An open letter to all and future Democratic candidates:
I'm no Koch brother, but I've given a non-trivial amount of money to many Democratic candidates over the last ten years. It was apparently enough that I'm now on pretty much everyone and every organization's email list. In this cycle, so far, I've given money to about a dozen individual candidates and to four different Democratically aligned organizations.
However, barring personal associations, I will no longer be contributing to "campaign" funds for any individual or organization. Instead, I will only contribute to plans to increase voter turnout.
My reasons:
While I'm sure the analytics support it, I'm done with "doomsday" fundraising email subjects. I'm sick of always leading in the general public polls, but often losing in the likely voter polls. I'm fed up with losing elections where 20% turn out, despite 60% opposing the result.
Most of the people I know don't even realize there's an election coming up. And that's despite me trying to talk about specifics of the upcoming election all the time.
We've already won the policy debate -- the only problem is that most of the people that agree with us don't vote.
Various Republican groups recently combined for a million dollar ad buy in my "media market". I've seen none of their ads, and so far, no one I know has seen any of their ads either. We download or stream everything. I haven't had cable or watched broadcast TV in years. A million dollars in TV ads is almost nonexistent for the "youth vote" under 40 or so. But it doesn't matter because only about 3% of the people I know will vote. Most of them don't even realize there is an election coming up.
So I'm only going to send my money to groups that are working to fix this problem: increased awareness of elections and working to convince them that voting is important and worthwhile.
