What I’ve realized more and more is how money sorts people out into
viable candidates or not.
Not only does my not having money mean I can’t self-fund or go
full-time, but it also means my family and my social networks are that much
less successful when I hit them up for fundraising; they might be able to give
me like a hundred dollars at most, whereas a lot of other candidates’ family
and friends can give them a thousand bucks or even like five thousand bucks at a time.
Looking at how everything has come together, an extra twelve thousand
dollars in the fall would be the difference between a plausible campaign and certain victory, since that money would have let me hire a full-time campaign worker,
and that would be enough for me to win, I think.
Though, we’ll see how I do anyways.
It really does make you think, though; twelve thousand a year was
around what kept me from being a standard successful student in the higher ed
track where I could hit my goalposts on time and go on the tenure-track job
market, and now that same twelve thousand is what’s keeping my campaign from a
standard staffing measure that's expected even at this low level of the game.
It’s funny, too, different people I know from unionization stuff are
doing campaign work now, and they’re very blithe and like, “The going rate for
a campaign manager now is three thousand a month.”
What bothers me when they say that is there’s no recognition of how
those wages come from cleaving to the rich in a broken system. They should be saying that same thing, with a
different awareness. It’s really crazy
to me how people just accept how wealth is affecting who can do stuff or not
nowadays.
I mean, three thousand a month is more than I make personally, that's just kind of wacky to face these expectations from others, even those who seem like you.
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