Guide to Donating to Democratic Senate Campaigns
August Edition, originally published on August 11, 2020
Last week I was asked about what Senate campaigns were worth donating to in this election cycle. Checkbook advocacy is sometimes met with cynicism by activists and campaign contributions often bring out complaints about money in our electoral system. I think both complaints are not productive at all. Sure, we should have a system where the very rich cannot overwhelm other candidates. But, of course, we don’t have that and wishing it weren’t so does not change the fact that money matters in politics (and not for corrupt reasons). And complaints about checkbook advocacy are BS, in my opinion. Electoral campaigns need money, issue advocacy campaigns need money, nonprofits need money. Where do people think that money comes from? It comes from donors – many of whom are either by necessity or choice mainly checkbook advocates.
We hear a lot about how bad money is in the political system, but let’s focus on what’s good about it. A successful campaign needs many things. Among them are infrastructure, staff, and polling. The latter two can be expensive. The former is a crapshoot, but it can be expensive too. As you’ve heard me say before, successful campaigns must do polling and polling is not cheap. Polling is how campaigns learn where and how they should be investing their resources and staff. It is very important. And while campaigns thrive on volunteer help, none are successful without at least some paid staff. (If you don’t think campaigns should have paid staff, then I challenge you to quit your job today and volunteer full-time on a campaign for the rest of this year. And just so you know, “full-time” on a campaign means at least 60 hours a week, including nights and weekends.)
There is something else about campaign donors that is very helpful – at least in the small dollar variety, donors tell us something about the level of support a candidate has. Regular folks donating $25, $50, or even $100 are people making an investment in a campaign. It’s not charity and it’s not buying access (which can be a serious problem – but that only happens with really big donors). The reason why Bernie Sanders made such a big deal out of his $27 average donation is because, particularly in light of how much money he raised overall and the number of donors, it tells us how invested and committed his support was. When you consider a candidate like Chris Janicek, who is Sen. Ben Sasse’s (R-NE) Democratic opponent, raising just over $110,000 and having only $7,000 on hand in August of an election year – compared to Sasse rasining over $5 million and having about half of that on hand – you can tell that not only is Janicek going to lose, but that he is not a good candidate. And when we probe closer we discover that Janicek has made some really offensive comments – so much so that Democrats have been calling for him to drop out of the race. Nevertheless, raising a lot of money is no guarantee of success as Amy McGrath is probably going to show us in her challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Most folks out there are small donors – and I assume that pretty much everyone reading this would so qualify. As a result, there are probably only one or two campaigns that anyone can feel comfortable giving a $100 or so donation to. As a result, I looked at the most competitive Senate seats and came up with a ranked list of where your money can have the biggest impact. My methodology is outlined following the list. So, with all that said, here are your best bets for donating to Democratic Senate candidates right now:
1. Maine – Sara Gideon
2. Iowa – Theresa Greenfield
3. North Carolina – Cal Cunningham
4. Montana – Steve Bullock
5. South Carolina – Jaime Harrison
6. Colorado – John Hickenlooper
7. Georgia (regular) – Jon Ossoff
8. Alabama – Sen. Doug Jones
9. Alaska – Al Gross (running as an Independent)
10. Kentucky – Amy McGrath
11. Michigan – Sen. Gary Peters
12. Texas – MJ Hegar
13. Arizona – Mark Kelly
14. Georgia (special) – Raphael Warnock*
Possible add: Kansas - Barbara Bollier (we'll have to see how the polling looks here now that Roger Marshall knocked off Kris Kobach in last week's primary)
*The Georgia special election will be a jungle primary on November 3rd. If no one gets to 50% there will be a run-off on January 5, 2021. There are two main Democratic candidates running. Warnock polls higher than Matt Lieberman (the son of Joementum) and generally has the support of more Democratic officials and activists. It is possible due to the nature of the jungle primary that neither Democrat will make it to the run-off.
Here is the methodology I used to determine the rankings above. I first developed three categories I considered relevant to impact. The first two categories are quantitative and the third is qualitative (or subjective, if you prefer): competitiveness; relative cash on hand, and; other campaign-specific considerations. I awarded from one to three points for the first two categories and from zero to three points for the third. Each candidate was then scored on a scale from zero to nine points.
For competitiveness:
• 1 point for GOP winning by more than 5 points in polling average
• 2 points for Dem winning by more than 5 points
• 3 points for race within 5 points of either candidate
For polling averages, I looked at the poll results going back to June via FiveThirtyEight. The average I use is more of an approximation based solely on poll results. I don’t use any special sauce (weighting recency, discounting poorer performing pollsters, etc.) and the end result is more of a mode than a mean. In any case, it’s a fair rough estimate for these purposes.
For relative COH:
• 1 point for Dem having more than $2M on hand
• 2 points for GOP having more than $2M on hand
• 3 points for within $2M either way
I used the information provided by the Center for Responsive Government on campaign finance matters for each campaign. You can find the data at https://www.opensecrets.org/races.
For other considerations:
0-3 points depending on qualitative measures that are relevant, such as:
• Doug Jones is way ahead in COH, but that will likely change soon now that the GOP primary run-off is settled. So, I gave two points for this.
• The Alaska race is unpredictable. This is generally true in the North Star State. I gave an additional one point to address this.
For category 3, I used my own knowledge of the races to add more points if I thought that was appropriate to get a better sense of the importance of a race. However, I also calculated rankings without category 3 (the qualitative or subjective cat) to see if that changed anything. It did not. The rankings are the same all the way through whether I include category 3 or not. The tables attached show my work. Feel free to play around with the data yourself. I hope this helps you make your decision of which race or races to donate to.
One final note on this: the Arizona race is essentially dead last in these ratings (Georgia’s special is actually last, but as noted above, there might not even be a Democratic candidate in the run-off). This is because Mark Kelly is way ahead of his opponent, GOP Sen. Martha McSalley, in the polling and in raising money. Kelly has been a fundraising machine. He doesn’t want to hear this, but he doesn’t need your money. Maybe that will change in a month or two (I doubt it), but right now if there is one Democratic Senate candidate who does not need your cash it is Mark Kelly. But, don’t let that conclusion stop you from donating to him if you feel so inclined.