Where else can I invite people to send $ (or effort, or both) that will be effective? Suggestions welcome.
I know it’s far from certain that these races will win, but I want to be able to say we did absolutely everything we could prior to the GA runoff elections. Mitch has to be stopped.
Does anyone know of a good source for Georgia demcratic voter turnout postcard writing & mailing, specific to the runoff?
My partner did a bunch of these for the election (over 800!) but is having trouble finding a source this time around. It’s mail so the sooner the better!
We also did voter turnout texting which was … interesting. If you haven’t done that, I can recommend it. My personal feeling is that texting is the best way to reach the younger voters we so desperately need to turn out…
Only suggestion would be to ask @orenwolf or other mods to set aside any shame and pin this to the top so that we can keep encouraging people to dig deep and donate for the next two months.
This shit is WAY TOO IMPORTANT. With Biden’s win in Georgia today, the Republicans are going to come out of the woodwork for this runoff and we need to hold them off and win these elections.
I’m reluctant to do this permanently for months because there are other discussions about this going on as well. However @codinghorror feel free to pin this to the category when you have an active fundraiser going on if you wish. I think that’s appropriate.
(You can stop reading now if you want to avoid a pessimistic rant)
About the “effective” part: I just don’t know. As someone who’s donated more to this year’s senate campaigns than I ever have in past years, I have to say I’m wondering if, once you pass a certain threshold, spending additional money on a campaign fails to help at all. Obviously there are diminishing returns when it comes to ad spending, but does it actually start to actively hurt a campaign at some point? I’m sure the political consultants have an opinion on this but I wonder if experts who don’t have a direct financial stake in the outcome have studied this.
In South Carolina Harrison spent $104m (!) and still lost by a margin of 10% to that sh*tweasel Graham who spent $44m less. That’s a budget of about $94.50 for every individual vote that Harrison received and it still wasn’t enough. Maybe we need to get more creative with how we spend this money rather than just buy more traditional ads.
I think this one, unlike the McGrath race, was worth it. But yeah it’s completely fair to note that the record of “let’s throw lots of money at senate races!” has been quite poor to date.
That’s why I am leaning towards contributing money (and time/effort) to organizations that work on getting out the vote beyond a single campaign – over a series of years, even decades.*
You can also take a bigger picture view: sure, maybe we didn’t win this race… but look at the trend… look at the demographic shifts… and let’s continue building on top of that trend. We can lose the battle, and still win the war later.
I went ahead and texted the bot to get started. You get an email inviting you to write a sample postcard, take a picture of it, and mail it to them for validation, along with verbal agreement that you’ll follow their rules.
It is BYOPP (bring your own postcards and postage) but as I mentioned, I am happy to cover the cost of postcards and postage (via PayPal) for anyone interested in helping out. I also donated $50 to the effort itself.
As you can see I kinda have serial killer handwriting so I’m only planning to do 200 of these ideally this coming week. But I will do a fair bit of text banking once the dates are closer:
Wed 11/18/2020 earliest date to mail an absentee ballot (already passed)
Mon 12/07/2020 voter registration deadline
Mon 12/14/2020 early voting begins
Tues 01/05/2021 voting day
This syncs up well with the weekly fundraisers every monday: Nov 9th, Nov 16th, Nov 23rd, Nov 30th, Dec 7th, Dec 14th
Getting into the spirit of things with postcard writing, here’s part of my second batch of 10. Note that it can take 24 hours for your “account” to be active via the texting and email request systems.
I’m in for $600 to start, I think it makes sense to balance donations between individual campaigns right now in GA, as well as strategic “get out the vote” groups running on longer timescales…
It’s happening next week when I get paid! I’m going to double down. It’s way too important to just kind of stand over here and “hope.” Need to contribute. We need to make this happen and not sit back.
$10402
