Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid

As someone deeply involved in politics in Oregon (I am a house district leader in one of the districts Flynn would have been representing, I am co-chair of the county Democratic campaign committee and I am chair of a local Democratic group that focuses on policy and local electeds and that sponsored a forum that Flynn participated in ) I feel that much of the discussion on this site about Carrick Flynn lacks basic awareness of what the campaign looked like on the ground.  I also have some suggestions about how the objectives you work for might be better achieved.

First, Flynn remained an enigma to the voters. In spite of more advertising than ever seen before in a race (there were often three ads in a single television hour program), his history and platform were unclear. While many of the ads came from Protect our Future PAC, Flynn had multiple opportunities to clarify these and failed.  Statements such as “He directed a billion dollars to health programs to save children’s lives and removed a legal barrier that may have cost several thousand more lives.” that was featured on his website led people to come to me and ask “What did he do to accomplish this?  Who was he working with? What does this mean?”  These contributed to the sense that this was a shadow figure with no substance.  

Second, Flynn made the mistake of assuming he could win a race with many qualified candidates.  He had a chance just because the vote was split so many ways, but he consistently appeared less engaged, less experienced, and less able to represent Oregonians.  His story of being a hard luck child had little resonance in a state where so many have lost so much to natural disasters in the last few years.  His assumption that, as a freshman Congressperson, he could sway Congress with little experience in that realm rang false.  Two of the candidates had worked for years as aides to congresspeople and touted their experience as a way that they could work to make a difference. In addition, the desire to elect a representative that reflected the diverse nature of our district - especially one that had a powerful back story of an immigrant father who gained citizenship through serving two tours of duty in Viet Nam - was powerful.  

The EA community seemed to have gotten excited about Flynn because of his emphasis on pandemic preparedness.  But, people in Oregon have multiple needs from their representatives and Salinas, who is serving her third term in the legislature and who has been a powerful champion for women’s health care, for environmental issues, for gun safety, for education, and for human rights among other issues, showed that she was able to understand and deliver on these issues.  Again, in example, Flynn just said that he would defend women’s reproductive rights, with no further elaboration on how to do that or what that meant. 

I am surprised that there was not more attention paid to the support Flynn had in Oregon.  FEC shows fewer than 10 contributions to Flynn’s campaign from non-family Oregonians.  This should have been an important indicator of support.  This can be contrasted to over 750 contributions from Oregonians, many of them small dollar amounts, to Salinas.  

In sum, Flynn may be a smart and kind man who  won some of the vote because he achieved massive name recognition at the cost of $1200 per vote, but lost significantly because he neither articulated a clear history and direction nor demonstrated a commitment or knowledge of Oregon.  In a smaller field, he would have lost even more by my assessment.  

In addition, the negative and clearly false advertising that Protect our Future PAC used when it appeared Flynn was losing went against many of the things people on this forum profess to have wanted from this election:

1. It made government appear corrupt and inept - and that no good solutions could come from those who govern.  This makes it hard to assert that things like the pandemic can be addressed at the governmental level.
2. It undercut the winner, Salinas, and increased the probability that the much less desirable candidate will win in the general election.
3. It advanced, the practice of grainy dark pictures, untruths, and inappropriate use of information (such as calling a $250 contribution from a drug company in 2018 financing the Salinas campaign) which just subverts the electoral process.

Some 450 contributions were made to Flynn’s personal campaign from outside Oregon, many coming from followers of this forum, and many maxing out at the $5800 allowed for the primary and general election combined.  If that same money had been spent to reach out to future Rep Salinas to advance the cause of pandemic preparedness, I expect it would have been much more powerful.  

My reflection to those who were working with me in this election was “I love intelligent candidates and people who look broadly at the issues.  But this must be accompanied by humility or it becomes dangerous.”  I feel that this campaign, whether it was the candidate or the high spending PACs,  failed to achieve this humility.  

