The letter makes 24 suggestions about how to cure some of Democratic fundraisings’ worst problems, which I’d summarize as:

1. Simple wins that ActBlue should have done long ago

   ActBlue should refuse to serve the worst of the worst: “Scam PACs” that spend most of their money on their own expenses, and organizations that imply they are official party or candidate bodies. For borderline cases, add transparency highlighting the recipients’ unofficial status, or the percentage of funds spent on fundraising and overhead. (ActBlue did expel a few organizations earlier this year that seemed too much like official Kamala Harris entities.)

2. Protections for donors against spam

   Currently, ActBlue seems to do nothing to protect donors against spam. (I asked what they do, and they responded with no comment.) ActBlue didn’t create the spam problem, but it is in a unique position to help fight it. In the short term, there’s a balance between protecting donors from spam and protecting the small-dollar fundraising ecosystem; I’m sympathetic that finding that balance is non-trivial. But the right balance point is definitely more than doing nothing. (In the long term, reducing spam might well increase overall contributions.)

Beyond the letter’s suggestions to make the donor experience less bad, there are ways that ActBlue could affirmatively support donors and fundraisers. Clearest to me are features to support volunteer fundraisers, a group for whom ActBlue offers no support and where good tooling could drive lots of additional fundraising. The pace of new features from ActBlue has been slow at best.

Overall, ActBlue has been a great success story of non-profit movement infrastructure. But the case for non-profit movement infrastructure only works if that infrastructure grows and improves with the movement’s needs. The need for this open letter, and the breadth and specificity of issues it raises, underscore that ActBlue is underplaying its hand.

If ActBlue fails to move quickly on these issues, it raises the question of whether the movement would do better to shift behind one of ActBlue’s growing set of competitors, including (in no particular order):

• GoodChange

• Numero

• Oath

• Action Network

• DonorBox

For more on the open letter, this is a good overview and this is a great discussion with more context and depth.

“Missouri voted for a $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, and abortion rights & Democrats cannot compete there at all. Why? 

The answer to that is the road to a comeback.”1

We don’t know what wins elections

“Campaign Effects” can move results by roughly at most 5%. Democrats pretty much achieved this, with swing states moving against us 3-5% less than the national average. This tells me that we are doing pretty well in this category, which includes pretty much all campaign activity: Ads, Volunteering, etc.2

Roughly 65% of results are just consistency across election cycles, the smart advisor Matt Singer tells me.

That leaves around 30% of “Other.” This category consists of global events, plus activities whose impact is near-impossible to measure:

• Changing the “Information Environment”3

• Recruitment and selection of candidates

• Choices of broad messaging/policy selection and emphasis

Most time and money focuses on the 5%

Although “Other” has ~six times the impact of Campaign Effects, the time and investment of Democratic funders and professionals is flipped roughly the other way around (i.e. there’s much more focus on Campaign Effects).4

Why? I’ll illustrate with the example of the information environment.

The Information Environment

For the last few years, smart people have been warning that Democrats are lagging badly in the information environment; not just due to TV behemoths Fox News and Sinclair, but also among new media like streamers in fitness and video games.

For the past few years, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I should pay more attention to this area.

Why haven’t I? Here are some reasons that apply to me and (I think) almost all Democratic funders and professionals:

• Limited experience: I don’t have media experience or expertise. I’m not personally a consumer of much new media, so I have little sense of what’s needed.

• Complexity: It’s not obvious what the solutions are.5

• Measurability (Streetlight effect): It’s hard to measure what political impact any media project is having. This is a problem for analyzing projects, and also for recruiting funders and other allies.

• Large check sizes and limited revenue: Media projects often require large amounts of capital. And obviously it’s a tough industry.

• Long-term: Building a subscriber base takes time. It seems hard to test new things with limited capital.

• Orthodoxy: There could be pushback for supporting creators who take positions unpopular among Democrats.6

• General interest: It’s a big world, and there are projects that engage me more than creating new media companies.

These are mostly good reasons!

But if too much of the movement follows this logic, we end up seriously under-investing.

