Balancing Long-term and Short-Term Priorities as a Political Donor
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Except for the 2008 election, every presidential race has been breathtakingly close since 2000 — and 2024 is shaping up to be yet another nail-biter.
No Democrat is happy with today’s razor-thin margins in the Electoral College. It’s pure agony to watch the fate of our democracy hinge on breathtakingly close contests in just a handful of states.
We hate it. We literally lose sleep every four years. And, yet, most of us give zero money to change this situation.
Let me explain.
In 2016, Trump won the presidency by around 80,000 votes spread across three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden won by 42,918 votes across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The 2024 election will likely come down to those same three states — with the outcome again potentially turning on just tens of thousands of votes.
How Donors Can Help Expand the Electoral Map
How can we stop living on the edge like this? The answer is that Democrats need to expand the electoral college map in our favor, putting more states into play.
In a recent post in Blue Tent, I argue that North Carolina (which Biden lost by just 1.3 points) is the best target, followed by Florida (which Biden lost by 3.3 points). In both states, Democrats have the potential to mobilize large numbers of voters of color and young people who are now sitting on the sidelines, as well as to win over persuadable white voters.
This requires investments in grassroots organizing groups that are sustained over time — following the model that helped flip Arizona and Georgia. Right now, though, funds for such work are in short supply. North Carolina groups struggle to pull in major funding, while Democrats seem to have given up on Florida altogether.
A big reason that donors don’t pay much attention to either state is that we always see more urgent priorities. We think in terms of “needs” and “wants.” Winning battleground states on a knife’s edge, like Arizona, is a need. We have to win in those places to survive. Flipping Florida and North Carolina would be nice, but it doesn’t feel essential.
The logic of needs makes sense right before an election and Blue Tent followed it in our own recommendations. But we’ve also argued that all donors should have a balanced giving portfolio that includes long-term investments. Otherwise, we’ll always be scrambling to win by narrow margins in the same handful of states.
Giving to Build a Democratic Supermajority
At an even larger level, Democrats need to think beyond survival and imagine what it might look like to become a dominant party — and what it would really take to achieve that goal. I’ve started to engage this thought experiment in a multi-part blog series, “Path to a Democratic Supermajority.” Read part 1: “Does Anyone Have a Plan?” And part 2: “Scenarios for an Electoral Lock on the White House.”
The idea here is to get a clearer picture of our ultimate destination and then plan backward. While it may seem like a luxury to muse out loud about a 60-40 electoral future, I feel like it’s a necessity. We’ll never get to where we want to go without a map.
A case in point is the Electoral College. I argue that it’s totally doable for Democrats to achieve a lock on the White House in the foreseeable future — but only if we make the right moves starting now.
Which brings me back to North Carolina and Florida — the first stepping stones to that lock.
Photo credit: Dilok Klaisataporn/Shutterstock
