How To Not Set Your Money on Fire in 2024

A new donation platform, Oath.vote, seeks to change donor behavior. Plus, the silence of the American Jewish establishment as Bibi threatens a million-plus Gazan civilians.

I’ve written multiple times about the problem of political rage-giving, which is when donors give campaign contributions to candidates running against entrenched incumbents that they hate, but who have no chance of winning. Candidates like Marcus Flowers (who raised $16 million in his failed 2022 bid against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene), Amy McGrath (who raised $94 million in her failed 2020 run against Sen. Mitch McConnell), and Jaime Harrison (who raised a whopping $130 million in his failed 2020 challenge to Sen. Lindsey Graham) broke fundraising records and still went down to very predictable defeats. The problem is made worse by political professionals who rake in huge fees pumping out shrill emails urging people to give, and far too many small donors aren’t sophisticated enough to know if they’re spending their money wisely.

Enter a new solution: Oath.vote, which makes data-driven recommendations about how to ensure your dollars go where they are most needed and most useful. I spoke with co-founder Brian Derrick last Friday and came away quite impressed. Here are a few excerpts of our conversation.

Derrick: We analyze thousands of relevant races, federal and statewide. We've done 65 or 70 state legislative chambers, and then select local races all the way down to the school board. We analyze those races across three metrics--competitiveness, stakes and financial need--to find what we believe are the races where dollars will go furthest. Based on those three metrics we assigne candidates a score of one through ten, which is just a quick signal to a donor about the relative impact of their dollars in one race versus another.

So use the classic example: Amy McGrath in Kentucky with $100 million and a long shot to win is going to have a really low impact score; your $10 is just not going to meaningfully move the needle there. While an Arizona state senate race that's a toss-up by every metric where control of the chamber is at stake could end up with a 10 out of 10, potentially something like that. We put those recommendations with the visible impact scores up onto the platform. Anyone can access that; it's free to use.

You can select an issue that you're most interested in. We break candidates out by protecting democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, etc. Defeating Trump is our number one issue right now. And then you click donate and we, by default, recommend splitting a donation across a number of races. So that way it's not someone giving to this one candidate because they like where they went to law school and like their most recent ad, but it's more about the strategic value of these specific districts.

Q: If someone goes to your website, the first thing they’re asked is to join Oath.vote. Why do you ask people to join?

Derrick: Part of the dynamic shift that we are pursuing is rather than us bugging you to give $5, we want the donor to tell us what they're interested in. And so, with that quick onboarding, we ask four questions: What issues motivate you, what you want to focus on, what your budget is, and how often you want recommendations. And so that enables us to send increasingly personalized recommendations, where tens of thousands of people can get an email with a different recommendation. One might say here’s your once-a-week reproductive rights recommendation versus to somebody else it’s your once quarterly recommendation that's really focused on protecting democracy. And those will look different.

Q: How much do you adjust your recommendations based on changing information like updated quarterly campaign finance reports? That must help you make judgments about things like viability and competitiveness.

Derrick: Exactly. The filings that certainly help with our financial need metric. There's of course foundational data around the district and voter registration advantage that don't change so much from month to month, but there are also polling components. I think we saw eight House districts move this week, four in the direction of Democrats, four in the direction of Republicans. And so their scores were updated to reflect that. It's different at the state level, state by state because some of the states have monthly reporting requirements. Some of them are once every six months.

Q: I would think you have lots of challenges. Polling itself is inherently broken in many ways. And there are some solutions about which polls to trust more but I think whoever it is on your team that is focused on getting this algorithm to be as good as you can get it has got to be having sleepless nights.

Derrick: It's a really interesting challenge. Most people are using polling to try to predict an outcome and we are not. We are trying to predict a window. One of our core metrics as to how successful we are donors on behalf of our users, is how much funding we direct to races that are decided by less than 5%. And so while the polling might be wrong on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s race by three points which could be problematic for you, it actually is accurate enough for us to say we do think that this is going to be a really competitive race one way or the other, whether it's decided by three points in favor of her, or if it's decided by three points in favor or opponent. That six-point window is exactly where people should be directing funding. So, it's a little bit more helpful to us that it might be to the campaigns themselves.

