How Last-Minute Political Donations Can Make a Real Difference

Don’t look at voting as a dreary, once-every-four-years civic duty; think of it more like a high-stakes game of chess. Citizens of this mighty democracy get the privilege of strategically making moves — supporting some candidates and policies, blocking others — to protect freedom, advance economic opportunity, and generally improve life for our family, community, and country. And thanks to some sophisticated digital organizations, it’s possible to leverage and magnify that voting power by making targeted political donations — even as little as $5 — to obscure local races.

I’m not talking about those online solicitations that trigger an avalanche of spam with candidates frantically warning that democracy will crumble if you don’t chip in $100 by midnight. Savvy donors who are sick of all those political panic emails should perfect the art of strategic giving — and it’s more possible than ever thanks to organizations that marry futuristic data science with old-fashioned political smarts to maximize impact.

“In the last decade, whether it comes to the right to reproductive-health care or policies to raise wages for full-time workers, state legislatures have done more good — and more harm — than any other level of government,” says Daniel Squadron, a former state senator who co-founded the Washington-based States Project. The organization puts together grassroots giving circles — groups of small-money donors — and directs the cash to local candidates.

The effort caught the attention of Melissa Walker, a Brooklyn-based novelist who, like many Democrats, was despondent after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential contest.

“I wasn’t sure what to do, and I felt like the things that I was being told to do, like call Chuck Schumer every day and make sure you’re tweeting at [Senator Kirsten] Gillibrand, didn’t feel like they were really going to do anything,” Walker told me last year. “It wasn’t until I turned my eyes to state legislatures, after listening to some state legislators speak, that I started to realize that everything I was worried about and everything that I cared about was being decided in state capitals and not in Washington, D.C.”

Walker began volunteering, and is now the States Project’s director of giving circles — groups of donors who agree to help a particular legislative effort. “We really do focus on targeting those purple districts — never deep-red, never deep-blue districts, in the states where we’re looking to shift power. That’s because these races are won on the margins,” she says. “And when you put in place the funding and the tactics, you can absolutely move the needle.”

The group has enjoyed spectacular successes, like flipping four seats in Michigan’s state senate and four seats in the House in 2022 — one of them by 330 votes — to give Democrats simultaneous control of the state legislature and governor’s mansion for the first time in 40 years. A similar effort by the States Project that same year helped Dems win control of Pennsylvania’s lower chamber for the first time in 12 years.

Another group focused on local races is Oath, a Democratic platform launched in 2023 that analyzes hundreds of data points to identify the races where small donations can make the biggest difference. Oath aggregates polling data, historical voting patterns, and demographic trends to help donors target their contributions to where they’ll have the greatest effect, rather than just responding to the most urgent-sounding fundraising email.

“It is data driven, and we have receipts. The majority of my team are engineers and data scientists, and we work to analyze where dollars are likely to have the greatest impact in advancing a particular goal,” Brian Derrick, the group’s founder, told me. “We start with this very broad map of up and down ballots all across the country and try to narrow in to where the data shows that dollars can meaningfully move the probability of the outcome of an election.”

Want to defend the Constitution by supporting pro-democracy candidates against election-deniers? With a couple of keystrokes, Oath directs you — and your money — to candidates you’ve probably never heard of, like Allison Riggs, a State Supreme Court judge seeking reelection in North Carolina, or Tim Stringham of Arizona, who is running for county recorder, the official responsible for voter registration and early voting in Maricopa, the largest county in Arizona.

If you want to support gun-control legislation, Oath’s analysis says the most cost-effective strategy is to help Dems keep majority control in Pennsylvania and Minnesota and break Republican supermajorities in North Carolina and Kansas. The site directs you to nine local candidates who need some last-minute support. You can also get information on the handful of states that generate an outsize amount of anti-LGBT laws and get pointed to candidates for office in Kansas, Florida, South Carolina, and New Hampshire.

“Investing in down ballot races that have relatively low cash on hand, a very small amount of resources, means that your dollars are deployed in that state faster than when you’re giving to someone at the top of the ticket who has tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Derrick.

And Oath doesn’t give your information to anyone, including the candidate recipients. “We report only the legally required fields, never email or phone number, so that people aren’t added to all of these spam lists that are driving us all crazy,” he told me. “Because we put donors first, we ask people if they’re willing to just add a tip on to their donation. That supports the platform itself, and that has enabled us to continue running.” The group expects to have facilitated $30 million in donations by Election Day.

Lot of ink and broadcast hours will be spent sorting out the race for president. But we should all be spending more time looking at the 5,000 or so state races happening this year.

“The GOP has decades on us of building up these statehouses,” says J. Smith-Cameron, a New York–based actress (best known for playing the role of a hard-charging attorney, Geri Kellman, on Succession) who has joined and started giving circles. “National politics is a bit like showbiz — these big, sexy races that everybody wants to give money to and get involved with, and guess who’s going to win and watch the polls. That’s nothing like what we do,” she told me. “It’s not as glitzy, but it does more. It’s sort of like the secret weapon hiding in plain sight.”