I regularly post recommendations for the most effective giving we can do each election season, and more and more, my top choices have featured organizations that do their work all year round — for which, in fact, the most effective work occurs well in advance of any election.
I’m repeating those recommendations here and adding other groups that don’t just turn out existing voters to the usual contests, but also grow the electorate and expand the range of challenges we need to make to MAGA extremism at every level of government, in every locality.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any of the organizations I’m listing; I don’t gain anything from donations made to them except the satisfaction of knowing that Democratic money is being spent in good ways.
Persuasion
These two groups perform a function that many believe is impossible: persuading voters who might otherwise vote conservative to vote progressive instead. They manage this by building relationships with individuals and engaging them in conversations about issues important to them, before they even begin to attempt any kind of political persuasion.
This community affiliate of the AFL-CIO fills an important need in this country: they serve as a virtual union for workers that don’t have unions at their jobs. Though they can’t collectively bargain with employers for their members, what they do is organize them to effect electoral changes in this country that are beneficial to working people.
Working America reaches a demographic that, frankly, the Democratic Party has not been communicating very well with in recent years, which makes their work all the more valuable and even essential.
Galvanize USA takes a similar approach to Working America: building ongoing relationships with a specific demographic by offering help and information on issues that matter to the group, in this case, “women across the country—particularly in rural, small town, and suburban communities.”
Suburban women played a key role in Joe Biden’s victory, and will continue to be a key swing demographic in future elections.
Giving to campaigns and conventional GOTV (get-out-the-vote)
Giving directly to candidates is often an inefficient use of Democratic money because:
- Campaign spending very quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. The same money sent elsewhere would result in a bigger gain of Democratic votes.
- Excess money sent to an easily winning campaign is wasted.
- Money sent to campaigns with little chance of winning can also be wasted.
- Some contests are more important than others.
Oath does the work of identifying the campaigns where each donated dollar is most likely to make the biggest difference.
Both the Center for Voter Information and the Voter Participation Center are so effective at registering likely Democratic voters and getting them to the polls that they were ranked #1 and #2 by a Stanford-based group that took a data-driven approach to determining the most effective places to steer political donations in 2020.
Expanding the electoral battle lines
For decades, the GOP has held an advantage over the Democratic Party at the local level, but these two groups, Contest Every Race and Run For Something, are working to remedy that. They recruit, train, and support candidates to run for offices that would normally be seen as unwinnable and therefore left uncontested.
You might ask what the good is in contesting an unwinnable race, but the answers are that:
- Some of them are in fact winnable! Both organizations boast impressive “batting averages” for winning races that would otherwise have been conceded to the GOP without a challenge.
- Even if a local campaign doesn’t win, it can:
- Energize voters and affect statewide vote totals for state and national offices.
- Deliver a progressive pitch to voters who might not ordinarily hear it (or who might listen more openly when spoken by a local candidate from their neighborhood)
Finally, I’d like to make “honorable mention” of the Can’t Win Victory Fund, a group that runs candidates in gerrymandered districts where they really have no chance of winning, as a way to shine light on the problem of gerrymandering and advocate for fairer election systems. This group doesn’t really fit the criteria of these recommendations, but I include them because I was delighted to discover a group partly doing what I wrote about in this old blog post.
The power of many
I recommend that you donate to one or more of these organizations, and that you make it a monthly donation. It doesn’t have to be much. As with voting, it’s not about how much a single vote can do, but what we can accomplish if enough of us do it. There are billionaires donating millions of dollars to make the world better for themselves. How about if a million of us donate $10 a month (less than we might spend per month on coffee, a streaming service, or a single restaurant meal) to make the world better for everybody?
Volunteer work
For those who can’t afford to donate, or who want to get involved more directly, two of the above organizations, Working America and Run For Something, accept volunteers. Although I’m not as sure about the effectiveness and efficiency of their volunteer operations, I favor them because of what I do know about their work in general.
The volunteer work they ask people to do can be a little atypical. For example, Working America does a lot of recruitment of new members, and this makes volunteers feel like they’re just fundraising. But “membership” in Working America only involves a token fee that strengthens its members’ commitment turn out to the polls year after year in favor of candidates and policies that will improve their lives.
For those who want to do more conventional get-out-the-vote type work, or who want to find some local action they can join in person, here are three of the bigger organizations that coordinate volunteer efforts all over the country. I imagine that the effectiveness of these activities varies widely, but every little bit can only do good:
More…
These “what we can do” posts have usually been electorally focused, but given that we’re in for a long, hard slog, here are some additional actions you might consider:
- Pay the subscription price for a publication that does good investigative political reporting to a wide readership, like ProPublica, Mother Jones, The Guardian, or The New York Times. (I wish I could include the Washington Post as well, but…) This kind of work is essential to democracy — and therefore more essential than ever.
- Channel your consumer dollars and social media presence as much as possible away from corporations that are especially destructive to society, such as Amazon, Walmart, and Twitter. Even if we can’t exclusively patronize local, independent businesses or completely decentralized, de-commercialized social networks like Mastodon, there are corporate alternatives to each of the above that are relatively much better for the world. (For example, the online bookseller Bookshop.org, the more socially responsible CostCo, or Bluesky.)
- Read my thoughts on bridging the blue-red divide and pass them on if you like them. Or help make them happen if you’re someone with the power to do so.