Unethical politicians are trivial. Gotcha. Must be why things are going great right now.
It’s not unethical. It says right on top what the money is going to. Anyone who’s so pants-on-head idiotic that they can’t figure out what’s happening and how to change the split from that form shouldn’t be giving money on the internet. Probably shouldn’t have access to a credit card, full stop.
Ten minutes of looking on Democratic twitter will find a half-dozen similar links…it’s how political marketing is done on the internet and how you get campaigns to be willing to share fundraising appeals to their twitter followers. As far as I’ve read about them (from the similar Avenatti contretemps a few months ago), these tandem fundraising links are usually (maybe, required to be?) done in concert between the various campaigns.
Frankly, poking around Twitter a little, this looks mostly like a slightly pathetic attempt at Harris-bashing from a few of the usual suspects amongst the Bernie-bros.
“The DNC, if you trust us you’re fucking stupid and shouldn’t be allowed in public.”
Good luck with that. Bonus points for blaming Bernie Bros.
In the sense that it’s basically three or four losers on Twitter whinging about it.
And then you, of course.
Ethics are only for the other guy. I get it. I’ve been hearing for like 3 years now.
Cute and almost subtle. I’d take offense, but you’ve shown you have no real moral compass, so it’s kind of hard to.
So, do you get this worked up over the cut that Humble Bundle tries to take from your donation to Child’s Play? Or is “ethics” just something meant for politicians you don’t like?
Because you choose to give her half if you contribute via this means?
@Dave_Perkins was right: Bragman’s tweet wasn’t accurate. The Harris tweet makes it explicitly clear.
What’s unethical about it?
Just because it’s not hidden doesn’t mean it’s not bad. These things should be called out.
The DNC and the DCCC just had an absolutely brilliant night. Seriously.
For the past two weeks all we’ve heard is “Dems are blowing this.”
Turns out, they were pretty damned smart in how and where they spent money. They missed a few opportunities for sure, but overall they got great candidates to run, they widened the playing field considerably, and they were pretty tactical about where they sent the money they had control over.
And the results speak for themselves.
And in fact, to further that last post I made, there are some bobbles here and there. Some misses that are like “Damn!” (The GA-07 and TX-24 especially) but kudos to Tom Perez (DNC) and Ben Ray Lujan (DCCC chair) for recruiting a wide field of terrific candidates and deploying resources pretty well. Like I said, there were misses (there are ALWAYS going to be misses), but they also don’t seem to have done anything as blindingly stupid as the NRCC did with the VA-10, either.
Humble Bundle is people buying shit. They could burn that money in a fucking field. No one cares, they just wanted some cheap games. That any of it goes to charity is a bonus.
I feel like I’m in a room of mob bankers or shady lawyers. How you people are so blinded because it’s your side is beyond me.
I give up. It’s like trying to talk to my cat about calculus. Or a Trump supporter about the rule of law. It’s pointless.
Who are you referring to, the two you quoted or the forum in general? Because there’s been plenty of people in this thread expressing dislike or disdain, even if it doesn’t go to 11 like it does for you.
I think it’s a pretty weak position to act like Harris was trying to hoodwink people out of donation money. I also think it’s gross to use the recount to advertise in the way she did. If she cares about the GA election she should have linked directly to Abram’s fund. Instead she’s using it as an opportunity to raise money for herself as well, which I just find more then a little repulsive.
Where I disagree with some of the people on Twitter is that I don’t know how you can make such a donation without seeing the text. It’s printed clearly and obviously, no “OMG read the fine print, guys!”.
There are various ways to view this sort of thing. You could say you don’t like joint fundraising efforts at all. Or you could say you don’t like them when it appears one candidate is taking advantage of another candidate. But often the purpose of joint fundraising efforts is to get money for the unknown candidate by leveraging the well-known one. What you can’t say is that this particular example is deceptive, or that Harris is concealing the fact that she’ll get half the money.
This is all a bunch of manufactured outrage. Companies constantly run promotions where they promise to donate a little bit to a good cause when you buy their stuff. This is typically seen as a good thing not a grift, even though they could give all the money to the cause not just some small piece. Steam could give all the money to the developers, humble bundle could give it all to the charity, etc. Perhaps you find all those things distasteful, but they seem like a positive thing - a way to support more causes with more money because it doesn’t dramatically hurt the bottom line.
Perhaps you think people who go to that site simply donate without realizing its split. I don’t think anyone does that, I think it’s the same as any of these other situations - sure Coke could direct you to a donation site for the cause itself instead of advertising their promotion. Harris could just give money directly to Abrams without anyone donating it first. There’s always a way to be more charitable, that doesn’t make this some shady thing on par with the many GOP uses of campaign funds for personal purchases (as just one example).
So again, if someone on the right does this same thing (link to a site that clearly describes how your money will be used), I promise I I’ll argue that’s also ok.
It absolutely is unethical.
She is, implicitly, using Stacey Abrams to fundraise for herself. She is opportunistically exploiting Abrams for her own gain.
The ethical move would be to simply point people towards Abrams’ OWN fundraiser site.
The fact that Harris went out of her way to create her own site to try and gain money for herself using Abrams as a prop, is bad.
You guys refusing to admit something that is so obvious undermines your credibility on any kind of ethical issue. You are being blinded by your partisanship. Don’t go down that road.
“It’s black!”
“It’s white!”
“It’s black!”
“It’s white!”
Well put.
All political fundraising is touched with a bit of sleaze it feels. The entire nature and demands of political campaigning are way out of hand and implicitly encourage this kind of thing.
Do I dislike what Harris did? Absolutely. Is it small potatoes? Certainly. Is it illegal? No.
I would wager that if we were to look at every person in Congress for this type of split fund raising, we may be hard pressed not to find one from either party that hasn’t done something similar.
If you continue to make excuses for ethical lapses, then those ethical lapses will become accepted norms. Then they will make increasingly large ethical lapses, because they will only be incrementally worse than those accepted lapses. And things will progress, and get worse and worse.
That’s bull. I say no.
We have a right to ask more of our elected leaders. There’s absolutely no reason to excuse any of this bullshit as “technically not illegal.”
Simply not breaking the law is not the fucking bar our elected leaders need to clear. The bar is higher than that, or at least it should be.
You keep using that word. I’m not sure it means what you think it means.
Only if you assume that these fundraising links are done in a competitive environment where each campaign is only out to fundraise for itself at the expense of other campaigns. These links are put out with the express knowledge of all the parties…that’s how tandem fundraising works on Actblue. My guess is the Stacey Abrams campaign asked Harris to put that link up, since getting a fundraising link in front of 2m rich partisan Californian eyeballs is much more valuable than what Stacey Abrams could manage on her own.