Derrick also explained that Oath works to project the optimal funding level for every race, looking at the historic spending trends and the media market as well as other factors like candidate quality and competitiveness. Then they use that projection to make judgments about how well a campaign is doing with its fundraising. While about eighty percent of an Oath recommendation score is based on quantitative analysis, Derrick says he draws on human insight as well. “I am constantly on the phone talking to organizers,” he says. “We don't take information or input from candidates and campaigns themselves, but we talk to state parties, we talk to caucuses and frontline groups to try to get a better sense of what the data is missing.”

Right now, Derrick says the average Oath user is giving around $250-300 per election cycle. Typically, they live in a blue state, or in a blue city in a red state—places where people feel their dollars can have a greater impact than just their vote. He also says they have users who are independents or right-leaning but who want to donate in support of abortion rights ballot initiatives or candidates.

Interestingly, Oath.vote switched from using ActBlue as its donation platform at first to using Democracy Engine. Derrick told me that is because ActBlue didn’t allow them to withhold donor information from campaigns and they want to avoid a situation where donors whose contributions are split ten ways getting added to ten new email lists. ActBlue also doesn’t allow middlemen like Oath to generate revenue from voluntary tips, which is how the start-up is making money.

Derrick told me that he and his team are working on lots of new features for Oath (which is so named because they eventually want to cover every elected position where a person takes an oath of office). One would assign an impact value to donations, to help people understand how much more valuable early contributions are than last-minute ones. Another is to add more explanatory language around the specific scores they assign to candidates. And a third is to offer a “smart search” feature that helps guide a potential donor toward the choices that make the most sense.

One last thing that Oath does that I really like is send members a “personal impact” report at the end of the cycle letting them know what their impact was. If more people start giving this way, at least some of the oxygen that keeps bad candidates like Marcus Flowers and their consultants alive will be siphoned away.

—Related: One thing that Oath doesn’t do as of now, though it may in the future, is factor in the importance of supporting year-round community organizing. Derrick told me that especially for wealthier donors who might have a budget of say $20,000 per cycle, he and his team want to offer them an individualized budget that would allocate a portion for infrastructure and frontline organizations and not just candidates. But right now Oath is trying to meet donors where they are, which is starting out focused on candidate campaigns.

If you want to focus your money on supporting year-round community organizing that engages voters, one option is to go to the Movement Voter Project, which offers a wide array of groups to support. But another similar option that I recently learned about is Flip the Vote. Where MVP goes broad, Flip the Vote goes deep, driving funding to five grassroots voter engagement groups in the must-win swing states of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Each group has a proven track record, is run and staffed largely by people of color rooted in local communities, and focuses on long-term power-building aimed at creating a more equitable society. Every dollar you give via Flip the Vote goes directly to those groups; the organization has a separate group of benefactors that support its tiny staff. Since 2020, Flip the Vote has built a base of 10,000 donors through hundreds of house parties; if you are feeling depressed about 2024, there’s nothing more uplifting than getting together with friends and neighbors to hear from Flip the Vote’s organizers about how you can make a difference.

The Silence of the American Jewish Establishment

“When I look at the organized American Jewish community—the community that in many ways I am very much a part of in my daily life—I think I’m living in an insane asylum. It’s not an insane asylum where people are screaming. It’s an insane asylum precisely because people are not screaming, because of the kind of the profound and utterly frightening silence that you see from so many Jewish institutions, if not active enthusiastic support for this horrifying, horrifying slaughter in which people are being reduced to literal starvation and death because of the actions of a Jewish state.”

That’s the writer Peter Beinart, an Orthodox Jew, writing in his Substack newsletter from this past Friday, as the news spread that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ordering the Israeli army to invade Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza that is the refugee of more than one million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war against Hamas.

