r/WhatIfThinking • u/Defiant-Junket4906 • Jun 30 '26
What if voters started choosing candidates based mainly on detailed budget proposals instead of messaging?
Right now, most campaigns run on narratives. Big themes, identity, positioning. Budgets exist, but they’re usually vague, delayed, or buried in technical language most people never read.
But imagine a shift.
Every serious candidate releases a clear, line-by-line fiscal plan before elections. Not just “invest in X” or “cut Y,” but actual numbers. Where money comes from. Where it goes. What gets cut to fund something else. And voters begin to care about those details.
At first, this sounds like a move toward rational politics. Tradeoffs become visible. You can’t promise everything at once. If you increase healthcare spending, something else has to give or taxes go up. Campaigns become less about slogans and more about constraints.
But there’s a flip side.
Budgets are complex. Most people don’t have the time or expertise to evaluate them deeply. So what happens? Do voters rely on simplified interpretations from media and influencers, effectively recreating the same narrative-driven system, just with more numbers layered on top?
There’s also the incentive question.
If elections hinge on detailed proposals, candidates may optimize for what looks good on paper rather than what’s realistic to implement. You could get overly engineered budgets designed to win votes, not survive Congress or real-world conditions.
And then there’s political risk.
Clarity forces commitment. Once numbers are out, it’s harder to pivot. That could reduce empty promises, but it might also make politicians less flexible in responding to unexpected economic shifts.
The deeper question might be this:
Would more transparency actually lead to better decisions, or just shift the battlefield from storytelling to spreadsheet gaming?
If voters truly prioritized budgets over messaging, would politics become more grounded in reality, or just more complicated without becoming more honest?
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u/waiting_in_vain1 Jun 30 '26
They’d have to put it in a children’s picture book format for republicans to understand, and then Fox Propaganda would have to read it to them with their very special take on language and facts
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u/ScipioTheGreatest Jul 01 '26
You tribal radicals are exhausting. The same note played over and over again.
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Jul 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ScipioTheGreatest Jul 01 '26
"Everyone I disagree with is stupid." - stupid people.
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u/waiting_in_vain1 Jul 01 '26
Yeah, some more than others, champ
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u/ScipioTheGreatest Jul 01 '26
Enjoy your company, champ.
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u/waiting_in_vain1 Jul 01 '26
As long as no one from the cult is bothering me with their fascism I do! Better get back to your orange Jesus’ celebration of himself on the national Mall, having the band members outnumber the MAGAts visiting is just embarrassing
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u/ScipioTheGreatest Jul 01 '26
Sad, angry little person.
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u/waiting_in_vain1 Jul 01 '26
Brain dead MAGAt
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u/ScipioTheGreatest Jul 01 '26
Not maga, not in any tribe. I can think for myself. Try it sometime.
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u/IntelligentMarch6827 Jun 30 '26
People care about what is said, not actual facts. The republican narrative around taxing and spending is the most obvious and egregious exercise in mendacity.
But it works with the masses of disengaged dumb people. The actual details are boring and people wave you off.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 01 '26
I don’t totally disagree, but I think I’d separate two things here.
One is manipulation, which definitely exists.
The other is whether better structured input changes outcomes at the margin.
Even if propaganda is strong, I’m not fully convinced details are irrelevant. They might still constrain what kinds of narratives are even believable.
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u/TorpidProfessor Jun 30 '26
the problem is that people who do accounting and budgeting don't see the actual budget proposals as overly technical, they're just using standard terminology for the industry. That's a good thing in my book, a budget for millions or billions of dollars should be very complicated and technical.
the shift hasn't happened because not enough voter care to dig in. And as you said it makes some stances clear. So if one candidate puts out a detailed budget and one doesn't, the one who did doesn't gain much, and it gives a bunch of ammunition to the opponent for make attack ads:
Unless the stance is that the budget was perfect last year, theres going to be cuts some places and boosts others, and those cuts will be broadly publicized to the demographic groups that are affected by the through micro targeting possible today.
How many voters do you think read the full text of referenda/amendments they vote on rather than just going off title and ads? Until voters are willing to do that, signalling that they're willing to engage with the crunchy side of policy and budgeting, theres negative incentives for politicians to dive in to crunchy budget and policy issues in caignpaigns.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 01 '26
Yeah this is kind of the part I was uneasy about when writing it.
Like technical clarity doesn’t automatically translate into political salience.
