The Intercept debunks a Yahoo "study" that claims "big donors don't matter"

[99th_Monkey]

The Intercept article lists "four reasons" Yahoo's study is bogus on it's face, and I'll add another:
* Big donors typically 'hedge their bets', giving to candidates on BOTH sides of the isle to insure that they buy the support they are seeking for their particular corporate special interest.

Yahoo Finance Drops in From Mars to Explain Big Money Hasn’t Bought U.S. Politics

A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in U.S. politics, and 85 percent want the campaign financing system completely rebuilt or at least fundamentally changed. Even politicians themselves will tell you that big money controls most of what they do.

Yahoo Finance, however, has done a study on money in politics, and determined that everyone else in America is wrong:

With so much concern about democracy for sale, Yahoo Finance set out to ask a basic question: Are rich donors buying election results? We scrutinized thousands of federal records on campaign donations in presidential and congressional campaigns in 2012 and 2014, and came up with this simple answer: no.

What Yahoo did was simple and straightforward: Look at the top 10 individual donors to campaigns and Super PACs, as well as the top 10 biggest Super PACs, and then check to see how often the candidates the donors and Super PACs supported won.

And it turned out that big money’s candidates didn’t win every time! For instance, the candidates of the top individual donor, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, won only 56 percent of the time. The candidates of the biggest-spending Super PAC, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, only won 51 percent of their races.

So case closed, according to Yahoo: “The return on investment to big donors appears to be less than the fretting over the health of democracy suggests.”

Of course, the flaws in Yahoo’s study are as painfully glaring as the lens flare in a J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot. Here are the top four, from least important to most:
• Yahoo doesn’t know who the top individual donors were and how much they gave — because nobody does.
• Giving lots of your money to losers isn’t a sign of failure.
• There’s a political spectrum beyond the one between corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats.
• There’s much, much more to money and politics than elections.
-snip-

All in all, Yahoo clearly fell victim to what scientists call the “streetlight effect”: that is, drawing conclusions just from what’s easy to measure, rather than everything about reality. The streetlight effect is named after this old joke.

Late at night a policeman finds a drunk man crawling around on his hands and knees under a streetlight. The drunk man tells the policeman he’s looking for his wallet. When the officer asks if he’s sure this is where he dropped the wallet, the man replies that he thinks he probably dropped it across the street. The confused policeman asks, “Then why are you looking over here?” The drunk man explains: “Because this is where the light is.”

Yahoo is the drunk guy.

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/21/yahoo-finance-drops-mars-explain-money-doesnt-buy-politics/

[mother earth]

1. TY, 99th, K & R, and still Bernie shines...despite all the

naysaying & big money...STILL...Bernie shines.

I'd like to see the other candidates go it with only grassroots. Big Money is buying something.

[99th_Monkey]

2. You are most welcome

I wanted to get this article out there, before the Yahoo nonsense started
appearing as a 'reason' that we should't care about candidates' positions
on CU.

Yes indeed, Bernie stands out like a beacon, as We the People's candidate.