Donations Can Get the Meeting. It Doesn't Buy the Vote - Tom Manatos

Tom Manatos spent 20 years navigating Washington from both sides - as a Capitol Hill staffer who received the calls from advocates, and as the person making those calls on behalf of Spotify, Block, and the Internet Association. 

In this episode, he walks through how political access actually works: who the real decision-makers are, what it costs to get in the room, why state government is where business owners have the most leverage, and what the crypto industry's $193 million super PAC still hasn't been able to buy.

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Key Topics Covered

• Why lobbyists rarely talk directly to elected officials - and which relationships actually move policy outcomes
• How individual campaign donation limits work at the federal and state level, and what bundling changes
• What a super PAC can and cannot do, with current examples from crypto, Meta, and Anthropic
• Why state and local government produces legislation at far higher volume than Congress - and why that matters for operators in regulated industries
• How a coalition of platforms reversed a tax reporting change that would have affected millions of ordinary Americans
• The bipartisan reality behind closed doors - what actually gets legislation across the finish line
• Why domain expertise doesn't get you a callback unless it's attached to electoral relevance
• AI regulation: where Congress is, how far behind the industry it is, and what's likely to happen next

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