Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.
And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
Throwing money at a Republican primary candidate in Illinois is probably as ineffective as it would be in New York. The big cities are just too deeply Democratic.
Chicago is the home of the Chicago commodities exchange... and like New York has a bit of influence over businesses dealing with banking taking place in New York, so too does Illinois have influence over the regulations around the question of commodities and related markets.
"The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries"
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
Good. I vote against anybody who is supported by crypto pacs as one of my top priorities in primaries. Unfortunately, Schiff beat Porter for the Senate seat in California, but happily the grifting Rishi Kumar continues to lose every seat he runs for.
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.
Nobody's lobbying achieved objectives in the Illinois primary, which is more a statement about the ineffectiveness of lobbying (at least in these kinds of races) than anything else. The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
If the news is to be believed, the online influencer with no elected office experience came within a couple points of the experienced politician that won, so I would disagree with your assessment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lefty-influencer-kat...
A 4 point lead over someone barely over the Congressional age requirement with no experience is hardly a clear-cut win and almost margin-of-error territory.
I've often thought that the "effectiveness of political spending/lobbying" is often promoted by those who receive the political dollars and lobbyists.
And since it's a great way to answer the "If your side/candidate/issue was so great, why did they lose?" question without having to deal with any introspection whatsoever.
It's interesting how much money is spent lobbying at the primary stage, when you can always just shop around congress AFTER the electins for the cheapest whore to buy out and find someone for pennies on the dollar.
This bodes well for democracy. Hopefully things stay such that they can’t be bought. Once they can be we are in trouble.
Pretty sure primary sending isn’t very helpful when it’s intended to change election results.
What’s helpful is donating to people who you already know are going to win so that they do you favors later on.
The article suggests something like 90% of their spend was intended to change results. Can you help me understand your comment? I don’t get it.
On those terms, they also wasted a lot of cash. 90% of it went to candidates who lost (or opposing candidates who won).
I don't understand how a blanket statement like this can apply. In a voting district where one party is heavily favored, such that that party's primary election winner is basically going to win the general election (e.g. New York City), then primary spending seems like the only place to influence the election.
Throwing money at a Republican primary candidate in Illinois is probably as ineffective as it would be in New York. The big cities are just too deeply Democratic.
It's a primary. They put money against one Democrat in the hopes that some other Democrat who doesn't know about regulating crypto grifts will win.
Is there a writeup of the objectives of lobbying/spending here? Are specific bills/topics proposed for the upcoming session?
Chicago is the home of the Chicago commodities exchange... and like New York has a bit of influence over businesses dealing with banking taking place in New York, so too does Illinois have influence over the regulations around the question of commodities and related markets.
https://nationaltoday.com/us/il/chicago/news/2026/02/24/cme-...
https://businesslawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/commod...
Another bit is things like sports betting laws... and how they interact with prediction markets.
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/sports-betting-tax-beco...
https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/illinois-regulators-say...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cryptocurrency-and-ai-...
They're concerned about regulation, as always.
Note that this election has no impact over the current congress. Senators and Reps won't be seated until January.
"The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries"
I read that as them having mistakenly sent the cryptos to the "opposing candidate"
The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."
..could be a built-in feature of the matter?
:-D
Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Campaign spending does have an effect for unknown candidates, but once the voters know who you are and what you stand for, further spending doesn't move the needle.
It's true that the campaign with most money usually wins, but that does not the money caused the win!
One way to think about it is that the most popular candidate naturally gets the most donations, just like they get the most votes. It can also be a good investment to be on good terms with the future winner.
>Fortunately, you can't typically "buy" elections by donating to campaigns.
Having a Fox Mulder moment, because I too, want to believe. However, it makes me think, if it didn't work to some degree, whatever that may be, it wouldn't be common.
“Good investment” is looking a bit suspicious there
Good. I vote against anybody who is supported by crypto pacs as one of my top priorities in primaries. Unfortunately, Schiff beat Porter for the Senate seat in California, but happily the grifting Rishi Kumar continues to lose every seat he runs for.
You can't talk about what happened in the Illinois primaries without talking about the other PACs who spent big, specifically AIPAC and other dark-money Israel-affiliated PACs that spent to defeat pro-Palestinian candidates (eg Kat Abugazaleh) without ever once mentioning Israel [1].
It's far more accurate to say that pro-Zionist groups spent big in the Illinois primary and got mixed results. Crypto just went along for the ride.
There is a war in the Democratic Party between anti-genocide candidates, who enjoy 90% support in the base, and the establishment who is doing everything to defeat them, up to and including intentionally losing the 2024 presidential election [3].
Nobody cares about crypto.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/18/aipac-israel-illino...
[2]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/702440/israelis-no-longer-ahead...
[3]: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dnc-autopsy-gaza-...
I Will never understand why US allows this kind of political intervention.
I don't understand why they'd throw an election so the other pro-Israel side can win.
Kat Abugazaleh was a carpet bagger with literally 0 experience governing. The fact that she came close to winning is an indictment on our meme obsessed voting population and imo proof that ranked choice is absolutely needed. There were multiple bonafide progressives in the race with local roots and experience in the state house but the progressive movement abandoned them in favor of a candidate who ran their campaign from tiktok with 85% of the fundraising from out of state. Honestly a disgrace.
AIPAC was promoting the third place finisher. They opposed both Biss and Abugazeleh who finished first and second.
This is just activist cope. Voters in Illinois CD7, where I live, didn't put Melissa Conyears-Ervin (lavishly supported by AIPAC) into a tight second-place run against La Shawn Ford because Israel bamboozled them. If you look at the map of where the MCE votes came from, it's very unlikely any of them gave a shit about Israel whatsoever. Her votes followed the exact same pattern as they did in 2024, when she gave Danny Davis (the long-term incumbent) a run for his money, and when she wasn't supported by AIPAC at all.
In the Illinois 9th, AIPAC supported candidate seemingly at random in an attempt to split the progressive vote and clear a path for Laura Fine. Didn't work there either.
It may very well be the case that Israel is disfavored by a strong majority of Illinois Democrats (I'd certainly understand why). What your analysis misses is salience: people care about lots of things they don't vote about. Poll primary voters here; you will find a small group of them that think Israel is the most important issue in the district (they will be almost uniformly white PMC voters and they'll be disproportionately online). Mostly you're going to find voters that (a) hate Trump and (b) are concerned about the economy.
It's clearly not the case that "anti-genocide candidates" enjoy a 90% share of the Illinois Democratic primary electorate, because they didn't win.