www.followthemoney.org

It has lots of information for local and state races, and the interface is pretty easy to use. Plus options to export the data as CSVs, etc. if you want to do more analysis.

I’m going to be exploring this more, but let us know if you find anything that looks interesting.

Updated the list as of the 2020 election. This is based off data from Opensecrets.org, these are the members of congress who ran in 2020 and:

• Pledged to not accept corporate PAC donations
• Raised at least 20% of their campaign contributions in small dollar donations (< $200)

The list is based on data from OpenSecrets.org here: https://www.opensecrets.org/featured-datasets/19

They make the data available in Google Doc here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1T2yvwu9clk5eeETE90SgPeX0ouDXEeAEIDl_KTCtBhs

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

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/flipthesenatevb

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/specialelectionsvb

Here’s their guide to creating a list to donate to. It’s easy to sign up, only takes about 15 minutes, and once you created and saved a list, you can share it with other people too.

These kinds of lists are great because they’re efficient. When you donate it just charges you once, there’s only one transaction fee on the backend, and all the candidates split the money. Or you can punch in specific amounts for each person you’re giving to. There’s the option to make it a recurring monthly donation, which is great, and you can either share your email with the campaigns or opt out.

The only downside is that ActBlue only allows donations to liberal candidates, so if you want to include conservative candidates as well, you’ll have to give separately to them. There is another site https://winred.com/ which is focused on small dollar fundraising for conservative candidates. They allow similar forms to be made to raise money for a group of candidates, the setup process takes a little bit longer, but it’s a viable alternative.

A few of the really interesting findings are that:

• Money is certainly strongly associated with political success. But, “I think where you have to change your thinking is that money causes winning,” said Richard Lau, professor of political science at Rutgers. “I think it’s more that winning attracts money.”
• Advertising — even negative advertising — isn’t very effective. This is a big reason why money doesn’t buy political success. Turns out, advertising, the main thing campaigns spend their money on, doesn’t work all that well.
• Another example of where money might matter: Determining who is capable of running for elected office to begin with. Ongoing research from Alexander Fouirnaies, professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, suggests that, as it becomes normal for campaigns to spend higher and higher amounts, fewer people run and more of those who do are independently wealthy. In other words, the arms race of unnecessary campaign spending could help to enshrine power among the well-known and privileged. “That may be the biggest effect of money in politics,” West wrote

My emphasis on the last line. The biggest effect all the current spending on campaigns has might just be to convince regular people that they shouldn’t take the chance to run. That‘s the most important thing we can change with effective small dollar fundraising, we can raise money for regular people so they can at least get their campaigns off the ground. We can create an environment where good candidates can expect small dollar fundraising to be enough for them to start, and win, their campaign.

• Pledged to not accept corporate PAC donations for their campaign
• Raised at least 20% of their campaign contributions in small dollar donations (< $200)

The list is based on data from OpenSecrets.org

You can make an easy monthly contribution that will be split evenly amongst everyone in this list here: Contribute

Imagine what it would take to run. The first question anyone faces is how are they going to afford it? Running for congress is basically a full time job, can you afford to take months off from work to campaign? With maybe a 50/50 chance of actually getting elected? That’s just not an option for most people.

If you don’t have connections or know any wealthy donors, it’s extremely hard to take the chance and actually run. We need to make it easier for regular people to have the confidence that if they run, we’ll support them. We can do this by raising the bar on the amount of small dollar donations made to candidates.

• Total spending on the 2016 federal elections was $6.5 Billion
• Overwhelmingly that came from the richest Americans, over half from the richest 0.01% (the 1% of the 1%). And most of the rest from the rest of top 1-5%
• But $6.5 Billion dollars isn’t actually that much. If there’s 240 Million eligible voters in the US, and we all gave $5/month to any campaign, that would add up to 28 Billion dollars in campaign funding every two years. For pocket change we could swamp the campaign funding from the oligarchs by over 4-to-1
• That means that 5 times as many people could be running. Do you have any friends, family or co-workers who ran for office in 2016? Probably not. Do you know anyone who’s smart and honest and would make a good representative? If we all gave $5/month to anyone maybe that person would get enough to actually run.
• Let’s say $5/month from everyone is unrealistic. Let’s say that 75% of eligible voters don’t care, can’t afford or don’t think it’ll help. So only 25% of eligible voters give. That would mean we’d all have to give $5/week. Do you think you can afford $5 every week to help fix democracy? I could give up one beer a week when I go out and give that money to some politician that’s actually going to represent me instead.

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fundedbyhumans

• Pledged to not accept corporate PAC donations for their reelection campaign
• Raised at least 25% of their prior campaign contributions in small dollar donations (< $200)

The list is based on data from OpenSecrets.org here: https://www.opensecrets.org/featured-datasets/19