Spending all that money on a failed campaign doesn't seem like a very effective use of that money.<p>On top of that, running in a primary against a candidate that they admit is "well-qualified" doesn't seem very consequentialist to me. It has a lot of negative outcomes for the winning candidate. They spend their time messaging against the loser, instead of focusing on winning the general election.<p>That district has a slight Democratic lean. If they lose the general election, any degree of fault that stems from having spent money against the winner will have gone directly against their apparent goal.<p>This is my concern with the Effective Altruism movement in general. It's prone to the kinds of errors smart people make, believing that they're smarter and better-informed than they are. It's not that consequentialism is bad, but that if you don't understand the consequences, you will make things worse instead of better.<p>They supported a candidate they describe as a "political neophyte". Politics is a domain of knowledge, just like programming or crypto or anything else. You can't just slip into it by being smart and skip the parts where you know who the players are, what rules they're playing by, and what's actually at stake.<p>Effective Altruism might do best to follow their own advice: find an expert and do what they say, rather than believing that you can do better without experience. If they don't think that applies to politics, perhaps they should stick to domains that they know better.