Ask Lemmy

You can't. That's not enough money.

Make the lives of your community better instead.

You’d start by attending $10,000 plate dinners, and shaking hands with candidates and expressing views. Hire a few $60k a year idealists for a think tank to publish papers. Pick 1-2 issues and hammer them. Pay lobbyists to set up meeting and propose/write legislation and amendments.

As some of your (hopefully idealistic) candidates win, you ask them to help drive your issues through. Get them to make concessions to other people’s proposals for support on theirs, helped by your lobbyists. Use your think tank to drove issues and provide talking points and legislation.

That’s the traditional view. A better approach might be to create a 501c3 and run positive message ads that give you a warm feeling about america in general, say nothing of substance, and include a candidate you like’s name sometimes. Then another pac showing pictures of the candidate you don’t like and chanting “hate hate hate” behind them. Play to your audience.

Hire a couple people who are really good at making memes and other easy to digest content relative to your cause, then hire 1000 3rd world workers to constantly spam that content on the 10 biggest social media outlets, chat boards, etc. being sure to hit all the big groups that are in the ballpark of your cause. Amplify existing messages favorable to your cause with reposts and reactions.

Basically just a big astroturfing campaign.

My first move is to think about safety and longevity. I'm going to need a private island as a base of operations. Caution also dictates having a few backup homes, so my enemies never really know where I am. Beyond that, I need to spread my message, so I'm going to need a private plane. Something modest and a few years old is fine. This is a charitable effort. It isn't about me. And in the name of charity and effectiveness, let's go ahead and add a boat on there, too. Now, to really clear our heads before we get going and make sure we're enacting the right policies, we're going to want to bring in some girls...

Relentless advertising the week before the election. Any sooner than that and you're wasting money. The electorate has the collective memory of a goldfish so wait until the few days, and especially the weekend, before the election and dump it all into an overwhelming advertising campaign. Every other commercial that comes on TV should be one of your attack ads listing everything horrible the candidate you oppose has ever done wrong.
Buying politicians won't work, that kind of money will either buy one for a few years or many for a few months. But $500m is less than a million dollars a year for just the house of representatives and when that money dries up their normal donors will be there with big fat checks ready to change policies back to the way they were before.
In order to enact real change you'll need to actually replace the people in power. And even then the major sticking point is making sure that the candidates you endorse actually make the changes that would limit future corruption.

Don’t focus on a national scale, focus more locally. Look at state legislatures. Look at mayoral and school board races.

Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion to run a distraction campaign, taking headlines from Bernie Sanders' repeated wins in the early 2020 Democratic primary. Bloomberg spent $500M the first week to flood the internet with influencers and meme makers being absolutely distracted by the low torrent of low effort shit post memes about Bloomberg. It was so obviously an astroturf campaign built on fake sentiment that everyone forgot Bernie won 5 states in a row and was crushing Biden. By the end of the month, Elisabeth Warren also bowed out and took her progressive voters to Biden.

So for $500 Million you can ruin a grassroots campaign! Buy bad memes and pay influencers to distract people.

change the political situation in America?

Change for the better or for the worse?
(hint: the latter comes cheaper)

You'd be competing against multi-billionaires and huge corporations. It wouldn't be enough, even though it's a ridiculous amount of money for one person.

Changing the US would probably be impossible. Maybe changing your state would be possible. Changing your local community would be much more realistic.

Helping people get homes and food would likely help reduce crime.

Helping people get educations would help some people escape certain situations.

If you're fixed on changing the US political situation and you think there's a party that can change the situation, you can go with political donations. I believe whichever party spends the most money on their campaign is the one that wins more often than not.

The fundamental cause of America's problem is the two-party system. If you want to get rid of that you have to switch to a proportional representation system. I would suggest working at the local or state level. I do not know of any organization working on this issue. You would likely have to start one yourself or hire someone else to do so.

If you're genuinely going to do it, any suggestion I make here about specifics would be pointless, as you should do significant research before deciding on what flavor of proportional representation to push and where. But, the key is to adopt a system known for accurate and small party representation. If a party gets enough votes to win a single seat, they should be awarded a single seat. If they get a third of the votes, they should get a third of the seats.

Let me know if you want to talk specifics.

You could do what Mike Bloomberg did in 2020 and try and buy your way into an election. Then again when he spent $500,000,000 on his campaign that got him no where.

Buy yourself a couple of supreme court judges. They're a bargain these days.

$500 Million? How long can you rent a Supreme Court Justice for that much? That might be your best chance at positive change.

Now, if we're looking for Quantity of change over quality of change, you could actually cause the MOST CHANGE by putting that money towards a drone strike on the Capital while Congress is in session.

Just hypothetical answers to a hypothetical question. I'm not advocating anything. No need to put me on any more lists.

Could probably buy enough congressmen to pass a few laws. Not sure what the best ones would be.

Assassins

I think the best thing you could do with that amount of money would be to start a community organizing non-profit. Things like registering voters, tenant advocacy, helping people gain access to benefits, etc. etc. Basically, just organizing and connecting people to the system.

If you’re restricting things to just electoral politics, though, I’d say focus on close elections at the state level. A half billion dollars isn’t much in the context of a modern presidential election but it’s an absurd amount for state legislature elections. You’re probably not going to turn Mississippi blue or Massachusetts red (or whatever your goal is) but control of a swingy state like Virginia usually comes down to a handful of close elections. You could probably make a meaningful difference in 20 states just with get out the vote funding.

Y'know, I don't think that's enough to make any significant change. It takes more than money - it takes generations. Nothing will change until things get so bad that the comfortable (I assume they're comfortable if they're not engaged) majority get involved at all levels. I'm not pessimistic..

Fund an antifascist center in the top 200 cities in the country (one per state minimum)? Run a study on how to overthrow capitalism and mail a game plan for a general strike to every single American? Start a land bank for a large area that completely collapses western land ownership laws?

Don't bother. Enrich the lives of those around you. Feed homeless. Help friends start small businesses. Fix single mother's cars. Ensure your own stability first, though.

I really like the idea of testing alternative business and corporate structures and definitely not developing a model library for medical devices to print.

Since there no other comments yet, I’ve always had the idea to pick anyone running across any race in the US under the democratic socialist party and donate the max amount to each of them individually. I think all the max values are under $2,500 per individual but so many races are in small towns and whatnot where that could go a long way. I mean folk like Bernie Sanders would also get the max value per individual but it will go further for the downstream races. I have zero background or knowledge in this area so maybe that is just super naive.

Look at what the justice Democrats have done. They put highly progressive people in power. It's not a simple task.

You have to find the right candidates to put the money behind. Cover the expenses and make sure they can put all their time in their campaign.

Well, playing the same game as rich guys will result in you losing. But it's important to remember the October revolution was funded with much less.....

Ads on every billboard everywhere.