This is an excellent post, one slightly subtle point about the political dynamics that I think it misses is the circumstances around BoldPAC's investment in Salinas. 

BoldPAC is the superpac for Hispanic House Democrats. It happens to be the case that in the 2022 election cycle there is a Hispanic state legislator (Andrea Salinas) living in a blue-leaning open US House of Representatives  seat. It also happens to be the case that given the ups and downs of the political cycle, this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year. So just as it's basically happenstance the the EA community got involved in the Oregon 6th as opposed to some other district, it's also happenstance that BoldPAC was deeply invested in this race. It's not a heavily Hispanic area or anything, Salinas just happens to be Latina. 

If it was an Anglo state legislator holding down the seat, the "flood the zone with unanswered money" strategy might have worked. And if there were four other promising Hispanic prospects in the 2022 cycle, it also might have worked because BoldPAC might have been persuaded that it wasn't worth going toe-to-toe with Protect Our Future. Now what's true is POF was able to massively outspend BoldPAC but that became a diminishing marginal returns dynamic. Salinas had enough money to make it a competitive race not because there is some deep-pocked anti-EA lobby that was out to get Carrick Flynn, his aspirations just collided with another agenda by coincidence. 

So even though Salinas won by a pretty hefty margin, I think the counterfactual in which he wins does not require particularly large changes. 

Now of course weird shit is going to potentially stand in your way in any race you try to run in. But I think it underscores the fact that if EA wants to play in electoral politics it will ultimately be important to have more candidates running in more races, even if that means less superpac spending per candidate.   

I think that these are good lessons learned, but  regarding the last point, I want to highlight a comment by Oliver Habryka;

It seems obvious to me that anyone saying anything bad right now about Carrick would be pretty severely socially punished by various community leaders, and I expected the community leadership to avoid saying so many effusively positive things in a context where it's really hard for people to provide counterevidence, especially when it comes with an ask for substantial career shifts and funding. 

This seems really important, and while I'm not sure that politics is the mind-killer, I think that the forum and EA in general needs to be really, really careful about the community dynamics. I think that the principal problem pointed out by the recent "Bad Omens" post was peer pressure towards conformity in ways that lead to people acting like jerks, and I think that we're seeing that play out here as well, but involving central people in EA orgs pushing the dynamics, rather than local EA groups. And that seems far more worrying.

So yes, I think there are lots of important lessons learned about politics, but those matter narrowly. And I think that the biggest risk of failing to tread carefully here isn't about wasting money on political campaigns, it's undermining the ability to make trustworthy claims far more generally. We need to do our best to exhibit epistemic standards that are not just better than anyone else in politics - a bar too low to be worth noticing, much less aiming for - but ones that actually should engender trust among both EAs, and the rapidly growing set of people who are watching. And because politics operates at high simulacra levels, I'm concerned that in our rush to focus on various legitimate concerns and lessons while "doing politics" at the object level, we aren't learning those lessons.

I'm glad to see EAs running for political office explicitly as EAs. But I hope that the attitude and approach by the EA community towards the Flynn campaign doesn't become the norm. I felt that the campaign was intrusive and pushy, and the standard of care was much lower than what we expect for other causes/interventions.

Some points:

• I got direct campaign emails from the Flynn campaign, even though I never signed up for campaign emails. Presumably some EA organization gave the Flynn campaign a list of emails or they scraped it off some EA website. I would prefer EA organizations to keep contact information private and adopt an "opt-in" policy for sharing emails. I don't want to get spammed by people asking money for causes or campaigns, especially if EA political campaigns become more frequent.
• One of my local group co-organizers got a personal appeal from the Flynn campaign in the final days of the election asking them to fly to Oregon to do door-knocking for the campaign saying how it was high expected value. Not only is it a troubling sign that the campaign did not already have a large, local population of door-knockers, but the campaign didn't seem to consider the terrible optics of having people getting paid to fly in from out-of-state to do door-knocking for a few days. This seems anti-democratic.
• This primary was flooded with billionaire Super PAC money. This is part of an ongoing trend of billionaires buying political power and is detested within the progressive community. It's undemocratic, and we should be cautious about engaging in politics through billionaire money, even if it is 'our' billionaire, and especially if the EA candidate is running in a progressive democratic primary. Even if you think democracy is just an instrumental good you should be worried about the capacity for billionaires to heavily influence elections.
• The campaign language and EA posts about it, including this one, center entirely around Flynn and not the winner Andrea Salinas, who is also an excellent candidate. The values and views of other candidates the EA candidate is displacing should be a significant consideration in whether to support the campaign. It may be more successful to make EA a constituency for lawmakers, rather than just supporting EA candidates running against progressives.

