t need to bring conspiracy to the table when the facts will do just fine. Not alternative facts. Facts. And we can find out the facts because the US government thankfully makes political campaign finance data available in the raw at the federal level. This data makes everything transparent, at least in theory.

Why do I bring up “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories? To dispense with them. I think “both sides” are quick to jump to conclusions that US federal elections are “stolen”, “corrupt”, elections can be bought, and there is too much money in politics in the wake of Citizen's United. These lunatic theories are spoken out loud because most people, forget about average people, most people do not understand how the election cycle works and they certainly do not understand the role of money in politics. Yes, there is a ton of money in politics. That should not imply there is too much or too little money in politics. Fringe theories come up because money is being spent for or against people’s pet issues, their identity politics, and they don’t understand where this unstoppable force came from. Eliminating money in politics isn’t going to happen without a Constitutional Amendment, the only thing we can do is accept there is an incredible amount of money in politics, and try to understand why it’s the way it is. Once we understand the why, we can explore the “what” and the “how”. We don’t need conspiracy theories to understand money in politics. We need facts and data.

Where do we get the facts and data? Facts are all around us. In the news. In front of our eyes. You can see it in your world, influenced by elected officials. The data comes from the FEC. This is an official US government source with excellent documentation on the data itself, as well as a robust legal advisory section with hundreds of decision records and advisories. In general, the FEC does a good job making tools to explore campaign finance data on their website. For raising money and spending money, the FEC site offers an easy intro widget to see what’s going on at a high level.

Not a bad widget. Here is the US Senate candidate breakdown. The usual suspects are on the list. We can break it down further by clicking on a candidate or we can switch to candidates for the House of Representatives or the President of the United States. Continuing to more detailed searches in disbursements, the FEC continues to provide strong UX for researchers.

Here I can search for companies that are recipients of funds coming from political committees. I can search and filter on all the dimensions of data that I’d expect. Spender name. Recipient name. Time period. Scrolling down the page beyond what’s in the image, there are additional detailed dimensions. In the upper right corner there’s a nice Export button to give the data in csv format. The data output is a line by line readout of the data in the expenditure file for lines matching the search conditions. Exporting this data to csv means we can open it in a tool like Excel to explore the data, start playing with pivot tables, and make some exploratory charts and graphs. The more advanced folks will use something like R or Python and its ecosystem for data transformation and professional reporting and graphic solutions. The experts among us will be able to discern the narratives and influences that go into campaign fundraising and expenditures. Ultimately, this leads into political strategy, election campaign strategy, and how to execute a strategy to get elected.

There is a direct line from fundraising to outcomes in the world that most people can’t see. I’d like to change that. While the FEC provides all the data and a good UX to get it, the site doesn’t allow for outside-the-box reporting. There isn’t a great way to get data on an entire race, including all candidates, sources of income, expenditure outflows; there’s no way to explore the data in aggregate. Individual data points are great. Data exports are great. The FEC is certainly doing the right thing when it comes to making this data available. I think there is a lot of opportunity to go further than what the FEC provides in the raw. Which is why I built a platform to slice and report on the data in ways that provide for:

• custom reporting across time, location, race for office.

• tie fundraising to expenditures to truly “follow the money”.

• provide comparison of historical performance for candidates and context for race for office.

• automated reporting and visualization.

I want to make aggregate reports, charts, and graphs available to interested parties making strategic decisions. This is obviously a benefit to candidates and PACs/Super PACs. But there are many other audiences out there that can benefit. Executives at companies that work with political candidates. Product managers that want to make data-driven decisions. Lawyers advising clients on federal contribution limits. Marketing executives who want to analyze ad spend and optimize digital campaigns. Media consultants trying to place TV/radio ads. Journalists who want to see the story right now rather than dig through data month after month looking for a story. There is a lot of ground to cover beyond the FEC UX.

Friday posts might be more technical in the future. I wanted to outline the “why” regarding this data platform I built so that people can see the value proposition before we get into the details. I wrote this in part to delineate where the FEC functionality ends and where my functionality begins. I wanted to reaffirm with myself that there is still a value proposition here beyond a resume building experience with data warehouses, data pipelines, ETL workflows, complex data transformations, charts, and graphs.

For now, I will leave you with this, the only technical diagram I made for today’s post.

