My guess would be something like: starts at $200/vote and then gradually falls off as diminishing marginal returns kick in.
But in terms of my overall appraisal of the situation, I’m operating under a different heuristic: incumbents are very difficult to beat unless they are unpopular. And, as far as I know, Lateefah Simon is perfectly popular.
A heuristic I’ve heard used is that spending on advertising in primary elections in inexpensive media markets has an effect of roughly $100/net vote. On the other hand, Berkeley is an expensive area to run ads, so it should be higher.
(And this should be treated as a primary election, because it’s a Democrat vs. Democrat contest.)
Sometimes we see races where one side starts spending large amounts all of a sudden and the polls shift; this lets us get an okay-but-not-great measurement of the cost-effectiveness of ads. See eg here (search “Iowa”) for an example—though admittedly that was spending by a super PAC, which is generally somewhat less effective than campaign spending, so you should divide those cost estimates, maybe by a factor of 1.5 or so.
My guess would be something like: starts at $200/vote and then gradually falls off as diminishing marginal returns kick in.
But in terms of my overall appraisal of the situation, I’m operating under a different heuristic: incumbents are very difficult to beat unless they are unpopular. And, as far as I know, Lateefah Simon is perfectly popular.
I don’t understand that $200 per vote number, it seems absurdly high.
A heuristic I’ve heard used is that spending on advertising in primary elections in inexpensive media markets has an effect of roughly $100/net vote. On the other hand, Berkeley is an expensive area to run ads, so it should be higher.
(And this should be treated as a primary election, because it’s a Democrat vs. Democrat contest.)
Sometimes we see races where one side starts spending large amounts all of a sudden and the polls shift; this lets us get an okay-but-not-great measurement of the cost-effectiveness of ads. See eg here (search “Iowa”) for an example—though admittedly that was spending by a super PAC, which is generally somewhat less effective than campaign spending, so you should divide those cost estimates, maybe by a factor of 1.5 or so.
Mmmh, thanks