> The candidates that won were the candidates you'd expect to win given demographics and the recent political history of the region.
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.
Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.
> if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to ... They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
This is the crux. You give money to both candidates, while you frame the issue in terms of things voters don't immediately recoil at and don't work to understand. The part that IS population-facing you dress it up in dishonest language that makes the average person who disagrees think they mustn't have the average viewpoint. For example Faceboot's recent semi-successful lobbying to require OSs to betray their users.
> Focusing on whether a given candidate is helped by lobbying dollars or not is a red herring. The only thing that matters there is whether the candidates themselves think they're helped by those dollars.
This seems like a falsifiable theory.
Find a candidate who is extremely anti-establishment. They want to break up all the big companies, do the thing DOGE was supposed to do and then return the money to the middle class, reform the healthcare laws to get the cost of healthcare under control at the expense of the big healthcare companies, etc. Then have them not change their positions for money. This should be popular, right? Run on a platform of peeling off all the leeches; the thing the majority of voters actually want.
Then the leeches won't give them any money, and then we get to find out what happens. Do they win because they're doing the thing the voters want or do they lose because they don't get any money?
I'd say they lose because the media talks about their non-electability as a done deal. Even if we didn't have plurality primaries, there's a strong pull for people to only support candidates they think are going to win. So this type of candidate is in that 3% polling target you've already excepted (and it's only that high if they're doing well in spite of the media!).
I tried applying our argument while considering the validating [0] media coverage as a type of lobbying (in-kind donation. But I think this is being too reductive, and the two are really different types of support. We've seen candidates that are independently-wealthy outsiders come into political races trying to spend their way to legitimacy, and how they end up being portrayed.
[0] ie casting a character as a serious candidate regardless of whether they're judged as "good" or "bad"
(also, nit: "DOGE" did exactly what it was "supposed to" do. it would have taken a much different type of nuanced approach to actually trim fat to cut down spending while not being penny wise and pound foolish)
That doesn't imply that lobbying doesn't work, only that it doesn't work like that.
Suppose there are two main candidates in the running, one of them is running on issue X and the other on issue Y. You're not going to get either of them to change their position there. But if you care about issue Z, which most people aren't paying attention to, and you give money to the one that supports that, they're more likely to win because they have more money. They're also more likely to support your position on that issue if they know it means they get more money.
You probably can't get a candidate polling at 3% up to 51%, but you can often get a candidate who is only 3 points behind the front runner into the lead. Or get the front runner to change their position on something most voters aren't paying attention to in order to dissuade you from doing that.