And that’s how we end up with elections decided by things like this:

Imagine you’re a donor with two options to spend $1,000. Which do you choose?

1. Stranger-to-stranger contact (e.g. text banking or canvassing): You expect to generate one vote. The program includes a randomized controlled trial and you know exactly who gets contacted, so afterwards you’ll know how many votes the program produced.

2. Friend-to-friend contact (e.g. volunteer or paid relational): You expect to generate three votes. You can watch people text their friends, but you don’t know who they’re texting or whether they voted. While identical programs have been studied, you’ll never know exactly how many votes you produced.

Too often, the movement chooses Option #1. Even after years of successful relational organizing at scale, the movement’s software, muscle memory, and funding streams emphasize stranger-to-stranger contact. Donor advisor incentives may play some role as well; an advisor recommending #1 above can show clients exact results, whereas that’s less possible with #2.1

This “streetlight effect” isn’t unique to politics. Nike lost about $25 billion of market value over the past year, and according to an insider of two decades, a major reason was prioritizing what can be measured. Nike ended partnerships with iconic athletes, whose ROI is impossible to measure, and replaced them with digital ads and performance marketing that could be tracked.

Relational organizing still needs funding

Leading relational practitioners have shared with me that funding seems more readily available for traditional tactics, but they have had trouble fully funding their programs. Many traditional tactics can no longer usefully accept funding, but relational organizing still can.

If you’re still deploying political funding, look hard at relational programs.

• There’s a “crisis in U.S. housing affordability.”1 Why?

• American rail projects are twice as expensive per mile versus other developed countries. Why?

• It took twenty years to build a bus lane in San Francisco. Why?

The Abundance Agenda has no official definition, but broadly it aims to diagnose and fix problems like these.2

(Update: After publishing this piece, I created AbundanceMap.org which has a roster of 100+ abundance organizations and also a tighter definition of abundance.)

The Abundance Agenda in Two Sentences

There should be more high-quality supply and lower prices for:

• Housing,

• Transportation,

• Energy transmission and generation (especially from clean sources),

• Healthcare, and

• Education & Childcare.

High-quality supply of all these things is blocked by too little government effectiveness, which stems from problems such as:

• Incentives that favor risk aversion over progress, for elected officials and government staff;

• Special interests that use government to entrench themselves;3

• Too many veto points that drag out timeframes or kill projects entirely;

• A buildup of processes that slow progress to a crawl.4

The Abundance Agenda could be unifying

It might be too optimistic to hope that anything can avoid today’s extreme partisanship, but the Abundance Agenda at least has a chance, because it has benefits for multiple factions:5

• Left: Improve human welfare and government effectiveness, and oppose rent-seeking special interests.

• Right: Improve national greatness via growing wealth, improving living conditions, and providing clean and safe public spaces.

• Libertarians: Eliminate bad regulations.

• Business community: Support growth, building, and innovation.

Also, Abundance gets at what I believe most “moderates” want; an efficient government that makes evidence-driven cost/benefit trade-offs to make the country a better place to live. Organizing under an Abundance banner might be successful, whereas organizing “moderates” has mostly failed.6

Making Abundance Happen

As a nascent movement, there is little infrastructure to drive the Abundance Agenda. Most work thus far has been fleshing out the agenda itself, though some organizations are beginning to build explicitly Abundance-focused political power.

Most of the political muscle behind abundance issues is in single-issue organizations such as those focused on housing or transportation.7 One way to imagine new possibilities is by looking at existing political infrastructure, for example:

• Run for Something of abundance (Candidate recruitment and training)

• ALEC of abundance (Model legislation)

• Indivisible of abundance (Local abundance-focused chapters)

• AIPAC of abundance (Bundling for aligned candidates)

• Govern for America of abundance (Placing skilled grads as staff for aligned electeds)

Abundance infrastructure will take some novel shapes. Two examples show early signs of cost-effective success:

• Greenlight America mobilizes clean energy supporters in communities with upcoming permitting decisions. Founded by Indivisible co-founder Matt Traldi, Greenlight America won four out of six campaigns in its pilot phase.

