Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now

I would just add to this that it’s worth taking a few minutes to really think if there is anyone you might possibly know who lives in the district — or even a second-degree connection like a friend’s sister who you’ve never met. “Relational” communications are much more high-impact than calling strangers if it’s at all possible to find someone you have any connection with.

Oregonian here, born and raised. I don’t live in OR-6 but can see it from my home. I’m by no means a member of EA but I’m aware of it and until now had a generally favorable impression of you all.

I hope that rather than donating, folks in this thread will think about what they’re doing and whether it’s a good idea. The most obvious effect of this effort has been to 5-10x the total spending in this race. It’s pretty easy to read it as an experiment to see if CEA can buy seats in congress. Thats not innovative, it’s one of the oldest impulses in politics: we’re rich, let’s put my friend in power.

Further, it sounds like your friend Carrick is a great guy, but he’s got many defects as a candidate. He’s only lived in Oregon for about 18 months since college. From the few interviews he’s given, he doesn’t seem to have much familiarity or even really care about key issues in Oregon (in particular, the few interviews he’s given show that he lacks a nuanced understanding of issues like forest policy and drug decriminalization). He does not appear to have reached out to local leaders or tried to do any of the local network building you’d expect of a good representative. According to OPB he’s only voted twice in his adult life. He has no experience in government. And, of course, if elected he will very visibly owe his win to a single ultra-wealthy individual who is almost guaranteed to have business before the next congress in financial and crypto regulation.

Even if you think pandemic response is the only issue that matters, there’s little public evidence that he’s an expert: whatever consulting he did is private as far as I can tell. What he appears to be is a policy analyst studying AI governance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s not how he’s being sold. And frankly, I doubt it’s a pressing issue to most people in the district.

I also don’t see any thought about the other candidates in the race. It’s not your guy vs a potato: there are 3 credible, excellent choices. Reps Salinas and Leon are both children of immigrant ag workers who worked their way up through local politics. If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?

One final thought. I thought this group was supposed to be about deploying money more effectively. The amount that’s been spent here would have been more than enough to rent an office and pay a salary for Mr Flynn, an experienced lobbyist with a good Rolodex and support staff for several years. You could have had a dedicated smart pandemic response lobbying operation, not a 2% increased chance of your friend getting elected or whatever. How is your approach effective?

Oh man, I really love this. I used to do door knocking / phone banking in high school and they were quite fun. What wasn't fun was I struggled to find candidates who I really believed in. But everything I've read about Carrick, and also meeting him,  I think this is a really special opportunity to be part of something awesome. Count me in.

This really is a tight race!! Prediction markets at PredictIt and Metaculus are showing Carrick Flynn with just about a 50% chance to win. Political races don't get much more counterfactual than that! https://metaforecast.org/?query=flynn

(In addition to giving him a 47% chance in the primary, Metaculus gives him 40% odds to ultimately win both the primary the general and become a Representative. This implies that if he can make it through the primary, he has an 85% chance (40/47) of winning in November. So, most of the battle is happening this week.)

Why are you volunteering for the campaign?

I’m a volunteer for the campaign because

• I am convinced that Carrick is an exceptional candidate because of his track record of making big, impactful things happen. Examples: co-founding GovAI and CSET -- which are top references in AI governance --, saving potentially thousands of lives by clearing a roadblock to a nationwide vaccination program, and securing a court decision that reallocated over $1 billion to high impact health programs by manually going through over 1,000 pages of accounting documentation.
• Also, by all accounts from his friends and colleagues, is very honest and generally a good and kind person.
• would have a huge direct impact by being a champion to neglected and very important cause areas, like pandemic preparedness.
• would give a lot of information to future candidates interested in preserving future generations
• would gain a lot by being in Congress ASAP so that he can build experience and become even more impactful in the next few years. By being an elected official, Carrick enters a new "reference class" that puts him in a better position to have very impactful roles later. I think Carrick has a substantial chance of becoming one day in charge of the US national response to extreme risks, such as a pandemic or a technological disaster. 19 out of 45 US Presidents served in Congress and 5 out of 45 US Presidents went to Yale Law School, as he did.  So maybe Carrick would have a 1 in 1000 or 10,000 chance of becoming a US president, and an even higher chance of becoming "simply" extremely influential in US policy.

Does anyone have an estimate of how many dollars donated to the campaign are about equal in value to one hour spent phonebanking? Thanks!