Looks pretty simple, right? Download the data from the FEC. Those files are in zip format. We need to unzip those files to get the line-by-line data filed by every committee. Then we create a database schema based on data in the files. And now we can load the files, starting with each committee, then each candidate. Once the committees and candidates are loaded, we can load the contributions from individuals, contributions from committee to committee, operating expenditures, and expenditures by Super PACs in parallel. There are hundreds of files that come from the FEC. Loading them sequentially, one at a time, would take far longer than is useful for reporting purposes. Hundreds of files and multiple CPU cores allows for parallel loading which cuts the load time from weeks to about a day for the full FEC data set. Doing the diff for just the current election year is very fast once the full data set is loaded. Staying up to date is easy and automated.

What kinds of reports on US federal campaign finance do you want to see? There are no limits provided there is data on the subject. Submit your custom report request in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ Presidential campaign recently went through some staff shakeups after the FEC released a new set of data in late June. According to NBC News, the DeSantis campaign fired about a dozen staff members in early July. This is a little surprising, so early in the campaign for 2024. The staff had only six weeks to pull together a campaign that brought in $20M in that time. Not a bad haul for a six week stint. The problem comes on the expenditures side. In those same six weeks, the DeSantis campaign spent $7.9M. Nearly $8M in expenditures is a lot of money for a campaign only six weeks old.

From a financial manager perspective, that is an unnerving spend rate. What was this money spent on? I will pull some data from the data warehouse and have a report next time after I correct the data completeness issues I mentioned yesterday (link below).

Regardless of the details, a 39.5% spend rate is unsustainable. DeSantis is polling at about 17% according to the first New York Times/Sienna College Poll of the Race for Republican Nominees of the cycle. For comparison, DeSantis at 17% is well behind Donald J. Trump at 54%, and well ahead of Mike Pence at 3%. This is a difficult situation to be in. The needle isn’t moving where it needs to be with a huge spend behind it. What should DeSantis do, considering his campaign employs 92 people, far more than any other Republican nominee. Tim Scott’s campaign employees 54, and Trump’s campaign employs 40.

When I see a campaign employee 92 people, I think there are far too many cooks in the kitchen. A political candidate committee is a vehicle to develop strategy. Ninety-two people is more than enough to develop a strategy. A candidate’s strategy should focus on:

• the broad strokes needed to deliver a compelling message,

• poll high based on that message,

• engage with the constituency in meaningful and impactful ways,

• and reach the right mix of institutional donors and individual contributors.

A campaign strategy should be the braintrust of the operation. From a business perspective, the DeSantis campaign doesn’t need to employ 92 people for this outcome. Maybe DeSantis is a misguided control freak and needs to employ people for both the strategy and tactics of running a campaign.

The tactics should be outsourced to people and vendors with the expertise for tactical execution. I have to question the effectiveness of DeSantis’ reach based on the fact that his institutional donors are maxed out, and his grassroots fundraising is stalled.

Running an overstaffed campaign may be why the effectiveness is so low. Too many cooks, too many opinions, too many different directions. Someone on DeSantis’ staff, or DeSantis himself, noticed and took corrective action. After those first dozen staff members were fired in early July, another 26 staff members were replaced by late July.

“Following a top-to-bottom review of our organization, we have taken additional, aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden,” DeSantis campaign manager Generra Peck said in a statement. “Gov. DeSantis is going to lead the Great American Comeback and we’re ready to hit the ground running as we head into an important month of the campaign.”

And the person who made that statement, campaign chief Generra Peck, was replaced by policy advisor James Uthmier on August 8. Peck remains with the campaign as chief strategist, though for how long remains to be seen. Peck ran the DeSantis’ reelection campaign to a blowout victory in 2022, which saw DeSantis win by a dominant 59.4% to 40% margin over Democrat challenger Charlie Crist. I wonder if Peck views this as a demotion. I won’t speculate about the quality of relationship between Peck and DeSantis. However, notable donors were unhappy enough with the fundraising and polling results they called for her replacement.

In Peck’s defense, she doesn’t have a lot to work with. The biggest problem with the DeSantis campaign isn’t fundraising, or lack thereof, even though it’s a big problem. The biggest problem isn’t a high burn rate on expenditures, even though it’s a big problem. The biggest problem with the DeSantis campaign is the candidate himself. Ron DeSantis is not a likable candidate for a lot of demographics. He actively campaigns on a platform that:

• wastes taxpayer dollars on a feud with the largest employer in the state where he is governor.

