The Sister District Project is one of several organizations founded by progressives in the wake of the 2016 electoral disaster to address one of the Democratic Party’s most critical structural problems: Their supporters are concentrated in blue states and major metropolitan areas, often at a great distance from any competitive election. The idea behind SDP is to redistribute resources from these ultra-Democratic areas to where they’re most needed. The 527 nonprofit recruits Democratic volunteers in safely blue areas and gets them to phonebank, text bank, write postcards, and fundraise for candidates in a few dozen state legislative seats around the country every cycle.
SDP works to elect Democrats, but is independent of the Democratic party structure, which gives it freedom party committees don’t have. For one thing, it focuses only on a handful of state legislative races every cycle, raising an average of $45,000 per candidate and providing an average of over 1,500 volunteer hours to each of those campaigns. It also takes a metrics-based approach to where it invests and what tactics it uses. Unlike many other organizations, SDP openly reflects on its work through detailed impact reports and blog posts describing the research it does into the efficacy of various campaign tools.
State-level candidates are often badly in need of resources, and elections can be decided by a few hundred votes (or a single vote, as in the case of one 2017 Virginia race). So money, organizing and GOTV efforts are critical aspects to these campaigns. SDP shares data about its performance and how it measures success, providing orders of magnitude more information than old-school, tight-lipped Democratic operations. This makes it possible for donors to assess both the group’s priorities and it’s performance. This admirable approach—and the efficiency revealed by its numbers—is why Blue Tent strongly recommends Sister District Project to donors, and why we consider giving to this group to be a priority.
What are its core strategies?
With literally hundreds of state legislative races every cycle, SDP must pick a relatively small number of candidates to back. In 2020, the group had 40 “Sister Races,” up from 17 in 2019 and 25 in 2018. Each of these candidates receives substantial volunteer help: SDP volunteers make phone calls, write postcards, and in non-pandemic years, knock on doors. (SDP also endorses candidates in races in which it is not investing.) SDP candidates get practical resources such as a “campaign-in-a-box library” that includes templates and best practices, and makes its staff available for questions from candidates. In addition, SDP staff provide specialized assistance to campaigns on everything from digital strategy to vendor relationships, in the hope that these campaigns will gain what can be a decisive edge in often razor-close races.
How does it spend money?
SDP is more notable for the way it mobilizes volunteers than the size of its wallet. According to the group’s 2020 impact report, SDP volunteers made 34.5% of the in-district calls to potential voters for Sister Race candidates, a testament to the organization’s ability to mobilize volunteers in one place to help candidates in another. Fundraising by Sister District accounted for about 9.7% of total funds raised by the 40 candidates the group supported in 2020 ($1.8 million total).
One way to help Democrats win state legislatures is to look up SDP’s Sister Races and donate to them. These are selected because they are anticipated to be battleground races. But you can also donate directly to SDP, which will use the funds to finance its own operations; it takes paid staff to identify races and candidates who can be targeted, and it also takes paid staff to organize volunteers and provide assistance tailored to the needs of a specific campaign. More donations would mean SDP could expand to cover more races.
The group also has an affiliated 501(c)(4) called the Sister District Action Network (SDAN), which is responsible for researching methods of voter outreach and assessing which ones are most successful. Lala Wu, an SDP co-founder, told Blue Tent that SDAN publishes all of its research, even studies that produce results it doesn’t particularly like.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of its strategies?
The big downside with SDP is that it doesn’t influence that many elections. Additionally, since it tries to target races in a variety of states each cycle rather than focusing on a single legislative chamber, there isn’t much of a chance that SDP will single-handedly flip a state capitol from red to blue. This is a byproduct of the group’s choice to give a lot of assistance to a few dozen campaigns rather than giving small amounts of help to many campaigns.
But SDP’s hands-on assistance is clearly valued by campaigns. Wu pointed Blue Tent to a 2020 survey of candidates done by the Pipeline Initiative. These candidates were asked what kind of support they most appreciated, and what kind of support was most available. Endorsements were easily obtained but not necessarily seen as effective (69% of candidates said they received endorsements but only 35% highly valued these). The type of support most needed, but which didn’t often manifest, was mobilizing volunteers (58% valued, 38% received) and raising money from donors (47% valued, only 26% received). The sort of thing SDP does, in other words, is what candidates themselves say they need.
What is its track record of achieving its goals?
In 2020, SDP won only 15 of its 40 Sister Races—but wins and losses are a lousy way to judge an organization. More important is whether the races were close, because that shows a group was putting resources into competitive elections. On that front, 57.5% of Sister Races were decided by less than 5% of the vote, which is comparable to results in 2019 and 2018. In 2020, 57.7% of Sister Race candidates outperformed the previous Democrat to run for that seat, which is actually lower than usual (probably reflecting the fact that 2020 was bad year to be a down-ballot Democrat): In 2018 and 2019, respectively, 96% and 88% of Sister Race candidates outperformed the previous Democrat.
Another way to judge SDP is through its post-election surveys of its candidates, and of the 31 endorsed campaigns that replied in 2020, 100% said the group’s fundraising and field support were better than the other national organizations who helped these campaigns. This might be because SDP doesn’t provide support to all that many candidates, allowing it to focus it on its handful of Sister Races.
