The great thing about free speech is that it is, in fact, free. You don’t have to spend a single penny to speak your mind—just ask the local street-corner preacher or campus protester. Being heard is what costs money, and in the robust marketplace for political speech, it takes a whole lot of money to spread a convincing message that influences our politics. Conveying political ideas, whether for or against an issue or candidate, requires a compelling, persuasive message effectively delivered multiple times to the right audience. Most of us, even if we have good ideas, aren’t always effective at delivering the most persuasive version of our vision. If your goal is persuading others to support your views (and effective political speech often requires persuading a great many people), it helps to have on your side professionals who know how to craft political communications. Their job is to help you deliver the most persuasive message so you can be effective in building a movement to win the argument. It takes money to create those persuasive messages, particularly when that message must be delivered in multiple ways over time without losing its potency. Persuasive political communication that actually and consistently cuts through the noise of today’s political environment is uncommon. If you’re good at it, you’re pretty rare. With so many willing to pay for their message to be heard, the better the communicator, the greater the premium. Reaching Lots of People Costs Lots of Money Of course, no matter how persuasive a message is, if no one hears it, you’re only convincing yourself. Some might encourage confining your advocacy to random Facebook posts, as if adherents come to ideas like flies to honey. That sort of nonsense keeps good ideas unheard. You must keep your supporters engaged and interact with new supporters to build a movement. Whatever mechanism you use to engage—TV, radio, print, billboards, phones, mail, emails, websites, Facebook posts, tweets—at any real scale comes at a cost. For example, let’s say you wanted to communicate to a relatively modest 100,000 people. How would you? Email costs from $0.25 to $2.00 per thousand sent; a $1 average (one-tenth of a penny per email) is $100 to send a single message. Sending just once a week costs $5,200 per year. Keep The Promise Pac, a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC, spent $110,000 in spring 2016. Facebook likes can cost $0.05 to $0.10 each, and $0.50 or more per click to a website. The Republican National Committee paid Facebook more than $340,000 in March 2016 alone for “Advertising.” Robocalls average $0.03 per minute, so a one-minute call would cost $3,000. Rep. John Shimkus spent $29,000 this spring on robocalls. Live calls cost roughly $2 per phone call. Sen. Rand Paul spent more than $20,000 on live calls to voters in July 2015. Direct mail can range from $0.50 to $2.00 per piece. That’s at least $50,000 to send a single mailer. In the first half of this year, Priorities USA Action spent $1,420,704 on direct mail alone. Radio and TV costs can be stratospheric, and it’s exceedingly hard to measure their success. Pro-Jeb! super PAC Right To Rise spent nearly $100 million on its ultimately unsuccessful national media campaign. All this communication only comes after slowly building, expensively buying, or more commonly renting access to enough leads to produce those 100,000 contacts. Simply communicating to people once isn’t enough, and you will keep paying the cost of first contact every time unless those you reach opt-in to your message. Finding low-cost solutions to this problem is vital. While the finest of political insiders often deride petitions, for example, they serve the basic function of exposing recipients to a message they may agree with, letting them choose to engage and reducing the cost of continuing to communicate thereafter. When communicating those persuasive messages, at whom should you direct them? That’s the key to building a winning campaign, and why identifying the persuadable is a multibillion-dollar industry as relevant to politics as it is to selling soda, sports teams, or cars. It’s the professionals who understand how to acquire the data to reach the right people while maintaining a budget and crafting the kind of ongoing messages to sustain and grow a political audience. Before you know how to convey your ideas, you have to know where the audience is, and how to reach them. Campaign Finance Laws Require You To Pay Lawyers, Too Unfortunately, an incoherent, oft-unconstitutional mish-mosh of laws have made engaging in political speech stunningly complex and burdensome. You cannot meaningfully engage in any political activity or speech without paying for legal and compliance services to navigate the regulatory forest artificially placed between you and the public. If this strikes you as entirely unfair to new speakers and hugely beneficial to entrenched incumbents with near-limitless access to money to hire the few attorneys who practice in this arcane, esoteric field, you’re right. After paying to create a persuasive political message, the ability to communicate it through one or more means, access to the audiences you will deliver it to, and the lawyers to ensure you comply with the absurdity of ever-changing laws restraining free speech, you now have an interesting problem: All that free-speech suddenly costs a lot of money. This isn’t a terrible burden if you or your friends are rich enough to pay for any communications you want, famous and powerful enough to communicate for free via a receptive media, or the media itself with an embedded infrastructure to communicate its own political message whenever desired. None of this is a bad thing. Those who can speak and be heard have every right to do so, and it’s just as wrong to limit their speech as anyone else’s. But, if you’re not one of these political elites, just an ordinary person who wants to participate in political speech, you have no option but to ask for money from the very people you are communicating with. You have to band together