• insists institutional slavery benefitted black people

• divests women of their rights over their own bodies

• limits the books available to students in Florida schools

All in the name of a moral crusade against “wokeism”.

Who does that draw to the campaign? Who are the voters, and who are the donors? Well, DeSantis’ views on slavery benefitting black people isn’t going to draw a huge black constituency. I don’t see how it would. A white man telling women what to do with their bodies probably doesn’t draw a lot of women voters. Limiting the books available in Florida schools is a slippery slope toward banning books, which probably doesn’t attract the educated crowd, or people who value freedom of speech, thought, and expression. And wasting tax payer dollars in a feud with the largest employer in his home state is just a staggering miss in every demographic.

Who does the DeSantis platform appeal to? I don’t even want to write it, it’s so offensive. Process of elimination paints a very clear picture of DeSantis’ target demographic, and a different candidate already has that demographic locked up.

Writing this post gives me some jumping off points to cover in the coming weeks. I’d like to do a deeper dive into DeSantis’ expenditures, specifically looking at where the campaign spent money. What categories or buckets of spending did he have? Where was it effective and not? I’d also like to look more at the effectiveness of Peck’s strategy in Florida’s 2022 gubantorial race versus her effectiveness in the early weeks of the Republic primary season. I’d also like to examine what makes an effective platform and what makes effective messaging of that platform. I’d like to connect the dots of how a campaign could reach voters, donors, and effectively amplify the campaign finance loop.

On Friday I’ll talk about some of the tools and technology I use to pull these posts together.

Do you have any thoughts about the DeSantis campaign? Share them in the comments.

Share

I realized I made a mistake. I wrote some software and it does the wrong thing. I’m unable to provide the kind of results I’d like to discuss today. That’s the good news. There’s no bad news and there’s more good news: I get to write about my previous understanding of the situation and confirm my new understanding.

Today is Monday. Monday’s topic is supposed to be a discussion about the campaign fundraising in US federal elections. Topics like grassroots impact on a race, party performance vs. candidate performance, comparison of campaigns and races against historical context. Instead of getting into that topic deeply, we can only scratch the surface due to incomplete and incorrect data in a report generated from software I wrote.

The software I wrote helps me understand the FEC bulk download data in aggregate. The in aggregate is the important part. The FEC website provides an interface to search for contributions to candidates with obvious search criteria like name, address, town, state. The site provides a similar interface for expenditures. Search criteria for expenditures are similar to contributions, replace contributor with recipient and you’re nearly there.

The problem comes in understanding what do all of those individual transaction amounts mean. We can’t understand the patterns in contributions. We can’t understand who are the big winners on the expenditures side. While we have every individual transaction available and searchable in a pretty performant UI, the level of granularity is much too fine for anyone to make meaningful decisions on it.

I’d like to know where the most money is flowing from candidates to private organizations and publicly traded companies. This includes both total dollars spend and total number of transactions with that vendor. In US federal elections, candidates do not spend money individually themselves. Campaign expenses are paid for by committees associated with a particular candidate, or political party, or other political causes. Please note perhaps a most understated way of saying “Super PACs” in the previous sentence. Super PACs are a topic for another day (many, many other days).

A committee is associated with a candidate for the purpose of fundraising and then spending those raised funds on things to get the candidate elected. The committee spends money, reports expenses to the FEC, and then we get to write reports against those transactions.

Here’s the kind of report we can write with the tools I built. This report comes from a query against a data warehouse that holds the FEC data. Unfortunately, this report is completely incorrect. The mistake I mentioned earlier was that I loaded independent expenditure data into the contributors table because the schemas look nearly identical if you squint hard enough. The reports and visualizations do not pass the sniff test in regard to accuracy and correctness. In this report, we would expect the Super PACs to spend radically more money than DEM- or REP-affiliated committees.

I didn’t bother cleaning up the junk data in this graph because I already know the real content is incorrect. The FEC data in the raw contains many invalid values and incomplete fields that make the internal consistency difficult to interpret. This (practice) graph shows there are a few big winners concerning states that most benefit from US federal elections. There is not a level playing field. Some states benefit dramatically more than others. How much? I need to put the independent expenditures in the right place to know. What we have now is worse than useless - it’s misleading.

