Every Candidate You Donated to Won - That's Bad

You want to move a loss to a win with your donation

If you want to feel really good that everyone you donated to on election day, then donate to candidates in D+10 districts that are going to win no matter what. Here in Colorado you could donate to Polis, Bennet, DeGette, & Neguse and know come election day all your bets will pay off.

And you will have made no difference.

Your donations should be in close races that matter. If you get it perfect half your donations went to candidates who won by less than 0.5% and half lost by 0.5%. If you donate in the battlegrounds by definition many of the candidates you donated to lost. And many won, barely.

With that said, it’s hard to determine which races will be that close. And on the close races you have to make a judgement call of which way the electorate will swing in the last 2 days. In the ‘24 election I felt that the close races would swing Republican and so donated to Democrats that were ahead a couple of percent figuring they needed everything they had to hold that to a win.

When the election results came in, I was wrong in that estimation of the final swing. I should have donated to the candidates who were slightly behind in the polls. I do think donating to the state Senate candidates in the competitive districts was a good move as some of those races were close.

But instead of donating to Weiser & Griswold, I should have donated to Caraveo & Frisch. I donated based on my guess of a final swing going the other way.

So all my donations went to candidates who won. And that’s bad because I didn’t have as much impact as I would have if I had guessed the final swing better.

With that said, I took the right approach. And in ‘24 I’ll go more aggressive donating to those key Democrats that look like they are going to get 49% of the vote. Across the board, I had all winners this election so I’m shooting for a majority barely losing in ‘24.

And as soon as Caraveo & Frisch have donation pages up for ‘24 I’m making the maximum donation to each. Donations early are more powerful and their races will be close.