Beinart is right. With the exception of Rabbis4Ceasefire, which is organizing ongoing vigils and protests, and the Progressive Israel Network, whose member organizations have spoken up in varied ways against what Israel is doing in Gaza, there’s a resounding silence from the community organizations and organs of the American Jewish establishment. This isn’t just because they are reacting to the “Israel deserves all the blame” statements that streamed from the #FreePalestine left in the days right after October 7. They are in full “defend Israel” mode. Beinart says that he searched the Twitter/X accounts of a large number of Jewish groups, religious and political ((including AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Orthodox Union, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the US Holocaust Museum and the Simon Wiesenthal Center), and then put in words like “Rafah” and “starvation” to see if they even acknowledged the horror of what is happening to Palestinian civilians. “There was not a single source that brought it up,” he writes.

I decided to test the same proposition in the context of my own congressional district, where a fierce primary fight is brewing between the two-term Democratic incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Westchester county executive George Latimer. Before Latimer announced his candidacy in December, a group of 26 local rabbis wrote him a private letter urging him to run because they dislike how much Bowman criticizes Israel. The letter was leaked, and it prompted a group of other Jewish residents, including me, to pen a similar letter to Latimer urging him not to run because we believed it would provoke a divisive and damaging primary. Unfortunately we didn’t have AIPAC behind us, and our letter was ignored.

I went through the list, searching synagogue websites, rabbinic blogs, Instagram and Facebook pages and the like. Like Beinart, I found gurnisht, as they say in Yiddish. Nothing. Where I live, there is no synagogue whose leadership is comfortable dissenting about Israel’s actions in Gaza. There’s more visible dissent about the war in Israel than there is here in Westchester, and that’s even with the Israeli police cracking down on demonstrations. Some of this can be explained pragmatically. Rabbis who serve congregations all know that Israel is a topic that can rip their institution apart. Their older members tend to be reflexively more pro-Israel; their younger members may be less so, but if you question Israeli policies inside one of these institutions, you risk blowing them up. Last year, with just a few exceptions, Jewish communal and rabbinic leaders in Westchester were also silent about the battle to preserve Israeli democracy—even as substantial numbers of Israelis begged them for support. It’s rare to find a large or even visible progressive- or anti-Zionist grouping inside a mainstream synagogue (though I’ve heard of a few)—those Jews tend to be less likely to affiliate. After all, one of the reasons younger Jews are alienated from the mainstream Jewish establishment is its silence over or vocal support for Israel’s increasingly rightwing policies.

But it’s important to understand that, per Beinart’s plea, mainstream Jewish leaders and rabbis aren’t silent about what is happening; the way they talk about it is meant to do two things at once: first, to reassure their Israel-flag-waving members that they are of course in the right; Israel’s war is just, no matter what others say. (I disagree—Israel’s right to self-defense does not give it permission to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.) But then they add a little salve, meant to calm people’s consciences. It’s OK, they’re saying, to feel a little bad about this.

Take Rabbi Jonathan E. Blake of the Westchester Reform Temple, who led the group of 26 in their letter urging Latimer to primary Bowman. WRT considers itself to be a liberal-to-progressive congregation. Rabbi Blake appears to be a resolute supporter of the war, though one who hints at internal conflicts. A sermon he gave on January 12, which he posted on his blog, makes a provocative comparison between the ancient Egyptians and today’s Gazans. Drawing on the Biblical story of Moses’s confrontation with Pharaoh, he speaks about “the contest of escalating violence between the God of the Hebrews and the Pharaoh…with the objective of freeing the captive Israelites from Pharaoh’s ruthless terror regime. Unmentioned but surely present,“ he notes, “were the countless Egyptians enduring a horrific bombardment which brings to their territory widespread destruction of property, the death of cattle and livestock, a shortage of food and potable water, outbreaks of vermin and disease; a terrifying rain of fiery hail,” etc.