Furthermore, I'm not sure the information value alone was worth the millions spent on this campaign by the EA community. The 'lessons learned' listed in this forum post seem obvious. I googled "tips for running for congress" and in 10 minutes read through several resources that gave most of these same lessons learned. I expect a 30 min call with a Democrat strategist, of which there are several in the EA movement, would have also given the same lessons learned, and probably would have given a more accurate prediction on the election outcome than the prediction markets cited in this post. Flynn got ~half the vote of the leading candidate, which is more of a blowout than as suggested by the prediction markets. I frequently see parts of the EA community think they've found some new fascinating insight (EA movement learns about 'X') when in fact they are just columbusing knowledge from other communities. It's as if some piece of knowledge must be blessed or learned directly by a well-known EA before it's accepted by the community at large. A little less hubris and a little more humility towards other knowledge domains would save quite a bit effort and resources when learning about things like running for congress.

This is a great post, but I would like to present a counterargument to the claim that the extent of the funding did not matter due to scope neglect. Specifically, I think Flynn's race could suggest there are limits to the amount one organisation can spend on primary races relative to other ones (I agree that absolute numbers are unlikely to matter). I have two reasons for thinking that the relative levels of spending could have mattered. Firstly, it does seem highly unusual for a well-funded campaign to get all its funding from just one donor, which may have made it easier to land attacks relating to SBF. Secondly, this race becoming the most expensive primary in the country grabbed the attention of national media outlets and possibly political groups (e.g., the opposition PAC), potentially helping rally support around viable opponents. Finally, I will note that my argument is reasoning from one unusual data point and thus am not certain of it myself.

Condolences to the campaign team. Their efforts were not a waste, because we've learned a lot from them.

In retrospect, we can see that too many variables were stacked against Carrick.

• The candidate had little history in the location, voting history, credentials, political inclination, little practice with speaking to a mass audience, and little of the style of a public figure.
• The campaign suffered from too few local connections, a hostile media response, too little local funding.
• Outside the campaign, there was an allergic reaction to the crypto-backing, and the HMP endorsement.

There were some variables in his favour. To name a few, his compelling personal history, talented team and volunteers, and campaign and outside funding. But it wasn't nearly enough. A good half of these weaknesses are changeable, though. I think a candidate who has a bit more inclination toward politics and mass outreach, who has experience in the state house, and some of the connections that come with that, will have good chances.

Maybe someone should user-interview or survey Oregonians to see what made people not want to vote for Carrick

There's a weird detail I see in this post that seems to overemphasize the campaign's success:

Yes, Carrick lost. But he came in second out of nine, despite several factors pushing pretty strongly against him. Had things shaken out differently on a few key factors, he could have won.

and

So the fact that Carrick came in second, despite several (in the future, mostly avoidable) factors strongly pushing against him, and no comparable unique factors pushing in his favor, makes me more optimistic about the prospects of any future EAs who decide to run. To be concrete, my personal best guess is that >30% of American EAs would have at least a decent shot (say, >20%) of making it into Congress if they chose to dedicate themselves to their local community and spend time practicing the appropriate communication skills.

However, Carrick only received half as many votes as the winning candidate (results). Maybe this wasn't immediately clear as the data was tentative, but I find it hard to update much on this data.

