When Michael Bloomberg was ramping up his effort to buy the Democratic nomination, I didn't keep myself from pointing out one obstacle to the full-on field campaign his consultants claimed would carry him to victory.
Turns out I was right to be skeptical. But Bloomberg's needs sure created an opening for some lucky grifters.That kind of off-the-shelf campaign apparatus is mostly non-existent within the politics industry: it doesn't pay well enough.
FiveThirtyEight has published a delicious account of how one teenager made out like a bandit during a brief stint on the Bloomberg campaign.
There's lots more to James' story at the link.Throughout Bloomberg’s 101-day campaign for president, the former New York mayor spent more than $500 million. Part of that money was spent paying a campaign outreach firm, Grindstone Field Solutions, to hire hundreds of “deputy field organizers” (DFO) to campaign through phone calls, texts and social media posts, many of them teenagers like James.
The money was good: On average, James said he did about 10 hours of work a week, and on some days he wouldn’t do any work at all. But he got paid $83 per day regardless of how much work he did, which he said surprised him.
... “I actually did work but I think I could have, honestly, done no work and still gotten paid for this campaign,” James said. “They had no way of tracking. There was no enforcement system. They said, ‘This is your quota and we might call you if you don’t do your work.’ I never got called and I certainly didn’t meet all my quotas.”
Now if James got paid $83/day for essentially doing nothing, what do we think the contractor was paid for James' "labor"? $100 a day? $150? $200? I would not be shocked if it was the last.
There's often a lot of outright theft sold by consultants to candidates and their donors, but it looks as if Bloomberg's operation beat all. Let's hope what Bloomberg is putting into the general election on behalf of Democrats is better used.
What a racket!
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