⚠️⚠️⚠️ PROBLEM: Election experts keep lecturing you about how vitally important it is for Dems to flip STATE LEGISLATIVE seats blue...but there's *thousands* of them and who the hell knows which seats are even competitive at that level? 1/ americabluein22.com/state_leg/
🎉🎉🎉SOLUTION: I've compiled links where you can donate DIRECTLY to Dem nominees in up to *600* *competitive* districts in 36 states in one sitting!
There's ~7,400 state legislative districts, but LA, MS, NJ & VA don't have legislative races this year, CT candidates use public finance, & some states only have half or no state Senate races this year.
Of those, only around ~1,300 districts are considered competitive (within 10 pts). And of *those*, only around ~750 have Dems running who also have active ActBlue pages.
President Biden claimed the pandemic is "over" even though we still have "problems" with COVID. That was...a mistake. acasignups.net/22/09/19/presi…
The issue isn’t whether he was “technically” correct according to the medical definition; the issue is that if you’re trying to get the public to get the new bivalvent booster shot, funding from Congress or keep the PHE declaration in place, this isn’t helpful.
Let’s say you fly to Hawaii. Once the plane is over land again you’ve technically “arrived in Hawaii,” but if you try getting off before it lands you’re still gonna plummet to the ground.
Too many people don’t grasp that the COVID plane hasn’t landed yet.
Related: Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on 9/18/20. This graph shows the stunning impact her death had on Democratic fundraising (at least for my efforts, anyway).
The blue line is my actual 2020 cycle fundraising over time. The orange line is my 2022 cycle fundraising to date.
In 2020, I raised more in the 2 weeks after RBG died (nearly all of it for U.S. Senate races) than I had for the entire 22 months before that (~$1.9 million vs. ~$1.82 million).
I've also included an estimate of how I think fundraising would have gone if she hadn't died.
In all seriousness, however: What *should* the definition actually be for the pandemic being "over?" A solid month with fewer than X COVID deaths/ hospitalizations/ positive tests per day? 3 months with no new variants or sub-variants emerging? Some other metric?
Pre-COVID, influenza averaged ~27M cases, ~420K hospitalizations & ~35K deaths in the U.S./yr.
That's ~100 deaths/day, give or take. We don't consider that to be a pandemic/epidemic. Should that be the metric? (h/t @randomsubu for the corrected data): cdc.gov/flu/about/burd…
If you want to know just how much RBG's passing impacted Dem fundraising (especially for the U.S. Senate), here's a how my own fundraising efforts went from 1/01/20 - Election Day (the green line is how much I've raised since January 1st for the 2022 midterms).
I raised nearly $2 million in the two weeks after she died, almost exclusively for the U.S. Senate. That’s fully 1/3 of the total I raised for every candidate for every office for the full 2-year cycle.
FWIW, as far as I can figure, if RBG hadn't passed away prior to Election Day 2020, I probably would've raised a total of something like $4.5 million instead of ~$5.85 million (I raised another $160K post-Election Day for the 2 Georgia Senate runoffs).
This is my final attempt to estimate the answer to a question many have speculated about but few have been willing to voice out of concern that they'll sound too cynical or heartless: Just how many GOP & Dem voters have likely died of COVID since the 2020 election?
Only 31 states require registered voters to register a party affiliation when they register, and even then, that doesn't necessarily jibe w/how they vote in practice.
The closest equivalent for this purpose is Trump & Biden voters, though that's not quite the same thing either.
1. We desperately need to keep the #HouseBlueIn22! If the GOP takes control you’ll have racist, anti-science lunatics like MTG, Matt Gaetz & Lauren Boebert in charge. DON'T LET THAT HAPPEN.