Meet the Match.com of politics for average Joe
Helps you funnel funds to like-minded candidates on causes
Believe that a handful of billionaires and organized labor control which politicians triumph on Election Day?
On Monday, a Silicon Valley political start-up known as Crowdpac will debut a feature that allows users to do something about it. “Beat the Billionaires” lists the candidates whose opponents have benefited the most from billionaire spending on their behalf.
Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat running to unseat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tops the list of candidates targeted by billionaires’ money. Users who want to help level the playing field can use the site to donate directly to Grimes. A similar “Beat the Labor Unions” function goes live today.
“It’s really a simple way for people to engage in politics,” said Steve Hilton, a former top adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron who is Crowdpac’s cofounder and CEO. Hilton formally launched the site this month with Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica.
Crowdpac’s goal is straightforward: Allow ordinary people to identify candidates who share their views and give them an easy method to send donations their way. Think of it as a cross between a dating website like Match.com and a crowd-funding venture like Kickstarter.
Activists who are worried about the growing influence of unlimited money in politics have called for a major overhaul of federal campaign-finance laws. Given that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, “here’s a tool that you can use to make a practical difference right now within the system we have by hopefully boosting the number of small donors,” Hilton said.
Crowdpac is fed by massive amounts of data — campaign-finance records, voting records, remarks politicians have made in Congress and on social media — to help devise scores that rate politicians on a spectrum of liberal to conservative and on individual issues. Lawmakers are given a score on a 0-10 scale.
The site relies heavily on donor information for rating politicians under the theory that contributors — such as political action committees tied to particular industries — tend to donate to politicians who share their views. Hilton said the company’s internal analyses show that donor-derived rankings are a very reliable predictor of lawmakers’ official actions.
Using Crowdpac’s metric, the most liberal person in the Senate is Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., who has a score of 9.2 on the liberal scale, followed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 8.6 liberal.
Some politicians don’t neatly fit into categories.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., gets an overall score of 9.1 conservative, putting him far to the right on the conservative scale. But Paul, who has railed against the National Security Agency’s data-collection policies, ranks as a 10 for liberal on national intelligence and surveillance issues.
The for-profit firm aims to make money by taking a cut of political donations made through its site.
Eventually, Hilton hopes the site will sustain itself financially through advertising.
Hilton, dubbed Cameron’s “ideas guru” in the British media, left his job as the prime minister’s director of strategy in 2012 to move to Northern California where his wife, Rachel Whetstone, is a senior vice president at Google.