Continuing the analogy, Rabbi Blake tries to get in the head of those Egyptian civilians. “Did they blame Pharaoh and his courtiers for getting them into this mess in the first place?  Did they blame Pharaoh for his stated aim to commit genocide against the Hebrews, issuing a policy of drowning their children in the Nile?” It’s pretty clear Blake is suggesting a distinction between Hamas (Pharaoh) and ordinary Gazans (the Egyptian masses), but not all that much. “I imagine that these ordinary Egyptians, embittered by life and indoctrinated by their state-sponsored belief system to worship death, probably carried a deep and pervasive sense of victimhood.” Remember, many American Jews (and many Israelis) think all Palestinians have been indoctrinated into hating Israel and Jews. Israel is noble so the only possible reason they hate us is because their leaders brainwash them.

Still, at least Blake remembers the rabbinic teaching about not exulting at the suffering of our enemies. (During the Passover seder, Jews take ten drops of wine out of their cups to recall how the Ten Plagues harmed Egyptians.) “Even in the hell of war, Judaism does not give us license to dehumanize the enemy,” he tells his congregants. God tells the angels not to rejoice as the Egyptian army, in pursuit of the escaping Hebrews, drowns in the Red Sea. The Torah, Black reminds us, even says “…You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land (Deut. 23:7b).” And so what does that say about Israel’s collective punishment of Gazans? Blake is silent. This is as far he ventures.

But that’s not the end of the story. Two days, after Bowman tweeted criticism of Netanyahu for a new wave of attacks on Rafah that killed dozens of innocent civilians there, writing: “While we watched the Super Bowl, Netanyahu launched a wave of attacks and killed innocent civilians in Rafah - a place where many refugees fled for relative safety - despite warnings from Biden.” Rabbi Blake responded directly to Bowman on Twitter, writing, “You mean: while we watched the Super Bowl, Israel successfully carried out a rescue mission to save two of its citizens who had been kidnapped from their homes and kept in brutal captivity for 129 days by a notorious terror regime?” So much for not dehumanizing the enemy. (Blake’s synagogue is currently planning a “solidarity and relief mission” to Israel in March. There are no meetings with Palestinians on their itinerary.)

Other Reading

—It’s one thing to ask voters to care about abstract “threats to democracy.” It’s quite another to imagine “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as the Orange Cheeto puts it at his rallies. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wrote last week, Stephen Miller, who is probably one of the most openly fascist of Trump’s inner circle, gave a little-noticed interview with conservative activist Charlie Kirk in November. In the interview, Miller said that Trump would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden. To round up them up, Miller said, the administration would deputize National Guard units from red states to go into blue states and cities “arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”

Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk. Such a program, or pogrom, could require 100,000 to 150,000 deputized officers, plus another 50,000 to staff the camps where the deportees would be, ahem, concentrated. It would also likely trigger mass civil unrest, giving Trump justification to invoke the Insurrection Act. Now do I have your attention?

—Speaking of undigested craziness from the Orange Cheeto, I don’t think we have even begun to see the effects of his latest declaration about abandoning NATO allies to Russian aggression. Speaking at a South Carolina rally Saturday he said he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” if NATO countries didn’t spend more on their own defense. Roughly 41 million Americans are of German ancestry. A lot live in swing states (1.1 million in PA; almost a million in WI). Another nine million trace their roots back to Poland (250K in MI, 200K in PA). And while just one million Americans have Ukrainian ancestry, with most in NY, CA, NJ and FL, nearly 100K live in PA. As the NATO alliance starts to recognize the threat a Trump victory represents to their independence, we should expect a backlash against his recklessness not just from the foreign policy “blob” inside Washington, but also from people hearing from anxious relatives in Europe.

The fight to keep Trump out of the White House is just beginning. Yes, it’s going to be close. But have some spine, folks, we’re just getting started.

End Times

An oldie but goodie for Valentine’s Day. And it’s a story about organizing!