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Many have commented elsewhere on the unhinged terrible ads currently being run by many increasingly desperate GOP candidates (internal polling is BAD) across the country blowing through $1,000,000,000 making the slimiest, scummiest political consultants generational wealth, e.g., chris lacivita, but it's because the GOP believes driving boomer turnout is their only way to avoid a 2006 wipeout (or worse). Trump&Co have betrayed their millenial and younger supporters and the RFK Jr cohort and so they're hoping to rely on the dying boomer generation one last time. And I don't think it will work.
Instead of using the billions to make real GOTV organizations (like Turning Point or 10xVotes or Scott Pressler), the GOP/Trump Machine has given the money to the scummiest consultants to run yet another dozen rounds of TV ads into the already laughably saturated ads market. Why do they do this? Because ads are easy and known and makes consultants rich while GOTV is hard and costly. These people are scumbags.
GOTV is hard and costly, but it also requires upfront investment. Dumping more money into GOTV a couple weeks before the election would probably cost four figures per marginal vote. It's smarter to build persistent organizations that seem "wasteful" in off-election years but allow effective scaling of GOTV during the election time, but it's tricky to do right. Are you sustaining and building institutional capacity, or giving handouts to a mass class of grifters? Are those even really different things?
Dumping money into crappy ads late in the game isn't an especially efficient way to spend the money, but it's likely nevertheless the most efficient way to spend the money.
Let me tell you about the $1,000,000,000 voter information system the GOP built under Ronda Romney which couldn't even flag GOP registered voters who hadn't voted yet.
There already exist GOTV organizations which could be upscaled, which have cried for funding for many years from Turning Point to College Republicans to 10xyourvote. Before there was 2 weeks before the election, there was months before the election. The problem is the Party is full of incompetent malicious actors whose purpose is to make money instead of actually winning and they're designed more to keep upstart competent people out of the machine than to win elections.
Democrats create a patronage class by getting their GOTV funded by the government. Republicans starve theirs and make college kids sleep on sofas.
Should just give Abbott what he wants to use his personal information and campaigning system infrastructure.
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NGP-VAN on the Dem side could do that 15 years ago (I helped write some of the code for that). Sigh.
Makes me feel like I should go help even things out, but wherever the money is going, it's not going to the regular workers.
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