The Whole Picture
Spending less money doesn’t tell the whole story.
A campaign’s footprint isn’t just a dollar figure. Mailers use paper and ink. Signs use polypropylene plastic and steel. Cars burn fuel getting them placed. Consultants, caterers, and venues all have a real-world cost beyond the line item in a filing. Dollars are a proxy for resource use, but they’re not the whole picture.
AI has a footprint too. Data centers use electricity and water. The companies behind AI tools make real investment decisions about how to power that infrastructure. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and that’s not what this campaign does.
What This Page Shows
- Both campaigns’ costs in dollars — from public filings and actual receipts
- Both campaigns’ costs in estimated carbon (kg CO2e) — from published emission factors applied to each spending bucket
- The same table, the same units, the same methodology for both sides
- Full sources and methodology, so anyone can check the math
Here’s how the two campaigns compare on both.
The Dollar Cost
One race. Two budgets.
These are the incumbent’s filings — what the campaign Don is challenging spent the last time it was contested. The UNCAMPAIGN figures are actual current expenses.
The UNCAMPAIGN
$13.12Total spent to date
- Domain registration $13.12
We expect to stay under $50 for the entire campaign.
The Incumbent’s 2021 Campaign
$118,021Spent the last time the incumbent had a challenger
Source: NY State Board of Elections public filings
351 separate contributions to fund it
That’s roughly 9,000× more dollars.
But dollars aren’t the whole story
What about the carbon?
Spending less money doesn’t automatically mean using fewer resources. So we built a footprint estimate for both campaigns — dollars and carbon, in the same table, line by line.
The Comparison
Six buckets. Two campaigns. Both costs.
The table below shows where every dollar went AND what its estimated environmental cost was, for both the incumbent’s 2021 campaign and the UNCAMPAIGN to date. The incumbent’s figures come from 195 categorized expense records in her public filings. Click any bucket row to see the top vendors.
Top vendors in the incumbent’s 2021 filings:
- Minuteman Press — $18,576
- Rose Press — $9,015
- USPS postage — $3,260
- Bedford Dems printing transfers (multiple entries)
- Staples, GotPrint, Fridgedoor magnets
Inter-committee transfers and political donations:
- Bedford Dems 2023 — $10,000
- Bedford Dems 2025 — $5,000
- Bedford Democratic Committee — $4,213
- Other Bedford Dems committee variants (multiple entries)
- Chris Burdick for Assembly — $1,200
- Smaller transfers to Bowman, Delgado, Harckham, Buchwald campaigns
Itemized reimbursements to campaign staff and the candidate, per public filings.
Consultants, platforms, and professional vendors:
- Maria Colaco — $5,000
- Jovan Richards — $2,000
- Good Rebellion — $1,750
- Get Through (voter contact platform) — $1,673
- Amy Drucker Photography, Shiloni Pinto, design vendors (additional entries)
Paid advertising in local press and online:
- The Record Review (across name variants) — $5,725
- Halston Media — $3,850
- Kaye Media Partners — $2,280
Incumbent’s 2021 events, digital tools, and platform fees:
- Wix website — $1,519
- Katonah Museum of Art (venue) — $1,018
- Balducci’s, Whole Foods, Farmer & the Fish (event catering)
- NY League of Conservation Voters
- Act Blue platform fees
UNCAMPAIGN: domain registration ($13.12) — the campaign’s only expenditure to date.
What These Numbers Look Like
Scaling both sides.
~10,000 kg CO2e
Incumbent’s 2021 campaign
- Roughly 2 average US passenger cars driven for a full year
- About 25,000 miles of driving in a typical 25-mpg car
- The annual electricity use of approximately 1.5 US homes
- About 1,100 gallons of gasoline burned
~53 kg CO2e
The UNCAMPAIGN
- About 130 miles of driving in a typical 25-mpg car — roughly a round trip from Bedford to Boston
- The carbon from burning about 6 gallons of gasoline
- Roughly the footprint of producing about 50 standard Coroplast lawn signs — and Don’s campaign isn’t producing any
- About 2 weeks of electricity for a typical US home
If You Remember One Number
One Coroplast lawn sign ≈ 2,500 Claude queries.
