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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

I'm talking more about the borederline quid pro quo "I donated $10,000 to your campaign so here's my lobbyists, and more importantly if you don't vote the way they want, that $10,000 is going to your most difficult opponent next round". At the same funding levels, that $10,000 is now $100.

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The per-person limit is already only $2,700, and only people can give money (not companies), so direct contributions are not particularly compelling as a path for corruption. Plus, quid pro quo is already illegal.

Candidates are far more concerned about 3rd party money than direct donations these days, because 3rd party spending is unlimited. Quid pro quo is not necessary because it's all done in public. You don't need a secret meeting with a lobbyist to know if the NRA likes your position on guns. Just watch the ads.

Of course not every House member has to worry about this; in fact most don't. Most of the big spending on House races is concentrated in the few districts that everyone expects to shift the balance. This would still be true in a House of 35,000. While most races would probably get less expensive, there would still be a small set of "tipping point" races that would attract most of the effort and money.

But it would take a lot more races to tip the House.

Not necessarily; it only takes a one-vote margin to pass legislation in the House.

Quite a lot of House races are on "auto pilot", politically--that is, there's not much suspense about which party's candidate is likely to win. This is in part because of gerrymandering that produces districts favorable to one party vs another.

Tiny districts would be like gerrymandering on steroids. It wouldn't take much fancy geometry to produce a map in which the vast majority of House races remain easily predictable. And it is the marginal (unpredictable) races that atract the bulk of the big spending.

Campaign donations are only one form of bribery. There are in-kind gifts, and cash gifts to family and friends, and "consulting contracts" given after the politician resigns.

But the cost of campaigns downs basically linearly with number of voters too. (TV ads are proportional to eyeballs.) There are some non-linear effects here, but I'm not sure how they operate.

> But the cost of campaigns downs basically linearly with number of voters too.

What makes you say that? Hell at 10,000 constituents you borderline don't even need to run ads, just go door to door, personally.

Exactly. Seems to me it would be more plausible for a candidate without deep pockets backing them to be able to run a competitive campaign on issues the district cares about. Simply because they could just go around knocking on doors. A candidate and nine helpers each talking to 100 people a week for ten weeks could theoretically cover the entire district. Not to mention being able reach a good chunk of them by just hanging out at a local grocery store or visiting local bars and other hotspots. Throwing money at a hotspot race would have rapidly diminishing returns compared to a race with several hundred thousand people who can only be reached in numbers by broadcast ads or a truly massive campaign force.

EDIT: Although I suppose the tactic could at that point be turned to buying voters more directly. Spend a ton of money on something that benefits everyone in the district and make it clear that it'll keep coming only if they vote for your candidate, and you might have the same effect.

I believe their point is that you'd have to buy 350 reps to get the same 1% coverage you can get today with 4.

You could probably get the same result by blocking funding external to the district and killing citizens united. And/or shorten campaigns to 60 days so they just don't cost as much. And/or, provide public funding and election spending caps.

I don't think that trying to scale out of it would be that effective but I see what they are getting at. My guess, is that would raise the inequality of the playing field again as the richest would be able to spin up an organization to manage 10k reps, decide whose relevant who to fund, and so on, people who didn't have lobbyists before won't be able to afford that even if the per rep cost gets cheaper, the total influence cost will rise and price additional people out of the market.

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