The Premise - Understanding why things are the way they are.
A perspective on political strategy based on real-world data
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.