I know that this diary will either be taken very seriously and spur new thinking and healthy debate, be ignored because I am too new, or I will start a huge pie fight. I’m willing to take the risk. I’m going to think both very short term (Georgia runoffs) and long term (how we choose to use our ActBlue money in general). I promised myself I would NEVER do this until the heat of the election moment is gone, but the stakes are too high now for me (see above politcal ad) to NOT do this complex diary.
First, the #1 rule of donating is that at election time it is always a VERY emotional decision. I am very emotional and manic right now, and I know how it goes because I just had my emotions hacked by the news of the day and the ad behind the #hashtag that I posted. I promised myself as a Christmas present that I would give myself a couple days of rest before going back into the sausage grinder and start doing this in the intermission period. How can I not try to repay the gift this site has given me? I am intending upon giving you options here. Some of which you may think are absolute jokes or grifts. Some of which really don’t need the money, but you may think deserve a few bits of coin anyways. I’m not here to pass judgment on the value of each cause through your lens. Please don’t insult mine. DO YOUR HOMEWORK. APPLY YOUR VALUES. Go ahead and be emotional too, but always have that other side of you lurking and weigh every factor after the emotional burst is done. Read the second and third parts too!
Second, I know that times are very tough right now. I empathize with people that are struggling to put food on the table, keep their lives together mentally, and scramble to earn enough money to keep a roof over their heads. That was me as a teacher in Arizona. I understand that I now live with an upper middle class family and have the economic privilege of writing this diary. This is how I think I can best help the cause right now. If you cannot donate, that’s okay. You can be an activist in other ways, like
- Mental health advocate in me: staying alive, and taking care of you first. You take care of you is my #1 rule. That helps us by preserving you for future fights. Even by doing this little, you are helping the cause!
- You can find a way to phone bank or text bank. Contact those potential voters in Georgia. I know this is the privilege of time. I will explain this privilege in my personal radicalization story. They know how to help if you are reluctant. They won’t give you the challenging contact lists.
- If you live in or near Georgia, volunteer to canvass responsibly if you feel up to taking that risk in the socially distanced era of Covid-19. Just know that canvassing is like eating a whole bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans in the world of Harry Potter and being brave to try out every single one. If this is your first time canvassing or are an outsider, listen to the local ones who have made a living doing this. They know which flavors of beans to watch out for. This is the privilege of location right now.
The #2 rule of donating, and one I am glad I listened to, is that once you cross this Rubicon of activism, the organizations you do it for will always come back and ask for more. Be ready for it and set that boundary NOW!
- Use a burner email account, DO NOT USE YOUR MAIN ONE. It WILL get flooded with fundraising emails, AND CAMPAIGNS SHARE INFO WITH EACH OTHER. Fundraising pitches are often apocalyptic, and are meant to urge you to give more. Best not to see them if you are emotionally vulnerable, like me.
- Use a burner phone number if you can afford to. It is hard not to donate without giving your phone number out. It is impossible to text/phone bank that way. The texts will come at you fast and furious and at all hours. I used my personal number because I decided that I am capable of filtering it out on my phone on a case by case basis. Sometimes, I gave an extra non-recurring donation because I used it as a reminder system of who/what I am fighting for.
Here is the most immediate need, and who I have donated to and why. Feel free to add to this list in the comments and I will add yours to it. I’d create a bundled ActBlue with that cool thermometer thingy, but I don’t know how. Someone else can take that step and teach me how to add that in if this gets noticed.
I have a $100/week recurring with both Ossoff AND Warnock. They probably have more money than needed right now, but this was left over from my previous donation strategy. Read my personal radicalization story and the lessons learned from it for more. If you have the luxury, don’t forget down ballot candidate Daniel Blackman!
I donate $10/week to Stacey Abrams (#1 individual hero of the 2020 election to me) and her organization Fair Fight. This is the best bang for the buck right now, because it is Georgia based, is growing the potential voter pool, fighting voter suppression, and focusing on canvassing and turn out. IF YOU CAN ONLY CHOOSE ONE, THIS ONE IS THE BEST. It also fits into my criteria below the fold.
I donate $5/week to Marc Elias (#2 individual hero of the 2020 election to me) and his legal group Democracy Docket Action Fund. I distrust lawyers most of the time, but this one is the best in the field right now at a cause I strongly believe in: every voter should have the right to vote without being suppressed. Court cases take money to research, money to file in a court, and might allow him to take some cases pro bono for clients that would otherwise not afford him.
I have donated a $20 spot donation to Really American PAC. It was based off of the claim they are doing it to fund a riders to the polls program. 1 funded one rider *Sarah McLachlan sad music ad starts playing* today. They are worth it to me because I enjoy their viral ads and their #hashtags tend to trend when they do them. This is a good example of an emotional donation for me, and I don’t have a recurring donation yet because they haven’t yet delivered the goods and I haven’t done a deep dive on the organization.
