I was curious to see if the shutoff of QE has changed the media side of politics yet. Parties might be getting less money from ‘dark’ corporate sources?
If there’s any difference, it’s too early to see in publicly available stats. QE halted in early 2022, and the effects are still rippling through various layers. Corporate advertising for products is starting to show the effects. Companies that continue the habit of advertising solely to please the ESG hedge funds are starting to learn that HUMANS don’t have the same preferences as Larry Fink.
The deeper problem is that parties disconnected the negative feedback loop to “voters” LONG AGO, well before QE started in 2008. Parties have been driving away human “voters” for many decades. Only the mechanical bot-like partisans are still in the arena. Bots respond to advertising and noise.
While looking for these numbers I noticed a more interesting stat.
Very old rule: Products with real quality and real distinction don’t need much advertising. Products with no difference and no quality require heavy advertising.
Political products fit the latter category. At the federal level all politicians do exactly NOTHING. They perform no function except feeding the media advertising budget, and they perform THIS function magnificently.
Statista has a graph of spending categories on Facebook, which despite all the noise about Twitter is still the largest digital platform by a long shot.
POLITICAL SPENDING IS EXACTLY TWICE AS LARGE AS ALL OTHER CATEGORIES PUT TOGETHER.
The category called “Political/Governmental” spent 500 million in 2022. All other categories totalled about 240 million. Retail (real business) is the smallest by far at only 6 million.
The chart doesn’t split Political from Governmental, but they’re the same thing. PSAs by a government agency are advertising for DNC. The largest other category is “Social Media”, which means other platforms using Facebook to pull people toward their own advertising.
Polistra's Mill 