• Abundant SF has showed that a locally-focused donor circle can move the needle by spending $1-2 million to hire staff and support aligned electeds.

Fulfilling the Abundance Agenda requires power at all levels of government; local, state, and federal.

More Abundance infrastructure is bottlenecked on both funding and entrepreneurs, in a chicken-versus-egg way. There are only two or three major funders of abundance work right now.

Conclusion

Please reach out to me if you have thoughts about how to develop and advance the Abundance Agenda.

Appendix: Where to learn more

The most detailed articulation of the Abundance Agenda just came out in August 2024 at http://bringcostsdown.org. Its author Prof. Gary Winslett calls it a “Cost of Living Agenda” because the term Abundance is so unknown. I made a list of essays aiming to define the Abundance Agenda.

Two leading abundance practitioners both write great newsletters:

• Modern Power, by Misha Chellam

• Eating Policy, by Jen Pahlka

Public intellectuals who often cover Abundance themes:

• Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring

• Noah Smith, Noahpinion

• Ezra Klein, New York Times

Organizations have found an elegant solution; let volunteers just invite friends to an event.

The extreme form of this model has no donation ask at the event. A so-called “Point of Entry” event is the first step of the Benevon Model, an apparently-successful fundraising formula in the non-profit world that hasn’t been implemented in politics.1 At a Benevon Point of Entry event, the only ask is that the organization can follow up later.

Event Styles of Top Fundraisers

The closest I’ve seen to the Benevon Model in politics is Force Multiplier. Having raised $17 million, it’s the most successful all-volunteer relational fundraising effort I know of. At Force Multiplier’s Point of Entry events, there are three asks:

1. Join their email list and receive invitations to fundraising events with candidates;

2. Become a Multiplier, meaning someone who forwards their invitations to others;

3. Host a future Point of Entry event.2

Event-focused models have proven successful for many other relational fundraisers. Two of the most successful include:

1. Flip the Vote has raised over $10 million, mostly through Point of Entry-style events albeit with a financial ask.

2. Focus for Democracy, which has raised over $75 million, asks members to invite friends to its zoom events. Often there’s a pre-event with an introduction to the organization, with the main event including an organizational presentation and financial ask. Focus for Democracy does a great job making these events engaging and high-energy, often attracting hundreds of attendees.

There are many more groups with a similar model.3

Why does this work so well?

1. The common element is relational fundraising without explicit financial asks. The organizations above are some of the movement’s brightest lights, having engaged tens of thousands of donors with thoughtful advice, and raised substantial funding for important organizations and candidates.

2. These organizations’ Point of Entry events seem to go viral, at least modestly. For the organizations above, the typical Point of Entry event spawns >1 additional events. This “viral multiplier” can be extremely powerful, and a sign of great potential for growth given the right ingredients.

3. The events raise money not for themselves, but for others. Obviously, nearly all non-profits host fundraising events. These are different because the host organization is raising money for others.

Once the event was planned, I started calling the funders to let them know it was time to invite their friends.

The first funder said, “I’ll invite some people, but I don’t have a big-money network; I’m not like Richie Rich.”

The second funder said, “I’ll invite some people, but I don’t have a big-money network; I’m not like Richie Rich.”

Over and over, I heard the same thing. (You probably see where this is going.)

I called Richie. And he said the exact same thing; “I’ll invite some people, but I don’t have a big-money network.”

Why you can be a great relational fundraiser

The story shows that almost nobody thinks of themselves as having a wealthy network, even if they do. (All the people quoted are six- or seven-figure annual donors.) It’s very human to look up at the next level of wealth and imagine that those people can do something that we can’t. But usually that’s not the case.

It gets better; you don’t need a wealthy network to be a successful fundraiser. The most common thing I hear from volunteer fundraisers is, “I can’t believe how much I raised.” I recently figured out why; from data on a few hundred volunteer fundraisers, on average they raised half their total from just one donor. Sometimes the surprise was that the big donor had so much giving capacity; other times, the large donation came from a friend-of-a-friend who the volunteer didn’t even know.