Great post, and I hope folks will consider it carefully. I was thinking of writing up my thoughts on how to field better candidates, and points 1-4 cover what I would have written. (And do it really thoroughly, nice job Daniel_Eth!)

One thing about all of those points: they're not just about optics or voter preferences. They're proxies for being prepared to do the job. You don't just need to live in the district for a while before you run so you won't get called a carpetbagger, you need it to know what's going on. You need local connections to get support, but also to know who to call on when new issues come up. Experience in local office doesn't just look good on the bio, it shows that you've got experience with committee meetings and all the other basic blocking and tackling on a local level. And so on --these are matters of substance not just optics.

It would be great to see more long-term thinking in Congress, and I think if you all back candidates that would be viable without their EA connection and also add that perspective, you could do a lot of good.

I hope Mr. Flynn also considers running for local or state office. There's been a lot of churn in the Oregon state legislature recently, and that's likely to continue. He'd be a strong candidate for state rep in the next cycle.

Just wanted to say that I really appreciated this post. As someone who followed the campaign with interest, but not super closely, I found it very informative about the campaign. And it covered all of the key questions I have been vaguely wondering about re: EAs running for office.

As a Democratic candidate, being “the crypto guy” is a political liability; being tied to EA, not as much

How strongly do you think this was an update in the favor of an underlying reality of “EA being easy to present”, instead of “EA getting really good draws” in one campaign?:

• It seems like the Politico and WaPo articles were really fair, even good for EA. National press could have ended up being hostile as others were.
• A lot of attention was on money and crypto, which take up mindshare/sound bites. Maybe this shielded discussion of more cerebral criticism of “being an EA”.
• The campaign manager, much of the staff, and the candidate himself are some the best talent in EA. I guess they worked hard. It might be hard to see how many fires they put out or issues they massaged over, this could be consequential.

If the speculation in this comment is true, it might be hard to tell the difference. This is because these “draws” from this one instance have lasting effects and will set a positive tone for EA for a long time.

I guess one difference is that, if the story in this comment is right, EA can’t be confident that a median quality political effort wouldn’t create issues or erode positive sentiment.

edited a lot due to comments

My view is that this is a bet we'd take again. Copied from my twitter:

Sam Bankman-Fried et al spent $13 million on an I'd estimate an additional 25% chance for Carrick Flynn to win. Assuming an 80% chance to win in the national, that's $60 million to win  house seat on expectation for someone who cares deeply about pandemic prevention + great record + all the information learned in the campaign. My 25% comes from the metaculus estimate of 30% (which I think we should accept as a reasonable guess) assuming a 5% chance of him winning without the money. 

Should Sam spend that much to increase the chances on many house seats? I don't know, probably? How many seats do you need to pass pandemic bills? Also the first person has much higher marginal value. This looks like a choice that those involved would make again.

Also, this has great signalling value. If I were in a tough race in the next 2 years, I'd be pushing for Pandemic Legislation and negotiating for some money. "If he's willing to blow $13 mill on a nobody, if I back this legislation, maybe he'll back me" 

correct me if I'm wrong

This is a great post that I think captures a lot about what happened here. Especially 5. I think to some extent  the super PAC donations backfired — after all, you're right that Carrick got terrible press from the gifts. The dominant storyline in local media about Flynn was about how much money he was getting from this crypto gazillionaire in The Bahamas. Not to say that it would have been better for him not to have had the money. But I wonder how this election would've been different if POF had spent only, say, $2m on his behalf.

FWIW,  we just published this on POF over here at Puck which may be of interest to the thread.

I do agree that this provided quite some useful information. However, there may also be a big downside if the criticism of SBF is sticky and will carry to future EAs being funded in politics by him.

Did Carrick anywhere address the 'crypto-shill' claim directly?

I have not followed this campaign closely, but I can totally see why Carrick came across as being inauthentic - because he sort of was. He was downplaying his EA side and presenting himself as a normal local politician.

