One stated purpose of the campaign is to show the size and influence of the fediverse so that politicians and governments will set up instances and/or accounts and maintain an official presence on it. $500k may or may not be enough to do that, but the organizer is meeting with Democratic Party officials this week to discuss the campaign and there could be meaningful outcomes for the whole fediverse.
Paying for a politician to pay attention to you must be the most American thing I have ever seen. They should use fedivers because it is correct, if they don’t, they don’t deserve my money (I’m not from there so I personally wasn’t going to donate anything either)
I can believe that she doesn’t know anything about fediverse, I can believe that her team doesn’t know anything about fediverse as a whole, but that neither she nor her team knows anything about Mastodon, no, I don’t believe that.