How to Make Your Political Contributions Matter

Are you sending donations monthly, or at random, to the Democratic Party or to particular candidates who appeal to you? If so, there’s a more impactful and effective way to give your hard-earned money.

We all love those hard-hitting video clips, at least if they’re on our side. But how much do they cost? And what impact to they have? Do they change minds, or do they just push already committed voters on both sides to dig in deeper? What, if anything, do they do to get the over one-third of eligible voters who didn’t bother to vote in 2020 to vote now?

Some relentless investigative reporter or Ph.D. student in political science should take a deep dive into this. In the meantime, I’ll give you my hypothesis, some preliminary data and my common-sense conclusions.

My Hypothesis: My hypothesis is in the form of three syllogisms, as follows:

The effectiveness syllogism:
1. Video ads are expensive and mostly negative.
2. Their negativity turns off people on the other side, rather than attracting them to your side, and they don’t stay with voters.
3. Therefore, video ads are not worth their high cost.

The corruption syllogism:
1. Video ads enrich the PR and advertising firms that produce them, and the media that show them.
2. “Political operatives” who buy media ads for candidates and causes earn commissions on their ad buys.
3. Therefore, pecuniary motives from top to bottom corrupt the ostensible purpose of video ads: helping your candidate or cause win.

The GOTV syllogism:
1. Nearly all polls show the current presidential candidates within single-digit percentages, mostly within 5%, of each other in all the critical battleground states.
2. More than one-third (33%) of eligible voters did not vote in 2020.
3. Therefore, all other things being equal, if you could get just 15% of previously nonvoting eligible nonvoters to vote this year, and for your candidate or cause, you could win in most battleground states.

You can see where these three syllogisms are heading. Not only is Getting Out the Vote (“GOTV”) NOT corrupted by commercial motives at every level. The math of our electorate suggests that it’s far more effective than paying to create ad after ad, throwing them all into the ether, and hoping that, somehow, they will motivate people who are marginalized, cynical, or despairing, or who just don’t care, to get off their dispirited duffs and vote. Common sense suggests that’s a pipe dream.

That’s why, this year, I stopped giving to candidates and (with one exception) to the Dems. I also stopped giving to all my usual charities. I’m funneling all that money, and more, into monthly contributions to fifteen different GOTV organizations. Here they are:

(1) Black Voters Matter Action PAC
(2) Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ old organization)
(3) New Georgia Project (a spin-off of (2))
(4) Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda
(5) Democracy for America (DFA)
(6) Democratic National Committee (my single exception to the GOTV rule)
(7) Progressive Turnout Project
(8) VPP
(9) Mijente (Hispanic GOTV organization)
(10) Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) Action Fund
(which seeks to restore ex-felons’ voting rights)
(11) Swing Left
(12) Advance the Electorate PAC
(13) Hope Springs from Field
(14) Northeast Arizona Native Democrats
(which works with the 300,000 Navajo or Diné people)
(15) Movement Voter Project
(which works with youth, LGBTQ and other marginalized voters).
If you find this list overwhelming, don’t fret. You can find every one of these organizations on Act Blue, the secure, progressive donation site. That single site has lists of their various branches and affiliates and links to their websites, which explain in detail what all of these groups do and how they do it.

You can contribute to one, some, or all of them on that single site, Act Blue. And Act Blue maintains complete and exhaustive records of your donations, which, as far as I can tell, it keeps forever (over twenty years for me).

If you’re looking for tax deductions for your contributions, you can find that, too. Some, but not all, of these organizations have separate arms that take tax-deductible contributions. And Act Blue will tell you, just for the asking, which of your contributions is/was tax deductible, as part of its meticulous record-keeping.

Why donate this way? Here’s my take. Let’s suppose that it takes $150 a day to support a single eager, young, volunteer GOTV canvasser with food, lodging and transportation. There are 66 days left before the election. If the volunteer works every single day, with no days off, that support would cost $9,900.

What would the campaign get for that? Well, at a mere eight hours a day, with, say, three contacts per hour, that volunteer would have contacted 1,584 voters. Not only would those contacts have been person-to-person and in depth. Each would have produced notes, impressions and data about the elegible voter, revealing how amenable they were to the pitch, how likely they are to vote next time, and what effort the campaign should spend on them during they next cycle, or later in this one.

Now let’s extrapolate a bit. According to this source, the two parties together already spent a total of $471 million on “connected TV” (streaming) and digital video ads during this presidential campaign just through August 23. If we divide that total equally between the parties, and if we assume that the campaign didn’t really begin until Trump accepted the GOP nomination on July 19, the Dems would have spent $235.5 million over a period of 35 days. Extrapolated to the 66 days remaining, that’s $235.5 million times 66/35, or $444 million dollars.

Based on our typical volunteer’s contacting 1,584 voters for $9,900, that same money, if used in GOTV action, would have supported contacting 71 million eligible voters. In comparison, President Biden won the 2020 presidential election in the electoral college by a total margin of 44,000 votes in three battleground states.

Talk about overkill! If all the money spent on those evanscent 30-second video ads went into the GOTV ground game, and if the campaign knew who they are, it could talk personally to each of the voters who cast those 44,000 votes 1,674 times! This shows how lopsided the effectiveness math is for video clips versus ground-game volunteers.

Both the video ads and the ground game are unpredictable. You don’t know how the video ads affect individual voters, and if you poll them to find out, you might just be throwing good money after bad. You also don’t know how individual voters will react to personal visits, let alone repeated ones.

But I know from experience what you get for supporting eager young GOTV volunteers. In 2008, my ex-wife and I provided provided a room in our home for a volunteer in the first Obama campaign. (That’s why my estimate of $150 a day for maintenance cost is probably high: many volunteer GOTV workers get their biggest expense—housing—for free from other volunteers, like us in that Obama campaign.)

Our volunteer was personable and sincere, but we hardly ever saw him. For the whole week he was with us, he got up and left before we arose, and came back well after midnight when we were in bed. We affectionately called him “the Phantom.” We had a short conversation with him when he arrived, and a slightly longer one before he departed, hoping for a job in the first Obama administration.

That’s the kind of devotion and hard work that no expensive video ad can duplicate. And that kind of in-person, eager and sincere “on the ground” contact with voters is, in my view, the best way to win this (or any) election. Many voters who met the Phantom probably still remember him, just as we do, while the video ads they saw have long ago faded from memory.

There’s yet one more reason to support GOTV groups over individual candidates, even the top or most attractive ones. Ad mavens have no way of knowing what motivates voters, whether in groups or individually. Some voters may yearn to vote for Harris and Walz, or against Trump. Others’ sole motivation for voting at all may be supporting or opposing down-ballot, local candidates, or ballot issues like reproductive rights. A GOTV canvasser can size up that sort of motivation in an instant and urge a reluctant voter to support all the Dems. A video ad can’t even begin to address that sort of motivation; it’s just a shot in the dark.

So which do you think is more effective? Putting your money into the corrupt guessing game of video advertising, which is mostly negative and a shot in the dark? Or putting your faith in dedicated volunteers and their person-to-person contacts with reluctant and occasional voters? If you think like I do, you know what to do.


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