I think the bold move here would have been openness: talking more deeply about his true motivations and those of SBF. Obviously, that brings EA much more in the scope of opponents, with major risks.

The lesson I'm (tentatively) drawing is that an "EA insider" cannot easily enter politics because it's hard to be authentic without exposing EA to political attacks.

In this “news cycle” of EA posts related to the election, has anyone actually written on the actual issue of how compulsion/authority was used on EA in any sense, mechanical/intent/norms/solutions?

This purported undue authority or compulsion is what is motivating a lot of this anxiety right?

But I get the sense this all stemmed from just one very well liked (or high status if you’re cynical) EA (ASB) who promoted the candidate, along with a number of colleagues of some EA status.

As devil’s advocate, it’s unclear what the issue was, or how this could be prevented in the future (especially if no one is going to articulate this).

(Credit for idea of EA “news cycles” goes to Nathan Young).

Am a bit late to this but wanted to jot down a few thoughts:

1. Does EA Represent Electoral Constituents? Since EA is cosmopolitan and disregards national and possibly temporal boundaries, does that mean  EA politicians will prioritize non-voters over the interest of voters? A lot of EAs may feel like which Americans have health insurance coverage or have a right to an abortion is less important than Africans dying of malaria or humanity going extinct. But 1. is this a legitimate basis for democratic politics and 2. if legitimate, will espousing it inherently be a losing electoral strategy (since EA politicians will quickly be branded as doing a suboptimal job representing their voters)?
2. Should We Be Open to a Chesterton's Fence Around Money in Politics? One political science mystery (which EA investment in electoral races has tried to exploit) is that there is less money in politics than might be rational from the economic self-interest of motivated stakeholders (i.e. campaign donations and lobbying expenditures are much less than the government spending they help determine). But the Flynn campaign experience implies that at least being identified with a single donor creates strong backlash, so we should perhaps more carefully consider explanations for the "too little money in politics" mystery that aren't simply "it is rational to spend more money on politics."
3. Should We Require Local Buy-In to Run in Electoral Races? I'd love to understand better the local Oregonian organizing and stakeholder building that was done for this campaign. I'm also curious to what extent Nick Kristof (who was running for Governor of Oregon and has written sympathetically about effective altruism) was engaged. I was frankly pretty surprised not to see Kristof publicly on board, particularly because he'd built a gubernatorial campaign that ended up not being used (since he was excluded from the ballot for residency reasons). Given the heavy carpetbagging criticism of Flynn (outside crypto money, hadn't voted in recent elections, etc.) and some of the issues that have come up (criticism on local reddits, Oregonians posting negatively about the campaign on this forum, perhaps a misguided tactic of bringing in outside volunteers for door-knocking) along with question 1. i raise above, it may be uniquely valuable in future races to have at least some local community groups bought in ahead of time.

I'm worried about how much this campaign hurt the perception of EA as a whole. My guess would be not too much, since it's a local primary race, but I'm sure there are some people skeptical of the community. It's also possible that crypto is just easier to understand as bad than EA is, so that's what Salinas decided to run on. I'd argue that we don't know yet how EA affects a candidate's campaign. Although, most candidates probably have something that could drown out EA anyway, although probably not anything as damaging as crypto was.

Curious about this part:

“To be concrete, my personal best guess is that >30% of American EAs would have at least a decent shot (say, >20%) of making it into Congress if they chose to dedicate themselves to their local community and spend time practicing the appropriate communication skills.”

Would be curious for a bit more explanation from OP or others on this part.

So now that it's over, can someone explain what the heck was up with SBF donating $6m to HMP in exchange for a $1m donation to Flynn? From an outside perspective it seems tailor made to look vaguely suspicious and generate bad press, without seeming to produce any tangible benefits for Flynn or EA. 

Thanks so much for writing this up! I agree that we should be taking lessons from this run.