Thread by @z3dster

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

You can go to Cook's website and play with the maps to get some idea
cookpolitical.com/pvi-map-and-di…

Wisconsin is a good example where the Dems get the majority of the vote but only 3 seats in 2018

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Unit…

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

I explain more in the thread below

https://twitter.com/z3dster/status/1402708999418613768

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

ballotpedia.org/Georgia%27s_14…

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...