Stalky Stalking Stalkers

Monday, September 21, 2020

As many of you may know, this year was the first time in my life that I chose to donate money to political campaigns in support of the candidates I want to win. I haven't done it in the past for a variety of reasons, including:

  • I don't think "campaign contributions" belong in politics. I believe the government should provide a set amount of money to each candidate for the duration fo their campaign, and that should be it. No Citizen's United bullshit, no big money donors, no billionaire self-funded dipshits buying the election, no buying the candidate's ear. If they win, each candidate should have an equal obligation to every constituent in their area of responsibility, and no one should have to pay for that obligation through political contributions. I'm such a dreamer. 
  • I knew, I knew, that if I chose to donate in spite of my misgivings, the campaigns in question would become Stalky McStalkersons, inundating me constantly with requests for more money, in spite of the fact that I already know how much (and when) I'll be making additional donations to the campaigns I care about. 
But I believe this election cycle is the most important one of my lifetime, and I strongly feel the Republic is in jeopardy. So rather than tacitly agreeing to live in a Banana Republic where our fearless leader (or his whackadoodle son) wears a funny hat for the rest of my life, I sucked it up and made modest contributions to several candidates of my choice. 

Crap on a cracker, I was SO RIGHT. 

As an experiment, I started keeping track of how often the campaigns I contributed to contacted me to beg for more money. These statistics are from September 11 through September 18th, and for what should be obvious reasons (have you met me?) only include Democratic candidates. But there is no doubt in my military mind that the Republicans are doing exactly the same thing to their own donors. 

Amy McGrath9
Mark Kelly12
John Hickenlooper29
Biden/Harris29

As you can see, Hick and Biden/Harris campaigns are the Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner in the Stalky McStalkerson Sweepstakes, with a whopping 29 communications in just a seven day period.* For those who are math-challenged, that's a little over four communications a day, every day. 



And politicians wonder why people of good conscience don't want to donate to their campaigns. BECAUSE THEY DON'T WANT REPRESENTATIVES OF ACTBLUE OR ACTRED OR WHATEVER PEERING IN THEIR WINDOWS AT NIGHT TO SEE WHEN YOU'LL DONATE AGAIN, THAT'S WHY.

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*Disclaimer: These values do not include phone calls, because I just don't answer calls from numbers that are not in my contact list. I also only received one SMS from each candidate because I opted out after the first ones, which to their credit, they respected. So the ACTUAL number of attempts would be far higher were this a scientific poll with a control group. Which it's not. 

2 comments:

joycemocha said...

This is also why I don't sign online petitions. I'd just as soon not have my email explode on me, and I'm not convinced that (unlike campaign contributions) they do any good.

Janiece said...

Hm, yes. Our government has already proven they don't give a crap about what their constituents believe, so why bother?