Effective political giving

From the article:

There is nothing wrong with great fundraising—hooray fundraising!—but as we saw with Mike Bloomberg, there is a point past which you run out of effective ways to allocate money. Kentucky voters can absorb a lot, but they can't absorb $100,000,000 of Senate ads. And campaign finance law doesn't allow candidates to pass campaign funds along to other candidates beyond a token amount.

This is why I'm an advocate of indirect giving. If you want to support Biden or the Senate campaigns, find underfunded Congressional, state and local candidates running in districts those big campaigns need to win. Downballot candidates target groups of voters that may be invisible to the bigger campaigns, but whose vote will help them in November.

Consider that in a state house campaign, where the voter universe may be a few thousand people, it's not unheard of for the candidate to have met every voter individually.

Let me illustrate with an example. Sara Huddleston is a state house candidate running in Storm Lake, a small town in northwest Iowa. She can expect about 12,000 people to vote in her election, and her path to victory lies in turning out Latino voters at local meat packing plants, a constituency she has been organizing for many years.

As you can imagine, these immigrant workers, disproportionately sickened by the pandemic, are not big fans of Trump or the Republican Party. But they are also not listed as likely voters in any database. As Sara explained to me in a conversation a few weeks back, getting them to vote in past years meant convincing tired, hungry people to go back out in the dark and cold after a long shift, to participate in an abstruse process that few were familiar with.

There's not enough of these voters to interest Biden (who even during the caucuses never visited western Iowa) or Theresa Greenfield, the Democratic candidate for Senate. But these voters are Huddleston's base! She can't afford to ignore them. If you give her campaign money, she will spend the money on getting those people to vote. And this year, she has over a month in which to do it.