What I’d like to do is take the data in the report above, and make some interesting visuals to understand the landscape of US political finance. That’s the intent of the Monday article. And that’s the importance of building in public. Preparing to post this graph, this report, and this article forced me to take stock of my understanding of the data from a third party, my understanding of the tools I built and my understanding of the files provided by the FEC, and my ability to critically think about the data in front of me to ensure correct, valid results before looking for a narrative.

The conclusion is that I need to reload the data warehouse from scratch. Drop schema. This is a little painful for me. Though I have an excellent M1 Pro MacBook, and though I took great pains to massively parallelize the data load, the process still takes over 24 hours from start to finish. That is the easy part. The more difficult part is correcting the end-location of the data so the reports have a complete set of data to export and visualize. I’ll discuss how it’s going in next Monday’s post.

Maybe not next week, but eventually we will have weekly posts on campaign fundraising and expenditures! Please subscribe to The Keys Report so you know what I’m working on. Stay subscribed to get the latest news and current events on campaign finance in the 2024 US federal election cycle.

Have you ever learned from your mistakes? Leave a comment and let me know!

Money and politics go hand in hand. Money is politics, and politics is money. If you want to understand the world around you, follow the money. Since 2012 and the US Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizen’s United, spending money on politics is an exercise of First Amendment rights. That is, anyone can spend any amount of money in politics, as long as they obey certain rules. President Obama notably chastised the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Citizen’s United case during a State of the Union address, in a rare case of Executive rebuke of the Judiciary. In the years since, the amount of money in politics has exploded.

Data from the FEC shows 2,111,820 contributes from individuals in the 2010 election cycle, versus 96,467,122 contributions from individuals in the 2020 election cycle. This is an increase of over 45x. The number of expenditures, meaning the number of transactions candidates and committees paid to vendors, partners, travel expenses, or any other financial outflow, increases from 1,339,329 in the 2010 election cycle to 2,316,694 transactions in the 2020 election cycle. This is an increase of 1.7x. Note, this is not the dollar amount spent, it is the number of different payment transactions across all candidates and offices for those election years.

Rather than complaining about the influence of money in politics, we should seek to better understand the post-Citizen’s United reality and use that understanding to make better strategic decisions. Who is “we”? I imagine there are a few different personas and audiences that want to understand the landscape. Business strategists. Political strategists. Entrepreneurs. Finance lawyers. Journalists. Each of these personas has a different reason for being here. Over the coming weeks and months I will share my understanding of campaign finance and the forces that influence it on The Keys Report.

You may ask why you should subscribe to The Keys Report. I am Anthony Keys, a business strategist with a background in computer science. I combine strategic thinking and technology to ask the right questions of the right data, while using and building the best technology tools to pull unique and actionable insights from the data. Over several years I built a set of tools that puts the official FEC bulk data downloads into a high-performance data warehouse for the most up-to-date US federal election campaign finance reports available.

The Keys Report is where I share my thoughts on campaign finance, political strategy, business strategy, and technology. I post three times per week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The schedule is:

• Monday: Campaign fundraising and expenditure insights - This is where I build in public. This will feature reports for different campaigns and races, as well as high-level political landscape influences.

• Wednesday: Political Strategy review - Thoughts and opinions on candidates making notable campaign moves.

• Friday: Technology Topics - A sneak peek at the tools and techniques I use to create summary reports and provide the most current data.

Subscribe to The Keys Report and receive every post in your email box as soon as it’s published.

Computer science is such a broad field with many different career paths available. Many of them are financially lucrative. There is often flexibility in work location. I have been remote since 2009, long before working from home became mainstream with Covid mitigation strategies. In a broad, complex field like computer science, students often have questions on how to focus their studies on something meaningful. Common CS career questions questions often go right to things like:

• “Which programming language should I learn?” (As many as you can.)

• “Which web framework should I learn?” (The most effective one for the job.)

• “Should I learn relational databases or document databases?” (Yes.)

These questions are tactical. They are specific about tools. I’m not sure these are the right questions for a student to start with. There needs to be a more strategic level planning session where the student asks about the kinds of problems they want to solve. Figure out the categories of problems you want to solve, and your tactical questions become more clear, which gives better answers in the context of chosen problems.