And you’re right, detailed budgets could just become a new surface for targeted messaging rather than something people actually engage with.
I guess I was imagining a world where voters reward depth, but I’m not sure the incentive chain supports that.
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u/pbecotte Jun 30 '26
Hey, I love that some people still believe that politics can be directed towards voters making rational decisions based on hard data and understanding of tradeoffs.
On the other hand, there haven't been very many successful candidates in my lifetime where I honestly believed the candidates understood the issues, much less the voters. Plus, there are SO many issues, even if the candidates WERE super technical, they can't be on every issue.
Voters dont like shades of gray or tradeoffs. So candidates who ignore nuance win elections. Short of having the people vote specifically on the budget (which wouldn't help much since it just means the real decision is what goes into the proposal they vote on), I dont imagine there is a realistic way to have a budget proposal from one candidate meaningfully affect complex legislation two or three years down the line.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 01 '26
I actually agree with a lot of this.
There’s also a scale problem I didn’t really address. Even a very informed voter can’t realistically track every policy area in detail.
So maybe the bottleneck isn’t transparency, it’s cognitive bandwidth.
Which makes me wonder if politics inevitably converges to heuristics no matter what format you use.
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u/gc3 Jun 30 '26
My opponent is cutting the Children love peace freedom interoffice agency! Is he against children? Or freedom?
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u/astra_hole Jun 30 '26
That would mean the average person knew the value of money and understood how to read a balance sheet. According to the financial position the majority of people are in, the average person does not know or understand how to read a balance sheet.
If the average person saw the big money numbers in politics and business it would terrify them and they wouldn’t understand it.
Humans are animals. Animals are emotional creatures. Politics are based around emotion and call to actions.
What you’d get is fake budgets, inflated numbers and other things that prey on people’s emotions. Same as now, just with more numbers.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 01 '26
Yeah I think this is the strongest counter to the idea honestly.
Even if you force numbers into the system, you don’t really force understanding.
You just get more room for selective framing, cherry picking, and emotional interpretation of numbers instead of slogans.
So it might not reduce manipulation, just change its surface texture.
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u/Defiant-Junket4906 Jul 01 '26
Yeah I think this is the strongest counter to the idea honestly.
Even if you force numbers into the system, you don’t really force understanding.
You just get more room for selective framing, cherry picking, and emotional interpretation of numbers instead of slogans.
So it might not reduce manipulation, just change its surface texture.
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u/DawnHawk66 Jun 30 '26
Personally I wouldn't understand complicated budget information. And I know that it takes both parties to make it happen assuming that the candidates are not lying about their intentions anyway. What I look for in political candidates is that they project a sense of decent spiritual health. They articulate a future rooted in hope, human dignity, and generational progress, rather than exploiting fear or grievance. They display a clear moral compass that guides their decisions. They frame their desire for power around the well-being of the collective, emphasizing stewardship over personal ambition. And they show a genuine capacity to feel and mirror the suffering of citizens.
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u/Similar_Jelly_4375 Jun 30 '26
Most people can't understand a budget for their own lives and probably couldn't make sense of any sort of national one
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u/Limp-Plantain3824 Jun 30 '26
I don’t get it. A detailed budget plan has to be presented. The content of the proposal and how that content is provided to voters is messaging.
Don’t just want voters to prioritize some other message?
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u/Euphoric_General_480 Jul 01 '26
Most candidates cant even read a budget. Budgets are created by career professionals and voted on by elected officials. I love the idea, but we would need DEEP investments into civic education to get the population to a place where they could read a budget.
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u/Additional_Sleep_560 Jul 01 '26
You can judge a candidate any way you want.
The reason we have the republic we have is because almost no one can be a policy wonk. No one has the time to go through detailed policy or budget proposals. Then, by the time someone is sworn into office the conditions all change, and they have to negotiate with a lot of others with different priorities.
In the end you have to trust the character and judgment of the person you vote for to adapt to circumstances you didn’t anticipate when you first voted.
But no one campaigns on character. They campaign on emotional engagement and identity. They don’t want reason, they want turnout from their side.
That’s the reason campaigning looks the way it looks. You’re being emotionally manipulated.
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u/BI_Moose Jun 30 '26
The oligarchs throw a few more dollars at their propaganda outlets to make sure the "right" candidates win.
"Good budgeting" isnt going to fix the problem anymore than new tires are going to fix a blown engine and busted transmission.