A standard 18"×24" Coroplast yard sign — the kind with the metal stake — produces roughly 1 kilogram of CO2e during manufacturing, based on published emission factors for polypropylene plastic. A typical Claude query uses roughly 0.34 watt-hours of energy, which at the US grid carbon intensity works out to about 0.4 grams of CO2e. One sign equals roughly 2,500 queries.
The incumbent’s 2021 campaign had signs. From the dollar amounts in the printing and materials category, 400–600 signs is a reasonable estimate. Don’s entire AI use for this campaign — every draft, every meeting summary, every social post, every research session over the full election cycle — won’t come close to that footprint.
AI’s water and energy use is real and worth taking seriously at scale. At the scale of one local campaign, it is a rounding error compared to the paper, plastic, and fuel of a traditional one. The argument here isn’t that AI is consequence-free. It’s that the comparison matters, and nobody was running it.
Show Your Work
How we got to these numbers.
The figures on this page come from publicly available campaign finance reports filed with the New York State Board of Elections, combined with published academic and government emission-factor data. Anyone can verify the spending numbers at the state’s public filing portal. The methodology is here so you can check the math — or argue with it.
Where the dollar figures come from
The incumbent’s 2021 campaign filings are public record. We pulled the full expenditure records from the NY State Board of Elections public database. The $118,021 is the total expenditures across the two committees that funded the incumbent’s 2021 campaign — her personal committee and the local party committee that backed her ticket.
195 individual expense records were categorized into the six buckets shown in the comparison table above. No “miscellaneous” or “other” bucket — every dollar was assigned to a substantive category based on the expense code and vendor.
Public filings: NY State Board of Elections — elections.ny.gov
Where the carbon figures come from
For each bucket, we applied an emission factor (kg CO2e per dollar spent) drawn from published lifecycle-assessment data and US EPA economic input-output models. Where possible, we cross-checked the dollar-based estimate against a physical-unit estimate — for example, for printing, we back-solved the dollar spend into approximate pieces of mail and verified the carbon math matched the paper-mass calculation.
All factors are conservative midpoints, not worst cases.
| Bucket | Factor (kg CO2e/$) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Printing & Mailers | 0.05 | Liu et al. (2018) paper LCA; industry print sector data |
| Newspaper & Online Ads | 0.04 | Newspaper paper share + digital ad serving estimates |
| Consultants & Professional Services | 0.10 | US EPA EEIO services-sector intensity |
| Donations & Transfers | 0.08 | Downstream campaigns, similar profile |
| Staff & Reimbursements | 0.15 | Blended mileage + meals + supplies |
| Events, Software & Operations | 0.20 | Blended catering + office + software |
Where the UNCAMPAIGN figures come from
$13.12 is the actual domain registration cost — the only expenditure to date. The ~35 kg AI estimate assumes roughly 50 substantive AI queries per day across a 6-month active campaign window, multiplied by a 10× safety factor to account for longer agentic context and tool use.
Per-query energy of ~1 Wh (mid-range between OpenAI’s disclosed 0.34 Wh and academic estimates up to 2.5 Wh), at US grid carbon intensity of ~0.39 kg CO2e/kWh. Website hosting on Cloudflare Pages estimated at ~10 kg CO2e over the full election cycle for a low-traffic static site.
What These Numbers Don’t Say
Honest about the honest math.
- All footprint numbers are estimates from published emission factors, not direct measurements.
- Inter-committee transfers ($30,738) flow to other campaigns; we assume their downstream footprint is similar to the parent campaign.
- AI footprint is genuinely uncertain — estimates of per-query energy range across an order of magnitude depending on model and session type.
- Coroplast lawn signs are technically recyclable but in practice usually landfilled; we assume single-use for all footprint calculations.
- The 2021 race was a slate campaign (Supervisor + Town Board + Town Justice running together), so some of the $118,021 funded the full ticket, not the Supervisor alone.
The Whole Point
Less money. Less waste. Less noise.
We’re not arguing that AI is consequence-free or that every campaign should run on $13. We’re arguing that the framing “AI uses resources” is correct but incomplete without the comparison. The question isn’t AI vs. nothing. The question is AI vs. 40,000 mailers, hundreds of lawn signs, $118,000 in spending, and the fuel, paper, and plastic that comes with it. That’s the experiment Bedford is running this year. The data is public. The math is honest. You can check it.