The first list posted here on Funded By Humans was representatives in the house who ran and won with lots of small dollar fundraising. But now that the 2020 primaries are getting going it’s important to support candidates that are running in those races, these are the people that consistent small dollar fundraising can really help.
That’s what this list will be, here’s how we made it:
Started with a list of Battleground Races for 2020 put together by Ballotpedia. Again, we’re just doing House races because those generally require less spending, so small dollar donations can have a bigger impact.
This list is also just going to focus on the Democratic primaries. First because right now ActBlue is far and away the best and easiest platform for making these kinds of lists and processing small dollar donations. But also because some of the criteria below end up filtering out most of the Republican candidates. If you’re interested in giving to republican candidates, please follow the same steps to create a list to give to:
- From the Ballotpedia battlegrounds races I selected the house races that were targeted as flippable in 2020
- I clicked through to each race and copied the list of everyone running in the primary
- I looked up which candidates were available on Act Blue
- Then went to look up all the info available on OpenSecrets.org for everyone running in those primaries. Then filtered out any candidates that didn’t meet the following criteria:
- Has reported information to the FEC and so has info on OpenSecrets
- Has raised at least $10k from any source (there’s lots of candidates with almost no fundraising, and likely won’t be competitive)
- If they’ve raised less than $500k, they only need to have at least 10% in small dollar donations so far
- If they raised more than $500k they need to have at least 20% in small dollar donations
All those criteria together give us a list of 23 candidates running in primaries in competitive districts all around the country. These are new candidates trying to run in a competitive district, it’s still early in their races, and they’re candidates that need small dollar fundraising to be competitive.
Even if only a couple percentage of voters made small monthly donations to these candidates it would have a huge impact. This is a great group to give to if you support small dollar fundraising, and campaign finance reform in general.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/battlegroundprimaries2020
But the most important thing isn’t coming up with the perfect list of candidates to give to, it’s to find some group you want to support and to start giving. Here’s some other lists on ActBlue that people have made that are great options too:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/flipthesouthvb