Political advocacy is an important lever for reducing existential risk. One way to make political change happen is to support candidates for Congress.

In October, Eric Neyman wrote Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act. He created a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate how donations to Bores's campaign change his probability of winning the election. It's excellent that he did that—it's exactly the sort of thing that we need people to be doing.

We also need more people to check other people's cost-effectiveness estimates. To that end, in this post I will check Eric's work.

I'm not going to talk about who Alex Bores is, why you might want to donate to his campaign, or who might not want to donate. For that, see Eric's post.

Model outline

The basic structure of Eric's model:

Donations let the campaign spend more money on advertising, which increases how many votes they will get.
The election has some probability of being close.
If the election is close, then the expected value of votes is approximately linear.
If the election is not close, then marginal votes don't matter at all.
[...]

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Outline:

(01:01) Model outline

(04:09) Input parameters

(04:13) Campaign spending per vote

(05:53) Voter turnout

(06:10) Margin of victory

(06:59) Probability that your candidate is in the top two

(07:18) Probability that your candidate is on the losing side

(07:38) Opposition fundraising discount

(08:21) Early fundraising multiplier

(08:52) Sensitivity analysis

(10:06) Cost to shift votes by one percentage point

(10:50) The models output isnt what we care about

The original text contained 14 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HwHoJDcJpGABQiPJc/epistemic-spot-check-expected-value-of-donating-to-alex

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Epistemic Spot Check: Expected Value of Donating to Alex Bores’s Congressional Campaign” by MichaelDickens

LessWrong (30+ Karma)