New podcast from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s  Knowledge@Wharton about how philanthropy is becoming dominated by rich people. Hasn’t that always been the case? After all, they’re the ones who have discretionary income, and they give for a variety of reasons.

A new report from the Center for Competitive Politics found that concerns over the presence of nonprofit organizations that do not report their donors (ominously called “dark money”) are “overblown.” The report shows that:

• Dark money” declined in both absolute and relative terms from the last presidential election cycle, down to $184 million from $309 million.
• “Dark money” accounted for only 2.9% of all campaign expenditures in 2015-2016.
• Nonprofits have never accounted for more than 5% of all election campaign spending in any election cycle.

Has technology changed how campaigns talk to voters? Sure. Campaigns used to spend millions on TV and radio, but with new Big Data, and studies showing that personal contact is much more effective in campaigning, many more campaigns are returning to traditional “door-knocks” to contact voters.

One of the most effective “ground games” in recent elections was Rob Portman’s Senate re-election campaign last year. Originally viewed as a tight race, on election night, 2016, Portman ran away with 58% of the vote, in traditionally swing-state Ohio.

His campaign manager, Corey Bliss told the Los Angeles Times that he would run the same kind of ground game: “go into a competitive district early, identify the swing voters, find out what they care about and then talk about those topics consistently in ads and online.” The difference is that now Bliss will do it independent of the campaigns his PAC will support; Bliss now heads up the Congressional Leadership Fund, an independent PAC already mobilizing for 2018.

Why? Because Bliss expects a good ground game to “sway the outcome by as much as five percentage points.”

“This model really works. It requires a lot of time, a lot of effort and lot of money, but I think it’s a worthwhile investment.”

From the New York Times: “Of all the gross-out stories about food that have broken the Internet in recent years — maggots in mushrooms, ‘wood chips‘ in shredded cheese, bug bits in chocolate bars — nothing has captured the public imagination more than ‘pink slime.'”

Well, yeah. Just the name … But this is another instance of “she who defines the terms of the debate, wins.”

Apparently the stuff, formally known as “lean, finely-textured beef,” not only is not bad for you, it’s safe to eat, according to Scientific American, and healthier than the real hamburger its mixed with. Leaner, cleaner, and with less micro-organisms.

But because the 2012 outcry was successful in dramatically reducing consumer demand for the product, hurting its developer, now ABC News faces a multi-billion defamation dollar lawsuit. The jury trial, in South Dakota state court, commences this week, and is expected to last eight weeks.