I have donated $10 spot donation to the brothers of the Meidas Touch group. It was based off of a claim that they are funding a grassroots campaign to do responsible socially distanced canvassing. That was a little less than an hour of work for one canvasser. Their viral ads are the best to me, and while this is still an emotional one time donation, I could see it as a morphing into a recurring one just based off of the ad strategy alone. The canvassing, if true, will cement it for me. Democrats would be wise to study how they do things in the online Twitter world if they want to be more effective there.
I’m here as a Covid long hauler, with no job and source of income right now, and the ad and hashtag #RepublicansDontCare made me realize that I have another story to tell. It is the story of how RBG and Covid radicalized me for this election, and turned me from a passive citizen to an activist. I am merging my twitter life with my life here (promised myself not to do this, because I don’t always follow the Rules of the Road there), because I need to raise the stakes even higher because of the short term above. This is my story.
A Personal Activist Radicalization Story
It all started with the death of RBG.
I was despondent at the news that night. I knew in my heart of hearts the hypocrisy that was going to follow. The #1 factor that motivated me to vote Hillary Clinton no matter what last time was how Merrick Garland was treated by #MoscowMitch. We really need to figure out our Supreme Court problem, because every vacancy now backfires against us by mobilizing their side against us while not doing the same for our side. They understand the value of the Supreme Court.
I sat there not sleeping a wink, the same as when the orange shitgibbon won the Electoral College vote. Try being a teacher in Arizona and having to reassure a classroom of crying 9 to 10 year old Mexicano and working class immigrant kids about their future being threated by the Twitler. HARDEST DAY OF TEACHING EVER, because I needed talking off of the ledge myself and I have white privilege. Then, I didn't have the time or the resources to help. I was stuck in activism refusal problem #1 I listed above: struggling to survive. I didn’t even march with #RedforEd in Arizona as a teacher, though I supported it! Survival is #1 priority for too many people, and we often forget that in campaigns.
I finally came to a conclusion — I was economically in a MUCH better position to help during this shock. I needed to do SOMETHING. I broke through the first barrier I once swore I’d never do: I donated to every Senate campaign I thought competitive, and I did it in an orgy of manic spending like I had never done before. I donated over $2000 in a single night of panic. There’s a reason that ActBlue counter printed money that night. People like me put more skin in the game. I swore that I would never do something as reckless and stupid as that again. Boy, was I WRONG!
In early October, I caught Covid, and I was absolutely irate that #DopeyDon/#DerangedDon allowed the pandemic response to be this bad. It became personal (total white privilege there BTW). The stakes were raised for me once again and this was the trigger that turned me from a passive citizen to an activist. It ‘woke’ me, for lack of a better term. Not only did engagement go up, but I confronted hard truths about myself, and shifted views well to the left politically at the same time.
When I recovered, I knew that I could not sit idly by anymore because the Mango Mussolini was to be the ruin of this country. Obviously, physical actions such as protest and canvassing were out due to Covid long haul. I didn’t want to join a campaign, because I have mental health and trust issues and it is hard to let people in. I was also a new nobody who doesn’t like playing by the rules. I had three choices, and I chose two of three.
- I could up my donation game. I did this, and my previous orgy became policy. I set up ludicrous levels of recurring donations to the Senate campaigns and Biden. I spent over a third of my savings, $7,000, on this front. I considered it a down payment on my future. I’d have less of a one if the Tangerine Terror won again.
- I could become an online social media keyboard commando. I already had a static Twitter feed for online educational news that I left fallow after I quit teaching. I activated it, purged the static part of it and became a bomb thrower It was my emo scream side where I could rant into the ether. Hyper Political Twitter is all about mass culture connections, bomb throwing attacks, and shock outrage. The more mass culture connections you make, the more bomb throwing you do, the more outrageous you are, the more likely it is you will go viral. I am a nobody there, and I want to remain that way. The worst one landed me in Twitter jail and probably on a government watchlist somewhere. That happening has the best thing for me.
- I could use my now endless supply of free time (the time privilege) text banking and phone banking. I was too sick and too shy to do it this time. Learned more about it from asking, and I’d probably be open to it if I didn’t have so many balls up in the manic air right now.
I made my life about defeating the Republicans. I damaged every relationship within my family because of my radicalization. My mental health is sneakily a wreck due to this, because I don’t know how I am doing this; this is so outside my comfort zone. I was hoping for a blowout. A sneaky depressive spiral for me started when that didn’t happen. I was abjectly mortified that Trump came within 45,000 votes of winning AGAIN. This caused the election and activism reanalysis that I will post next.
Reanalysis #1: We Need to Fix Our Donation Focus
We need to play the long game that conservatives have played for 50 years. They started out at the local level at the school board. We need to do the same. We need the 50 state strategy done RIGHT. We cannot rely upon a savior to do it for us, we need to do this ourselves. If we cannot join in, we can fund it. It’s the sneak attack option that is how Republicans find new voters (more on this another day). We need authentic representatives of our values within the community fighting in the trenches for us. THAT is the true 50 state strategy!
