TakeCongress.org

Ed Baskerville, August 2020

As we head into the most important election of our lives, it’s all hands on deck. To bring our democracy back from the brink, we must elect Joe Biden and win Democratic majorities in Congress.

Volunteers are working hard every day to make that happen, shepherded by tireless volunteer organizers. And you should absolutely volunteer! But all that organization work costs money, and, thanks to the ActBlue platform, there are many ways to donate. This website is yet another.

As the 2018 midterms approached, I was looking for a good strategic way to donate to Democratic candidates that followed a simple philosophy:

Distribute donations intelligently to as many candidates as possible, and do it with transparency, so that donors can see exactly where every dollar is going.

Specifically, I wanted a formula that would give more money to candidates in neck-and-neck races without giving short shrift to candidates with lower—or higher—chances of winning. That is, I wanted donations to be weighted by impact, the same way investing in an index fund hedges your bets across many stocks.

That’s why I ended up building this site, which raised about $75,000 in the last few weeks before the 2018 election (under the name LetsFlipCongress.org), and this year we’re hoping to raise more! In the end, though, this site is just a simple idea for an approach for donations, and its impact will be limited unless it’s attached to an organization with some clout.

So, going forward, my hope is that an established organization will pick up the idea and roll it into their efforts. If you’re from such an organization, once this election is done and won I’d love to chat with you and discuss how to make that happen for 2022.