A thread on why if you have a few spare bucks and care about institutional racism, voting rights, health care, women's access to contraception and abortion, police violence, all the things so many of us care about—you should really be giving money to state races in 2020
The gist of it, there's an awful lot of them, they are chronically underfunded, the fundraising climate this year is particularly hard (because you can't do in-person events), and the impact of state legislatures in a census year when districts are redrawn can't be overstated
Let's take Florida as an example! Republicans have held a majority there for 20 years. That means that they have coasted through ten elections in a row where the Republican house majority is re-elected. In the 2014 election, a third of Florida house seats weren't contested!
We're doing better this year at actually contesting seats. But Democrats are still trailing by 5-1 or 6-1 in fundraising for those races. And these are not large dollar amounts in aggregate. Democrats raised only $860K across THE ENTIRE STATE as of March. miamiherald.com/news/politics-…
One consequence for Florida of our inability to get our shit together in state elections is that the state has appalling health care crisis. They have 10% of the nation's uninsured. Republicans in power have refused Medicaid expansion—money that could be helping Floridians today
According to the Miami Herald, there were eighteen districts in Florida where voters in 2018 chose a Democrat for Senate, a Democrat for governor... and a Republican narrowly won the state house seat. That's a failure to close a winnable race. miamiherald.com/news/politics-… 
The thing is, these races are cheap by national standards. In 2018, Patrick Henry lost to Elizabeth Fetterhoff in Florida House District 26 by 61 votes. It was one of six elections in Florida in 2018 close enough to require a recount. His entire budget for the race was $129,360.
So just these two safe seat Federal candidates have raised twenty-two times more money than the entire Democratic field in Florida. That's amazing. It shows that we're not giving strategically enough to even capture winnable seats, let alone really put the pressure on Republicans
Now, J. Random Bookmarking site is not the first to notice this or think of a remedy. Swing Left does it, the Sister District project does it, Forward Majority does it. The point is more of *us* should do it, especially in 2020, a pandemic year when fundraising is hard.
Because we mobilized a lot of people in 2018 who had never made political donations before (myself included!) with the Great Slate, in 2020 we're trying to add to this pool of donations with the State Slate. All the hard work has been done for you by @askaphysicist!
There are approximately two billion statewide races in the US, and Dave modeled them all, sorted and re-sorted, and got us a ranked list of races where small donations could go particularly far. You can find our first group here: techsolidarity.org/resources/stat…
If we can raise enough money (about $20K a person, a good chunk of a campaign budget), we have expansion packs just waiting in the wings. I can't stress how far your contribution can go in these state races. We have a real chance at winning in Florida, Iowa, Arizona, Pennsylvania
Money doesn't win elections, but lack of money loses us too many elections. We need to take away the Republican's dominant fundraising advantage. And yes, one of our candidates is Patrick Henry, who is going to make up that 61 vote deficit, with your help! secure.actblue.com/donate/state_s…