Intended to donate in December and then again in January and had too many credit card issues, just maxed out my donation right now because of this post. Thanks!

Before the election was decided, I agreed with the overall point that donating, phone banking, or door-knocking for the campaign seemed quite valuable. At the same time, I want to mention a couple critiques I have (copied from my comment on "Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid")

• The post claims "The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points." However, it declines to mention that the same poll found that "26 percent of the district’s voters [hold] an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas" (The Hill).
• At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim "the campaign is especially impactful right now" seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
• The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren't able to show Carrick speaking, and I've read a few internet comments complaining about how they've never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
• Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn't have much support from Oregonians.
• If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it's in out-of-state EAs' comparative advantage to do so.

Donated because of this post. Thanks for sharing and good luck to Carrick.

Here's an ITN-style analysis from an anonymous friend and me.
 

1. Neglectedness. Very few candidates put pandemic preparedness and preserving future generations as their top priorities. Also, given how important it is to have flexible spending from small donors compared to big donors, we could say that $3k increases his effective level of funding by 0.1%.
2. Tractability. A doubling in funding could increase probability of the campaign winning by 10% (i.e. 30->40%).
3. Importance. The value of a win is worth $N
4. The calculation. Then the value of a $3k donation is $N * 0.1% * 10%.

N has to be greater than ~$30M for it to be worth donating. Seems highly likely given Carrick's expertise in, and interest in pandemic prevention and other issues that are important from a longterm standpoint. Another (related) way to look at it is that if you think that large donors who contributed to the campaign are making the right choice, then small donors donating to the campaign itself are having a severalfold bigger impact per dollar (because their spending is less restricted). 

How quickly can campaigns spend money? Can they reasonably make use of new donations within less than 8 days?

It is still useful to donate until Sunday!

I just talked with someone in Carrick's campaign and they said that there are still two more days for ads to be useful. The PAC has its own ads but they don't show Carrick's speaking. The campaign has better, more personable ads that people like better but the campaign can't use the PAC's funding for those better ads.

And we have another Fermi estimate of the ROI on a donation to Carrick’s campaign! 
 

'There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. Let’s assume that the House as a whole holds 1/4 of the total influence over the federal government’s spending, as one half of the legislative branch. Naïvely, Carrick’s influence would therefore be 1/(4*435), or 1/(1,740). 
 

If Carrick is elected, over two years the government will have $3.2T in discretionary spending. If Carrick can influence his share (1/1,740) of that, he’ll influence about $1.8 billion. 

How much difference can your donation make? One regression I saw suggested that every 10x increase in a candidate’s funding predicted about 5 percentage points greater vote share. (To be fair, this was for Senate races, and just looking at correlations, but this is the best model I could find after some quick Googling.) 
 

So let’s say Carrick has about $1M raised so far. And since it’s a close race, let’s say if Carrick gains 5 percentage points of the vote, his probability of winning goes up 25 percentage points.
 

Multiplying that through, we get that for every dollar you donate to Carrick’s campaign, in expectation Carrick will influence $51 of federal spending:
 

Carrick’s “share” of federal discretionary budget if he wins * federal discretionary budget over 2 years * $1 as proportion of a log increase in funding * increased probability Carrick wins from a log increase in funding.
 

Let’s assume that Carrick is politically constrained and that only 10% of that “share” is directed towards projects that are competitive with a major longtermist funder’s last dollar. Even so, you would get that donating to Carrick has more than a 5x multiplier on your donations as compared to other opportunities.

But I actually think this is probably a big underestimate. For one thing, this does not account for the non-budgetary ways Carrick can create value, such as enhanced regulation, oversight, debate. Carrick winning would also make substantial investments in EAs’ political influence, such as in getting useful information for the next generation of candidates, socializing EA ideas, and making useful introductions.

But even the dollar calculation is probably low. Getting Carrick elected would significantly improve (maybe by 10 percentage points) the probability of a $30billion dollar pandemic preparedness bill being passed. This alone would surpass my Fermi estimate.
 

This is why I’ve maxed out to Carrick. I hope you will too.'

Thanks to my anonymous friend for this great estimate.
 

The phone banking form doesn't have dates so I don't know which Monday it's asking about?

I'm genuinely curious: if you’re considering donating but haven’t yet, what are your key questions/cruxes?

Feel free to answer here and/or DM me. 

I'm organizing a small group discussion around this and your questions would help direct the conversation.  Also maybe some people can answer here!

If you're interested in chatting casually about this, please DM-me :)