Here's how I came to this conclusion:
I looked at the skin in the game that I had put in, a third of my life savings and nest egg to get out of the house of my parents again. THAT is commitment. However, it disgusted me that I also lit so much money on fire blindly without thinking about all possible criteria. A lot of this the fact that there needs to be TWO different donation strategies, a short term AND a long term one. I want more focus on the long term! Here are my donation criteria now:
- I avoid bundled professional organizations such as the DCCC and DSCC and DNC, and state parties/organizations, because I do not have control over how that money is spent. While there is definitely a place for them and I might make a spot donation once in a blue moon, they don’t get funds until last in line.
- I now avoid nationalized races, which are the Presidential race, Senate races, and increasingly House races. I make an exception on an extremely limited basis for what I consider underfunded longshot campaigns that might work demographically. Think Texas 03 and Texas 31. I avoided the House this year, because I thought we were on offense. Boy, I would have violated my first rule had I had the privilege of a crystal ball and omnipotence! There are too many emotional donors swimming in this pond, and my money will be lit on fire here on a strategic standpoint.
- For PACs like Meidas Touch, and Really American, I might spot donate once in a while until I do a deep dive into their funding levels and what they do with the money. Political ad based PACs are this way for me. Be careful of emotionally donating to these based upon slick presentation. They could be a grift.
- I’m getting closer to what I want the focus to be with my recurring long term donations to issue advocacy groups. I fund groups that I agree with like David Hogg (youth activism and gun safety), Democracy Docket (free and fair election rules), ACLU (free speech for everyone), Working Families Party (activist working class left), DO YOUR HOMEWORK HERE, and support the ones you feel most comfortable with. BEST LONG TERM BANG FOR YOUR VALUES BUCK IS HERE.
Now, I get to my 50 state strategy hobby horse that has become the focus of my strategic long term donations, especially after such a very close election and unprecedented voting patterns. I want to donate to voices that actually work in the communities they target because THAT is how you build a 50 state strategy. But that is another post. I haven’t 100% done the research and I have white upper middle class privilege, so many of these relied upon a bundled voter turnout activist PAC I ran across in my elections donating. Might have been the best $100 I spent! If you have better or alternative options, please let me know! I’m not 100% knowledgeable here. There’s always a potential for co-opting, misrepresentation, and grift here too! DO YOUR HOMEWORK!
Here is my list of current grassroots organizations I have a $5 recurring monthly donation to right now until the database is built. These I have NOT done the homework on or have knowledge about because this part of the diary is about two months premature. Fill me in if I am wrong please!
Black Voters Matter Fund
Mijente PAC
Make the Road Action
Voto Latino
Community Change Action
Progressive Turnout Project
Now, these two based upon results and Arizona political knowledge I can 100% ENDORSE. They delivered Arizona for us, along with Cindy McCain (unpopular take here I know, but she is #3 individual hero (outside of running for office) on my list this election for her party switching stand. I say this because along with the grassroots she helped deliver Arizona. Without her AND the activism, we wind up short of the target. We needed BOTH. I know my second home state).
This one came from our own DailyKos. It got 151 recs, but was likely rabbit holed by us due to the man who lives rent free in the heads of DailyKos in #Cult45. Four Directions focuses on Native American political activism. The results of unprecedented Diné and other tribal turnout in Arizona speak for themselves.
One Arizona focuses on Native American and Hispanic turnout — the second one is the demographics of the school I taught at. They also reach out to new arrivals in the state. They were the only ones who reached out to me about voting in the AZ 08 Lesko/Tipirneni special election. That was a ballot that would have likely gathered dust on my table (I signed up for mail in ballots because I didn’t know where the polling location was). They knew my lack of history, they took a chance, and they got a vote for Dr. Hiral. This I knew was happening in Arizona. It broadened my donation pool to grassroots organizations above.
There is one final group I mentioned above: Fair Fight. To me, this is the BEST of all long term strategic donating money that gave us proven results in Georgia. Abrams totally changed my perspective about her 2018 run based upon helping deliver RESULTS in Georgia. It is the perfect storm of voter registration, issue advocacy, grassroots organizing for a state, and running a parallel operation to the official election campaign that supplements it.
The head of DNC is all about message discipline and fundraising. Democrats are like herding cats with their messages, and I don’t know how to even suggest how to fix that yet without offending someone. That’s a hot take for another day.
We need a hybrid of Jaime Harrison (who can fundraise like God and is the short term funding strategy) and Stacey Abrams (50 state grassroots long term funding) as our head of DNC. We need BOTH strategies right now: short term ActBlue to hold the line against the fascist tide and long game ActBlue to change the conversation in grassroots communities.
One last word. If this diary makes you want to lob pie at one another, then we fall. We will fail. My mantra is Winston Churchill’s famous speech combined with a Katniss Everdeen appeal to who the TRUE enemy is:
"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."