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I've been spending most of my political time and energy the past year doing local organizing, talking to elected officials, and supporting fighters in the primaries. Now it's 100 days to the general midterm election; time to place some bets! Come join me!

To date I've mostly not been donating much to individual campaigns -- a bit here and there. I intend first of all to ignore every text and every call, a lot of which are scams and all of which are annoying. Just stop it. But I am going to place some financial bets, as big and as early as I can.

What are my priorities? (a) Flip the house, with as big a margin as we can to block false claims of election rigging. Must-have goal to slow the bleeding.

(b) Flip the Senate. This is a _reach_, because the Senate is inherently hard and right now Democrats have something like 40% chance of doing this. But if I can help push that 40% even slightly higher it's worth it, because the Senate blocks judges.

(c) Build organizations locally. This bullshit of trying to win elections by carpet bombing people at the last minute through buying "airtime" (remember that?) or ads on social media that's owned by oligarchs is a terrible way to spend money. It's also got really low ROI.

OK, those are my goals. How do I think I can throw money at this problem? First, prioritize @voteriders.bsky.social, at least up to the employer match for 501(c)(3) organizations. Because that gives me nearly 3x leverage. And VoteRiders is highly efficient -- money to it goes to getting voters

documentation they need to vote, resources and education to get people to navigate the maze of laws the GOP has passed the last few years to try to suppress it. Though they'll help everybody in a nonpartisan way, it's mostly the people the GOP are targeting who need the help.

And if someone who isn't voting for my candidate does end up getting help through a nonprofit to overcome GOP obstruction -- maybe that'll plant a seed for 2028. Anyway, how do I measure this? Well, looking at www.focus4democracy.org/how-we-calcu....

...one way is to measure how many dollars it takes an organization to create one net vote. Given the 3x leverage and the general impact of VoteRiders, I'm guesstimating this ends up being between $40-$120 per net Democratic vote. That's not bad! It'll probably be pretty targeted to battlegrounds.

OK, what's next if I have any more money? Well, right now I'm looking for some high leverage grassroots efforts. I like Seed the Vote (seedthevote.org), which is a local Bay Area org that partners with grassroots orgs around the country to do very early canvassing that may help bypass noise.

Canvassing generally has high ROI and I like their model, so I think I'll put some early seed money in. Let's see how they do. (Funding is via Everyday People PAC.)

What next? Well, Movement Voter PAC looks good right now: movement.vote/2026/. They're aligned with and building local capability in swing areas. If marginal dollars help with their efforts, this may be another good place to drop money without having to do exhaustive research on campaigns.

I'm also going to donate to Swing Left Peninula, our local organizing group, because I know them personally and they're doing a good job. go.swingleft.org/group/swing-...

I will probably also add some funds directly to our neighbors in California, Randy Villegas in CA-22 and Adam Gray in CA-13 just over the hill. And if I can get the free time I'll go and canvass at least over the hill in CA-22 (Stockton area).

But the other efforts here -- getting people documents so they can vote, getting people talking to each other person to person in strategic areas, investing in turnout in the places where we need it -- that is investing for the future, too. Anyway, that's my thinking. I'll make a budget and start

sending money this week. I'll try to get it all sent as soon as possible for this fall. And then I'll plan to do it again each year. Because the alternative is watching my country slide into a full authoritarian state, apparently! Life is full of choices.

(If anybody has better info or thoughts, let me know!) /end