We know that when you donate to political campaigns, you want to see your hard-earned dollars put to good use—and there’s nothing better than direct contact with voters. That’s why we asked our friends at the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to tell us exactly what the candidates Daily Kos endorsed last month to take the state House back from Republicans need in order to get out the vote and finish strong:
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Laurie Smith is $5,000 short of what she needs to fully fund her paid canvasser program.
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Paul Takac, who is running in a district that includes the Penn State campus, is $20,000 short on his student engagement program.
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Anna Thomas needs $8,000 to run a paid phone program to contact younger voters who are away at college—but still registered in-district—to remind them to vote by mail.
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Mark Moffa needs $8,000 to launch a paid canvass to target independent women and talk to them about reproductive rights.
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Missy Cerratto and Lisa Boroski need about $16,000 each to launch paid phone programs.
Can you chip in $19—that's just $1 to each of the 19 Daily Kos-endorsed Democrats running for state House in Pennsylvania and Michigan—to help flip two Republican-held state houses from red to blue? Time is running out, so please click here to donate now.
Acting together, our small grassroots donations can help make up each of these gaps and allow all of these campaigns to reach the voters they need to communicate with in order to win. And personally, I love seeing this sort of transparency, because we don’t often get this kind of detailed window into campaign spending. But now we have one.
And this really matters, because Democrats have a shot of capturing the Pennsylvania state House for the first time in more than a decade—but we can only do it if these candidates have the resources they need to win. The problem is that downballot races like these often go under the radar for Democratic donors, even though an entire state House campaign might cost less than a congressional candidate raises in a single fundraising quarter.
We spent much of the past decade targeting key races across the country to break Republicans' grip on power in states that had been massively—and, in many cases, illegally—gerrymandered to make Democrats uncompetitive. We finally met with success in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and now both states have the chance to elect Democratic majorities in the legislature for the first time in many years.
The past few years have made painfully clear just how important these legislatures can be. Republicans have used their majorities at the legislative level to pass some of the most breathtakingly regressive voter disenfranchisement laws in history. Republican legislatures were a centerpiece of Donald Trump's plan to steal the 2020 election, and now that the right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, state lawmakers are using their powers to massively restrict or even outlaw abortion. But we can break Republican majorities in two big swing states with your help.
Please, if you haven't already, donate $19 right now to put these 19 Daily Kos-endorsed Democrats for state House over the top.