Nit: if it was common enough for people within a specific coalition to donate to candidates of both parties due to their single-issue concern, one might imagine that it would lose a lot of its strength as a negative signal (except maybe with the current admin, which as you note is very loyalty-focused).
I think there’s no world where it becomes that common, because most people care more about loyalty to their party than they do about particular issues. And most donors are not making donation decisions based on anything like the considerations in this post.
We don’t need most donors to make decisions based on the considerations in this post, we need a single high-profile media outlet to notice that the interesting fact that the same few hundred names keep showing up on the lists of donors to candidates with particular positions on AI. The coalition doesn’t need to be large in an absolute sense; it just needs to be recognizably something you can point to when talking to a “DC person” and they’ll go, “oh, yeah, those people”. (This is already the case! Just, uh, arguably in a bad way, instead of a good way.)
Nit: if it was common enough for people within a specific coalition to donate to candidates of both parties due to their single-issue concern, one might imagine that it would lose a lot of its strength as a negative signal (except maybe with the current admin, which as you note is very loyalty-focused).
I think there’s no world where it becomes that common, because most people care more about loyalty to their party than they do about particular issues. And most donors are not making donation decisions based on anything like the considerations in this post.
We don’t need most donors to make decisions based on the considerations in this post, we need a single high-profile media outlet to notice that the interesting fact that the same few hundred names keep showing up on the lists of donors to candidates with particular positions on AI. The coalition doesn’t need to be large in an absolute sense; it just needs to be recognizably something you can point to when talking to a “DC person” and they’ll go, “oh, yeah, those people”. (This is already the case! Just, uh, arguably in a bad way, instead of a good way.)