For students in computer science, your career trajectory is directly related to the kinds of problems you want to solve, and there are a number of ways to look at problem solving. Here are the strategic-level problems before you. Focus on solving those, and your technology choices become clear.

• Do you want to live a comfortable life with a high income? Figure out where the money is, and become the kind of person that gets hired into those jobs.

• Do you believe in a cause and want to make a passion play to solve problems in a critical field? The money may or may not be better than a compensation-oriented career. You'll likely make less money year-to-year, with, maybe, an infinitesimally small chance at a huge payday someday in the future.

• Are you enamored with the study of computer science itself that you want to contribute to the direction of the field? Academia may be an appropriate career path.

The tech choices in each of these paths are different. It's great to be polyglot, though not required. Good application of computer science principles lets you move across this set of problem categories.

What other kinds of problems are out there? No one can make an exhaustive list because we don't know what we don't know. With computer science we are able to solve entire classes of problems at once (think: solving sudoku puzzles). This allows us to think big. Computer science is really a study of problem solving itself. Studying computer science is one way to learn about learning. In my 26 years of professional experience, I've found good computer scientists are among the top problem solvers because they know how to ask the right questions, figure out what the important points are, mitigate the risk of the unimportant points, and get the right work done.

Regarding internships and getting your foot in the door - aim high, put all the options on the table, and go from there. That means you should apply and interview everywhere. Customize your resume and applications for each place. Read the job descriptions, then tailor your application and resume to match. Employers are looking to hire exactly what they put in the job description. Let them know you understand the message they're sending you by sending the same message back to them. Birds of a feather flock together. Making yourself look like a hirable candidate goes a long way toward getting hired.

Tell people about what you're doing. Be open to new ideas. Socializing your ideas and projects with other people is at least as important as doing them. You never know who will take interest in your project and skills.

Your first jobs don't define you, but in 2022, they make a big difference in career trajectory. Push yourself. Challenge yourself. You can do it.

Earlier this week I was surprised to learn about a difference in expectations on a product capability I thought was well defined and well understood. I was wrong. There was a difference in understand the capability between people on the same planning team. Fortunately, implementation was still at a point where we can reset expectations without any damage to the product or organization. Most important, we could reset expectations without damaging egos. What follows is a summary of organizational collaboration, and steps taken to remediate the misunderstanding.

Delivering business value in large, complex software projects involves a lot of planning. In larger companies, there is organizational separation between planning and implementation. Product management is separated from software development. Product management works on strategy and planning. Software development implements the work defined by product management, feeding input back into the planning organization. A strategy and planning organization takes input from “the business”, however that is defined, and turns it into a prioritized roadmap. That roadmap is broken down into prioritized units of work. Those work units should break down into customer-facing deliverables, leading indicators, and release dates.

The planning organization works ahead of the development organization. Sometimes this feels like a long-form, highly-compensated game of telephone. Conversations happen and ideas are thrown over the wall to the next person. At each hop down the line, there is a chance ideas will be muddled. Two people may think they have the same idea because of the conversation. The participants use the same words, in seemingly the same ways, and both leave the conversation thinking they have the same outcome in mind. And then the wrong product is delivered after implementation. Whoops.

How do you arrive at the right outcome? Talk with people. Think about communication like putting rocks in a rock tumbler. With a rock tumbler, rough, jagged rocks in a variety of shapes and sizes go in, and weeks later smooth shiny rocks come out. Rocks in the tumbler apply pressure on the other rocks, bumping into them, knocking the rough edges off.

Pulling interested stakeholders together to get all the ideas and understandings out on the table is like putting rocks in the tumbler. Individually, our first ideas are rough and not fully formed. Talking about any software functionality is abstract by definition. Software projects are about defining behaviors. Humans judge each other by our behavior all the time. When something unexpected happens, people panic.

A good discussion pushes different perspectives against others. Putting pressure on ideas identifies the essence of an idea. The important points and the unimportant points become clear.

It’s important to point out that rocks out of a tumbler don’t look the same as when they went in. Openness is important when working in the idea rock tumbler. Holding professional or personal attachment to a particular idea down to its details is a bad idea. This is where we can take advantage of being lazy. What’s the problem with putting an idea on the table and letting others poke holes in it, try to lift if up with a lever, see where it holds and doesn’t hold, and then building on that idea. You’re on a team, let the team do their part of the work.

