Back in May, I published an article about how the Democrats are grifting their donor base.
In a quick summary, I stated that the Democratic Party is preying on the lower classes by pressuring them to donate so that the professional people can earn more money by making political advertising for TV and social media.
I am a bottom writer on Medium. And I was expecting the Medium lefties would not take a peek at this provocative title. So I was not expecting much traction for this article. But it did better than expected.
I had one responder with a critical comment. She said that grocery store workers, restaurant workers, and truck drivers do not have an extra $500 to donate to the Democratic Party. With her logic, she blew apart my entire essay.
So it seems.
I anticipated several ways to critique my essay. This was not one of them.
So I took a closer look at the comment. Sometimes people say one thing, but something else is bugging them. I had to wonder whether she was annoyed because I just painted the Democratic Party in a corrupt way. The vote-blue-no-matter-who people would not like this essay. Attacking my main idea with the “poor not donating $500” is a quick stab.
But let’s assume she was literal in her words.
The occupations I described are not flush with disposable income. They have rent and bills to pay, so giving money to political parties does not make sense.
Reading between the lines of her comment, I believe she prefers to think in yes/no, right/wrong, black/white, etc. paradigms rather than greyscales. In other words, she was operating on the either/or fallacy. As I was responding with my greyscale logic, I was seeing the inspiration for this Medium article.
She was not impressed with my greyscale logic. Her rebuttal was that I obviously did not understand the plight of poor people in Western societies.
The poor & politics
When I was an active member of a political party, I was earning about $20,000 a year. Average household income in my part of the world at that time was about $37,000 a year. So let’s say I was in the lower-middle class. According to my critic, I would not be donating politically.
Yet I donated about $1,000 a year to the party. About 5% of my gross income. So, working people do donate to political causes. If the theater is set up well to touch their heart, they will open their wallets.
And we know these days have lots of theater.
My critic is probably correct that most people of this demographic will not be swayed to open their wallets by this theater. In fact, I would say the bigger challenge is getting these people to the polls to vote in a Democrat way. I wonder if my critic will be canvassing for the D’s next fall to find that vote — or will she be writing Medium articles convincing her readers who are already going to vote D to vote D.
Let’s do a little math. There are about 240M voters in the USA. Let’s say a third are D-inclined. Let’s say a third of those belong to the working poor class. That’s about 27M Americans as poor Democrats. If 1% of these people donate $500 and 5% donate $100, my math says that’s about $270M coming from this demographic. Not a bad haul from a demographic where 94% did not donate. The Democrats would be silly not to go after this money, especially given today’s stakes.
Some poor Democrat supporters will donate. Greyscale logic tells us significant money will find its way from the poor Democratic demographic to the Democrats’ coffers.
Either/or logic says “no donations” because 94% is much greater than 6%.
So who is right?
I anticipate this analysis being critiqued because “American democracy is at a crossroads.”
I won’t argue on that point.
But methinks there is some liberal grift happening. And that is one reason why we are at these crossroads, where the Democratic Party needs the money from people it has not helped much in the past two decades.
Published on Medium 2024