Finally, though wins and losses aren’t a great metric, there are definitely cases where SDP swung a result. In 2019, the group put resources behind Shanda Yates, a Democrat running for a Mississippi House seat that a Republican had held for 32 years. She won by less than 200 votes, and told the Jackson Free Press that SDP provided invaluable technical support in helping her identify supporters and create successful door-knocking programs.
A caveat is that it’s not clear how much SDP can scale this model in which campaigns get such personalized attention (SDP’s head of campaigns knocked on doors for Yates), but it demonstrates how valuable its assistance can be.
Does it have strong leadership and governance?
SDP was founded by five women, three of whom remain full-time with the organization, so it has had a good amount of continuity as it has grown its operations. Notably, this team has been able to shift tactics and launch new ventures as the organization has grown, which should give donors a degree of confidence.
What metrics and milestones does it use to measure its success?
As noted above, SDP is very metrics-focused, and its unusually comprehensive impact report noted not just how many Sister Races were close, but how much money went to candidates of color and women candidates; what proportion of Sister Race candidates’ funding and voter communications were contributed by SDP; and how satisfied candidates were with SDP.
SDP obviously wants to win campaigns, but more than that, it wants to put its efforts behind campaigns that are in close fights, it wants to support a diverse array of candidates, and it wants to provide resources valued by campaigns.
How transparent is it about its spending, results, and learning from its mistakes?
One nice thing about SDP is that it’s unusually transparent about what it is trying to do and why it favors some tactics over others. Its habit of publishing every study it undertakes shows its commitment to transparency and thinking analytically about elections.
A recent example of this is SDAN’s studies on the effects of postcards. Many progressive groups, including SDP, organize volunteers to hand-write postcards and send them to potential voters as a get-out-the-vote measure. This is a popular tactic because the pandemic limited person-to-person voter contacts and because it’s relatively easy to get volunteers to sign up to write postcards. One two-state study from SDAN showed postcards could boost primary participation rates, but other SDAN studies have suggested postcard campaigns weren’t that successful at increasing general election turnout or getting people to register to vote. Even when postcards were used to follow up an earlier (non-postcard) voter contact, there was no statistically significant effect, one SDAN study found.
These findings (which are more preliminary than conclusive) sit awkwardly next to SDP’s bragging in its impact report that it sent over 318,000 postcards in the 2020 cycle. This shows a kind of rigor in the group’s approach—it is thinking about what works and what doesn’t, and is willing to think out loud. (These studies may be why Sister District hasn’t gone all-in on postcarding as a tactic.)
Is it committed to racial and gender equity both internally and in its strategies?
Unlike some progressive groups, SDP’s mission isn’t explicitly to elect women or people of color. But it was founded by a diverse group of women and in practice, a majority of its funding goes to women candidates. Additionally, 47% of its 2020 Sister Races featured candidates of color, and 10% were LGBTQ.
Does it collaborate well and is it respected by its peers?
As noted above, the candidates who work with SDP tend to appreciate its help. The group has also been working with other progressive organizations on new initiatives, including “Future Winners,” a collaboration with Run For Something and EMILY’s List. The idea is that many first-time candidates have tons of political talent and potential, but if they lose—which they often do through no fault of their own—they decide to get out of electoral politics. Future Winners aims to identify these people, train them up, and prepare them to run again and win (especially women and people of color, who are disproportionately likely not to run again). This kind of pipeline management is important at the lower levels of politics, and Future Winners is a novel approach to improving candidate quality.
Another new program of note is the “State Bridges” initiative, which is an attempt to get SDP volunteers to fundraise for a handful of other organizations, like Citizen Action of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Stands Up. This shows that SDP is looking for multiple avenues to build power and win elections beyond their candidate-driven model.
Does it have clear and realistic plans for the future?
As the above examples show, after its first couple of cycles in action, SDP has started thinking more about what it can do between elections to help Democrats win. It continues to mostly do what it does best—directing blue-state volunteers and donors to where resources are needed—but has branched out and launched new projects.
One is the “Purple District Project,” which connects sitting Democratic legislators in swing districts with one another so they can share campaign and governing strategy and get to know one another. It’s a relatively small program at present, but is SDP’s attempt to serve a fairly unique group of politicians who have to navigate difficult political terrain.
These plans show SDP moving beyond just trying to win elections to a more holistic power-building model (which other groups at the state level have also been trying to do). The inter-organization partnerships show that SDP has joined a collection of aligned groups—some of them also born in the aftermath of 2016—that are trying to supplement the work of official party organizations and play off of one another’s strengths.
Conclusion
SDP’s transparency, its focus on metrics, and its strategy of intervening in races where it will have an impact make it a great choice for donors who want to maximize the impact of their dollars. It’s not the largest organization, but what it does it does well, and thinks carefully about process. That’s why Blue Tent highly recommends SDP.
Blue Tent is rating it a priority rather than a high priority because while the work it does is great, donors concerned about state legislative races have many avenues for their giving, including donating directly to campaigns. SDP’s Sister Race list can be a resource for donors looking for candidates who need money. But donors who want to build power for Democrats and take a longer view should definitely give to SDP along with candidates across the country.