This doesn’t mean step back and watch. That’s disengaged, not lazy. Try to pull other ideas in to build a common solution with broad buy-in. People are more likely to agree with a plan, and promote it, when they have an ownership stake. The best polished ideas are those that draw from all of the ideas put into the tumbler. Keep talking, and then review, review, review with the team.

The world may have changed since the initial planning sessions. Set aside working sessions during the week to revisit plans as implementation time draws near. Planning orgs run out ahead of implementation orgs; months can pass between planning something and writing software to deliver it. The best laid plans may be irrelevant by the time development bandwidth can implement them. Don’t be afraid to revisit plans to challenge the underlying assumptions.

Stakeholders can be too close to an issue or idea to see the bigger picture. Planning sessions sometimes get too myopic. Sometimes people don’t understand what they don’t understand. People can be too busy to have the cognitive bandwidth to engage in the same discussion with the rest of the team. Don’t hold this against other people. We are all guilty of it. Be forgiving of assumptions and expectations. Other people aren’t the enemy. There is no place for finger pointing and blame. However, there is plenty of room for taking responsibility for a lack of understanding.

Taking responsibility is a big part of empowering others and making the room safe for others to take responsibility too. If people don’t take responsibility, don’t worry about it. You can’t control them anyway. But you, personally, can take responsibility. If your ideas are not understood by other people, the problem isn’t with them for not understanding, the problem is with us for not communicating clearly. Take the time to tell people what you’re thinking about. Ask for input. Figure out where an idea breaks down. Find the limits of the idea while planning rather than watch it fail in production. This is a collaborative exercise that needs other rough, jagged ideas to knock off the rough edges of our own. The outcome is a collection of smooth, polished ideas that have enthusiastic approval with a broad set of stakeholders.

Being a good leader is about doing things yourself and setting an example. It doesn’t mean doing everything yourself, or even most things. Leading is about setting the parameters of success and defining a framework to achieve success. It’s not about dictating parameters and frameworks. Those things need to be socialized across a group to build consensus and understanding. A team needs to know, directionally, what the aim is. Aim doesn’t have to be perfect. A team needs to know how they are expected to work together. This changes as people get to know each other. People become more effective working together over long periods of time.

Effective leaders surround themselves with people who outshine them in certain areas. Leaders support and encourage others to keep outshining them. There is an element of humility to being an effective leader. Ego can’t get in the way of progress. I can’t fall into the trap of thinking I’m the best software architect in the neighborhood because people with experience different from mine, who are closer to the details of a project should be the people making recommendations. My job is to understand their recommendations, clear the path to implementation, and make decisions based on risks. None of that includes competing with software architects on their own turf.

Establishing yourself as a leader can be difficult. The kind of person who talks the talk and doesn’t walk the walk succeeds often enough that it steadily frustrates the competent, capable, responsible, reliable aspiring leader. People resent a loudmouth know-it-all masquerading as “leadership”. Who hasn’t seen someone like this lead a project into a dumpster fire? Or stir up chaos on a daily basis that everyone feels except them? How do you escape this person? Take the lead yourself. Take it from them. Don’t be shy about it. Be bold and get out in front. Identify what needs to be done, do it, and then tell people you did it. This works in a lot of situations. Professional work situations. Athletic training. Academic - high school through post-doc.

Getting out in front means planning. Leadership is about effective planning. Planning means setting achievable goals with fair, equitable outcomes. These goals should be palatable to a broad range of stakeholders. The goal is to outline a plan that gets buy-in from your team. Initially goals should be for the short term. In new teams, there is a “get to know each other” period where grand plans are difficult to agree on because the team isn’t speaking with the same vernacular. The words sound alike, and they’re used in similar ways, but the plan isn’t received the same by every member of the team.

In a project I was recently involved in, we had one person “assume leadership” in an unspoken way. The goal of the project was to determine the value proposition of a particular product, in the context of developing the product to meet the value proposition. There is a presentation aspect of the project where we would present our findings to executive stakeholders. The assumed leader had a particular product outcome in mind and was going to bend the process to fit his outcome. The assumption was that he was going to tell us what he wanted to see done, and we, the rest of us, are going to do it. Regarding the presentation, he wasn’t going to do that either.

