How To Not Set Your Money on Fire in 2024
A new donation platform, Oath.vote, seeks to change donor behavior. Plus, the silence of the American Jewish establishment as Bibi threatens a million-plus Gazan civilians.
I've written multiple times about the problem of political rage-giving, which is when donors give campaign contributions to candidates running against entrenched incumbents that they hate, but who have no chance of winning. Candidates like Marcus Flowers (who raised $16 million in his failed 2022 bid against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene), Amy McGrath (who raised $94 million in her failed 2020 run against Sen. Mitch McConnell), and Jaime Harrison (who raised a whopping $130 million in his failed 2020 challenge to Sen. Lindsey Graham) broke fundraising records and still went down to very predictable defeats. The problem is made worse by political professionals who rake in huge fees pumping out shrill emails urging people to give, and far too many small donors aren't sophisticated enough to know if they're spending their money wisely.
Enter a new solution: Oath.vote, which makes data-driven recommendations about how to ensure your dollars go where they are most needed and most useful. I spoke with co-founder Brian Derrick last Friday and came away quite impressed. Here are a few excerpts of our conversation.
Derrick: We analyze thousands of relevant races, federal and statewide. We've done 65 or 70 state legislative chambers, and then select local races all the way down to the school board. We analyze those races across three metrics--competitiveness, stakes and financial need--to find what we believe are the races where dollars will go furthest. Based on those three metrics we assigne candidates a score of one through ten, which is just a quick signal to a donor about the relative impact of their dollars in one race versus another.
So use the classic example: Amy McGrath in Kentucky with $100 million and a long shot to win is going to have a really low impact score; your $10 is just not going to meaningfully move the needle there. While an Arizona state senate race that's a toss-up by every metric where control of the chamber is at stake could end up with a 10 out of 10, potentially something like that. We put those recommendations with the visible impact scores up onto the platform. Anyone can access that; it's free to use.
You can select an issue that you're most interested in. We break candidates out by protecting democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, etc. Defeating Trump is our number one issue right now. And then you click donate and we, by default, recommend splitting a donation across a number of races. So that way it's not someone giving to this one candidate because they like where they went to law school and like their most recent ad, but it's more about the strategic value of these specific districts.
Q: If someone goes to your website, the first thing they're asked is to join Oath.vote. Why do you ask people to join?
Derrick: Part of the dynamic shift that we are pursuing is rather than us bugging you to give $5, we want the donor to tell us what they're interested in. And so, with that quick onboarding, we ask four questions: What issues motivate you, what you want to focus on, what your budget is, and how often you want recommendations. And so that enables us to send increasingly personalized recommendations, where tens of thousands of people can get an email with a different recommendation. One might say here's your once-a-week reproductive rights recommendation versus to somebody else it's your once quarterly recommendation that's really focused on protecting democracy. And those will look different.
Q: How much do you adjust your recommendations based on changing information like updated quarterly campaign finance reports? That must help you make judgments about things like viability and competitiveness.
Derrick: Exactly. The filings that certainly help with our financial need metric. There's of course foundational data around the district and voter registration advantage that don't change so much from month to month, but there are also polling components. I think we saw eight House districts move this week, four in the direction of Democrats, four in the direction of Republicans. And so their scores were updated to reflect that. It's different at the state level, state by state because some of the states have monthly reporting requirements. Some of them are once every six months.
Q: I would think you have lots of challenges. Polling itself is inherently broken in many ways. And there are some solutions about which polls to trust more but I think whoever it is on your team that is focused on getting this algorithm to be as good as you can get it has got to be having sleepless nights.
Derrick: It's a really interesting challenge. Most people are using polling to try to predict an outcome and we are not. We are trying to predict a window. One of our core metrics as to how successful we are donors on behalf of our users, is how much funding we direct to races that are decided by less than 5%. And so while the polling might be wrong on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's race by three points which could be problematic for you, it actually is accurate enough for us to say we do think that this is going to be a really competitive race one way or the other, whether it's decided by three points in favor of her, or if it's decided by three points in favor or opponent. That six-point window is exactly where people should be directing funding. So, it's a little bit more helpful to us that it might be to the campaigns themselves.
Derrick also explained that Oath works to project the optimal funding level for every race, looking at the historic spending trends and the media market as well as other factors like candidate quality and competitiveness. Then they use that projection to make judgments about how well a campaign is doing with its fundraising. While about eighty percent of an Oath recommendation score is based on quantitative analysis, Derrick says he draws on human insight as well. "I am constantly on the phone talking to organizers," he says. "We don't take information or input from candidates and campaigns themselves, but we talk to state parties, we talk to caucuses and frontline groups to try to get a better sense of what the data is missing."
Right now, Derrick says the average Oath user is giving around $250-300 per election cycle. Typically, they live in a blue state, or in a blue city in a red state—places where people feel their dollars can have a greater impact than just their vote. He also says they have users who are independents or right-leaning but who want to donate in support of abortion rights ballot initiatives or candidates.
Interestingly, Oath.vote switched from using ActBlue as its donation platform at first to using Democracy Engine. Derrick told me that is because ActBlue didn't allow them to withhold donor information from campaigns and they want to avoid a situation where donors whose contributions are split ten ways getting added to ten new email lists. ActBlue also doesn't allow middlemen like Oath to generate revenue from voluntary tips, which is how the start-up is making money.
Derrick told me that he and his team are working on lots of new features for Oath (which is so named because they eventually want to cover every elected position where a person takes an oath of office). One would assign an impact value to donations, to help people understand how much more valuable early contributions are than last-minute ones. Another is to add more explanatory language around the specific scores they assign to candidates. And a third is to offer a "smart search" feature that helps guide a potential donor toward the choices that make the most sense.
One last thing that Oath does that I really like is send members a "personal impact" report at the end of the cycle letting them know what their impact was. If more people start giving this way, at least some of the oxygen that keeps bad candidates like Marcus Flowers and their consultants alive will be siphoned away.
—Related: One thing that Oath doesn't do as of now, though it may in the future, is factor in the importance of supporting year-round community organizing. Derrick told me that especially for wealthier donors who might have a budget of say $20,000 per cycle, he and his team want to offer them an individualized budget that would allocate a portion for infrastructure and frontline organizations and not just candidates. But right now Oath is trying to meet donors where they are, which is starting out focused on candidate campaigns.
If you want to focus your money on supporting year-round community organizing that engages voters, one option is to go to the Movement Voter Project, which offers a wide array of groups to support. But another similar option that I recently learned about is Flip the Vote. Where MVP goes broad, Flip the Vote goes deep, driving funding to five grassroots voter engagement groups in the must-win swing states of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Each group has a proven track record, is run and staffed largely by people of color rooted in local communities, and focuses on long-term power-building aimed at creating a more equitable society. Every dollar you give via Flip the Vote goes directly to those groups; the organization has a separate group of benefactors that support its tiny staff. Since 2020, Flip the Vote has built a base of 10,000 donors through hundreds of house parties; if you are feeling depressed about 2024, there's nothing more uplifting than getting together with friends and neighbors to hear from Flip the Vote's organizers about how you can make a difference.
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