Consider not donating under $100 to political candidates

I basically agree with this (and might put the threshold higher than $100, probably much higher for people actively pursuing policy careers), with the following common exceptions:

It seems pretty low-cost to donate to a candidate from Party X if...

• You've already made donations to Party X. Larger and more recent ones are slightly worse, but as Daniel notes, even small ones from several elections ago can come back to bite.
• You don't see a realistic world where you go into the federal government during a Party Y administration even if you didn't donate to Party X, because...
  • You don't think you could go into the federal government at all (though as Daniel notes, you may not realize at the time of making the donation that you might want to later; what I have in mind is like, you have significantly below average people skills, and/or you've somehow disqualified yourself).
  • You have a permanently discoverable digital paper trail of criticizing Party Y, e.g. social media posts, op-eds, etc.
  • You just don't think you'd be able to stomach working in a Party Y administration. (Though consider asking, would you really not be able to stomach it for a few years if it seemed like an amazing career and impact opportunity?)

One thing I've been saying since the FTX days is that we absolutely shouldn't be donating to politics in general (with exceptions of course but in broad strokes and definitely don't donate to the Presidential race or a national party). The evidence that donations to political parties past a certain point do much is unclear (people only can see so many ads) and there are just much much larger problems in the world that EAs should be spending their money on, at worst you can just donate to AMF and this would do way better than most money spent on politics.

The exceptions would be that a very high integrity person was running who was a committed EA. In these cases, I think the math checks out but rarely will it for just some generic candidate.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility that making a partisan donation could be an issue for some non-governmental roles either. I don't have a strong sense of that, but recall that people looking to assert that an organization has a partisan bent will search their employees' contribution records and then report that as evidence of bent. So I were trying to come across as a non-partisan organization, I might be concerned about hiring a bunch of people who had all donated to the same team.

That's admittedly speculative . . . but probably not more speculative than a ~$10 donation being outcome-determinative in a major US political race, either.

Hi Daniel,

I wonder whether it would be possible to donate anonymously or indirectly via other people to solve the issue.