I nope’d right out of that one. Nope. Not going to happen. Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to work on the project together, as a team, and everyone’s thoughts, opinions, feedback, and input will be considered together. The product will reflect the value proposition based on the value proposition, not what someone wants to build on the company’s dime. I did the pre-work. I asked for data and opinions. I consolidated those data and opinions into an outline of our methodology and findings. I did all of this “in public”, over an email thread to all of the group participants. I sent the aggregated data and consolidated opinions to the group for feedback. At our next call, the assumed leader hadn’t read anything that came back to him on the email thread. He was only aware of what he sent. The rest of the team wanted to use our work as the foundation of the project.

Leading is facilitating. There were a number of discussions going on in the email thread based on data collected in the field. All of the team members contributed data and their thoughts on what it was telling us. Just having the discussion is a meaningful act in leadership. Creating a composite opinion is a meaningful act. It gives people an opportunity to grab on to an idea and discuss it. Poke it. Try to see where it falls short. Try to see where it is strong. Writing things down and sharing it is a meaningful act of leadership. Maintaining the group’s process and history through documentation is a meaningful act. Building off of existing ideas is difficult when there isn’t a written record of those ideas. Making small, incremental progress is a meaningful act of leadership.

I’ve kept details of the product out of this. I hope the meaning becomes clear from leaving that gap. The meaning of leadership itself is collaborating with others toward common goals. That collaboration has to happen. Leadership isn’t exclusively about goals. Humans are social creatures. We socialize with each other. We work together to achieve more than one of us individually. Individuals can’t come together when there is no communication and collaboration. Therefore, leadership isn’t about setting direction and making others do the work. Leadership is about getting the work done yourself.

Leadership is a responsibility. Leadership is responsibility itself. Leadership isn’t a declaration. It isn’t a hashtag or a TED Talk or a marketing campaign disguised as community service. Declaring yourself a leader is like declaring yourself a monarch. Sure, you can say the words. No one can stop you. But the declaration, online or not, doesn’t make it so. The likes, the hearts, the prayer hands emoji, these don’t make you a monarch. “I am a leader” is not the same as “I am responsible”. Even “I am responsible” is not a complete and accurate statement. More complete is “I am responsible for…”. Responsibility has a cause. You’re responsible for something. That something has meaning. Otherwise you wouldn’t be responsible for it. You could abdicate your responsibility if something doesn’t have meaning and you’re back to vapid declarations of leadership.

Responsibility and leadership are defined by consistently behaving as if things matter. Responsibility isn’t a one-time act. It’s taking care of something consistently over time. Consistency over time is a key point. Starting with zero “followers”, there is at least one person that matters. That person being yourself. Is anyone going to follow your lead when you can’t follow yourself? Highly unlikely. Behaving consistently over time gives the opportunity to accumulate at least one follower: yourself.

Responsibility is a negotiation with the future. The act of setting things in order today provides for greater opportunity or resources in the future. People negotiate with the future all the time. Saving money today might mean more funds to buy a home in the future. It might mean retiring at some point versus working until you expire. Paying attention to nutrition and fitness right now might lead to higher quality of life in the future. Paying attention to your job functions might bolster your career prospects. There are some things in life that matter. Ignoring things that matter provides for a dismal present and bleak future.

How do we get to the happy future with abundant resources? We need to plan for the future today. Planning helps us determine the things that matter. We all have a limited amount of time. Our time is limited daily by obligations and inconveniences on top of the things we have to do. Our time is limited by our lifespan. Our days are numbered. Understanding our limits imposes the need to set priorities. How should we choose to spend our precious moments? To me, it seems prudent to prioritize self, family, friends, colleagues, and community, in that order. As responsibility is met at each level, you can start extending yourself into the next level, slowly and deliberately. That means responsibility to oneself must be fulfilled before responsibility to family. In fact, the acts of meeting personal responsibilities are prerequisite to fulfilling responsibility to family. Who wants to be the person who shows up to “help” with a project and ends up being the cause of rework and remediation that takes more time than if we didn’t show up in the first place?

I’m setting the stage for more to come. In part, this is a challenge in meeting my own personal responsibility. Planning topics for writing and discussion in the present is no good if I don’t actively write now and in the future. If you can plan in the present and act for the future, good for you — you just got your first follower.