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> “Smaller, newer parties and independent candidates will lose an affordable channel to reach voters, while large, well-followed accounts remain largely unaffec
by paxys 1y ago
> “Smaller, newer parties and independent candidates will lose an affordable channel to reach voters, while large, well-followed accounts remain largely unaffected,”
Grassroots campaigns are not banned. Organic social media activity is not banned. Smaller parties will be just fine. This will only negatively impact politicians/parties/corporations who think that spending more money entitles them to a louder voice.
- seydor 1y agoand how does a sole candidate for mayor begin this 'grassroots campaign'. If you seriously start knocking on people's doors, you re most likely to end up dead or in prison in this day and age
- Bjartr 1y agoWhat makes that more true today than, say, 40 years ago?
- seydor 1y agoonline communication, city densities, very fast movement of people, immigration, inexistence of third spaces, helicopter parenting and so many other things
- lostlogin 1y ago> migration What’s special about this? Are we in a period of particularly high migration? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_migration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_migration
- inglor_cz 1y agoThe British NHS now provides translators for about 200 languages for their patients. How many would they need in 1950? Twenty at most, even fewer outside London.
- Dylan16807 1y agoIf we use the 1950 standard of need, then they don't need anywhere near 200 today either.
- baud147258 1y agoif you're a sole, unknown candidate, how do you expect to be elected? More seriously, you can still hand out leaflets, meet with locals in public, cold-calling the locals, sticking placards, talking to journalists working for a local publication (if available).
- greggsy 1y agoDon’t be ridiculous. Canvassing is not a dangerous activity.
- jopsen 1y ago> If you seriously start knocking on people's doors, you re most likely to end up dead or in prison in this day and age. Not in Europe, certainly not Denmark. As a kid I've knocked on many doors selling lottery tickets for a charity. I think pretty much all streets in the town was assigned to a route and one or two people. We still get people collecting from the red cross every year. For the record I hated knocking on doors, if my kid ever comes home with lottery tickets to sell on a given route, I'll buy then all and burn them before his mom makes me sell any! I'd honestly rather be a bad parent :)
- paxys 1y agoIf you are too scared to step out of your house and meet your neighbors because you think your city is a warzone then you are not the kind who should be running for office anyways.
- theshrike79 1y agoI'm not scared, I'm Finnish. I've lived in an apartment for a decade and I didn't know a single one of my neighbours. We all liked it that way.
- btown 1y agoWhile I'm sympathetic to the sentiment here, it can be overly simplistic in some common cases. For instance, a newcomer might benefit disproportionately from the first X units of ad spending to "get their name out," relative to an incumbent or someone with a famous name spending the exact same price on the same X units, whose incremental effect might be less. Alternately, a local candidate might not have funding for traditional media spots but might want to experiment with smaller ad buys, or might appeal to a demographic less likely to see traditional media spots. In all of these cases, this regulation disproportionately helps their opponent. Of course, the incumbent often has funding for multiple times the ad spend of the newcomer, so the status quo wasn't necessarily a good situation either. Publicly funded campaigns, providing every candidate with an equal amount of money to be used across all types of advertising, could be highly effective here, but only in contexts where this can't be end-run by e.g. PACs in the U.S. post-Citizens United.