This 🧵is going to be about why you should check the Cook PVI before donating to candidates, specially in 2022
The Cook Partisan Voting Index is a index that looks at how districts and states voted compared to national elections and ranks them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook_Part…
If in the last two elections the national share of the vote for Ds and Rs was somehow 50/50 and in a certain district the R got 60/40, that district would be R+10 since the Republican outperformed by 10 points
Cook releases these indexes after every election cycle
Generally a seat is considered a swing seat if it between D+5 and R+5, anything higher is generally a safe seat, meaning whoever wins that party's primary is most likely going to win that seat
You do have swing years, like 2018 or 2010, when a party beats the spread
However, because time, money, and other resources are limited giving funds to say a Dem in Greene's R+28 is most likely not going to accomplish much
Instead concentrating on defending your own <+5s while attacking their <+5 seats is the best strategy. Now of course gerrymandering makes this harder as part of the goal is to create safer districts for oneself while often creating one or two really strong districts for them
However in this case you have on R+5, two so Blue you can't lose and one even+0 district currently held by a Dem. Giving excess funds to the two solid Congressional seats for the general is silly, better to pour them into the district that needs to be defended and the R+5
This cycle there is a new Political Action Committee pushing to seat right wing local activists on school boards under the banner of fighting CRT, a strawman to get them wins
A school board race is much cheaper to fund than a congressional run, a few hundred dollars can pay for mailings and yard signs. If you are on the fence between giving to a Twitter heavy Dem running in a R+7< that hasn't gone D since Clinton and your local school board...
..or town officials choose local. Those seats can help build up new blood in the party and keep the GOP from taking over children's education or working to break already overtaxed teachers and school systems
It's really easy to research and as much as it would be nice to see some of these people removed from congress or the senate it is better to make sure they don't have the gavel and subpoena power. Your local elections and ballot measures matter too so think local act global
Ballotpedia and Wikipedia both of easy to check histories of districts as well as the PVI right there in the side bar
Going to add some of my personal thoughts here:
I'm fully onboard with a 50 state strategy, run a dem in every place, no uncontested elections. Give a baseline of support based on position (senate, congress, mayor, school board, etc...) but don't surge in places it doesn't make
sense. Now if you end up with a race where the candidate surprises and outperforms in early polling or the R is caught in a scandal you have something already on the ground to build off of. At the same time running a candidate getting 30% of the vote over and over again...
...isn't going to gain you as much as getting local control via school boards, mayors, and councils and building up a backbench. Also it gives more people a chance to work on campaigns and build up the skills as managers, outreach, press, etc...
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@oneunderscore__@BrandyZadrozny continue to do amazing work and this article is an important read on the right wing grievous merchants and their role in creating and spreading the CRT boogieman
I decided to look at the website for No Left Turn, one of the grievous merchants they cite in the article and it had a link to a survey for parents to fill out if they are upset about what their kids are learning form.jotform.com/203353751215044
Imagine being upset that your kids are taught
"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" or "American exceptionalism is dismissed"
In their mind CRT is a catch all for ANY teaching that goes against a Disneyfied version of American history
I've noticed the "Anti-Critical Race Theory" forces, which all seem to have a common core of linkage to right wing think tanks, love to quote MLK and say their goal is to make sure everyone is under the same rules.
However CRT, the real CRT, is looking at not rules but...
..their application. It looks at how laws have been used to enforce the status quo and compares and contrasts the application of legal decisions based on the class, race, and position of those involved.
Think about the issues with laws around crack having much stronger...
..laws than cocaine, which disproportionately affected the poorer communities where cocaine was cut to make it cheaper and each kilo go further.
Now if we apply that same framework to say laws around land use and find out that the law was not applied fairly and was used...
FAIR For All an organization detected to ensuring that only colorblind lessons get taught in schools didn't like that I noted the large number of circumstantial links between them and the Prep School AstroTurf group
I can't prove a clean link between them and Prep School but they seem to have a limited number of people hyper involved in both, however I can prove a link between them and conservative provocateur and questionable video editor Andy Ngo and other IDW orgs
I've explained Google Analytics and reverse searching them before, if two sites share the same ID they are most likely linked by at least using the same web designer
I've seen tweets re:my OSINT thread asking why reporters aren't doing the same thing. I've seen some amazing OSINT work by reporters from small outlets to large, but there is a limited number of reporters with a finite amount of resources and an inverse number of deadlines
I don't blame reporters.
The cost of the entry to create inauthentic behavior/disinformation/misinformation is low, the opportunity cost to getting caught is low, there is little reason not to if you are a bad actor. It is everything from product reviews, to YouTube stars buying views, to nation states
On Saturday the 5th the New York Post put up an exclusive article about a few parents groups that planned to pay for a billboard truck to protest Critical Race Theory being taught in NYC prep schools
@soft_fox_lad noticed some suspicious information about the largest of the groups, Prep School Accountability, and shared it with me