Better still, you can be a great fundraiser just by inviting friends to events, rather than asking them for money. This is the model of the most successful relational fundraising projects.

The time to start is now

A group of 100 foundations and donors recently launched a campaign to highlight the much greater effectiveness of early funding.1

Fundraising is very likely the most impactful way you can volunteer.2

To learn more about getting started, reply to this email or schedule a quick call with me.

1. Early giving leads to “early having.” Even before the money is spent, it’s beneficial in clear but hard-to-quantify ways.

2. Early spending can make later spending more cost-effective (3-5x).

3. Early spending can reach voters more cost-effectively (2-4x).

4. Early giving can support critical infrastructure like data services, best-practices research, and staff training.

These benefits are not realized nearly as much as they could be. Around 75% of political funding arrives very late, beginning in August and peaking in September.1 That’s just 1-2 months before early voting begins in mid-October.2 A group of 40 pro-democracy foundations recently wrote:

…We hear the same thing from our grantee partners after every election cycle: The money came too late.

While everyone agrees on the concept, details are hard to find. How much better is early funding? And how early is early?

I spoke with over a dozen campaign managers, media consultants, and data analysts, and concluded that a good rule of thumb is the headline. But it’s not an exact science, nor a step function; every day earlier is helpful, and giving shortly before the election is still way better than nothing.

Here’s more detail on what I learned.

1. The benefits of “early having”

Just having cash or commitments helps candidates and organizations, even before they spend it. Said one serial campaign manager, “Predictable is more important than early.” I heard widespread agreement that early funding or commitments make candidates and organizations:

• More likely to attract high-quality staff

• More able to make and execute a high-quality plan3

• More able to reserve TV and digital ads before they either sell out or their price increases by 20% to 100%.4 (Advertising is the majority of political spending, so these savings are material.)

• More able to engage the best service providers before they book up or increase in price by 25% to 40%.5

For candidates specifically, “early having” helps by making them:

• Less likely to attract high-quality opponents

• More likely to receive endorsements, donations, and press attention

2. Early spending can make later spending more cost-effective (3-5x)

Time to develop, target, test, and refine ads can produce content five times as effective as the median ad. Advertising is the majority of political spending, so making it better is a big deal. The worst ads actually hurt your candidate, meaning it would be better to simply light the money on fire. This happens routinely, and testing is critical because professionals have trouble guessing which ads work.6

Another example in this category is building lists of potential volunteers and voters. This could include (for example) connecting with influencers who support your candidate, or running ads to build a subscriber base. These lists or other channels can reach voters at 1/3 to 1/5 the cost of finding and reaching them later on, both in the current cycle and future ones. These list-building programs obviously can’t be as effective if they launch shortly before the election. (The smart advisors at Focus for Democracy have been an advocate for these sorts of programs.)

3. Early spending can reach voters more cost-effectively (2-4x)

Long before the election, there’s time to identify the voters you need to persuade or mobilize, and to reach those voters where they are. Late donations arrive too late to seize such opportunities, which frustrates campaign staff. “We’d make different choices with earlier money,” said one; another echoed, “There needs to be more early funding. Late funding drives me crazy because the later in the cycle you have fewer options.” Here are specific examples.

Obviously, the most impactful reminders about voting come from a friend, not a stranger. When well-run, such “relational” programs compound over time as volunteers recruit more volunteers. Just like compound interest, this compounding is powerful; these programs can reach 2-4x as many voters when they start early in an election year. The following chart from the Movement Voter Project Donor Guide illustrates the concept:

Said one program analyst, “The more time you have for organic growth, the more touches you can get for free later, when it matters.” Relational programs depend on infrastructure of technology and techniques that must be developed well in advance of the election (see #4 below).

Another example of cost-effective early money is voter registration and vote-by-mail enrollment. For “site-based” registration like a college campus or street corner, ideally you’d have a presence at large events like concerts and sports games. If ten days of funding arrives in February, you can pick ten days with huge crowds. But if ten days of funding shows up in October, you get ten pretty ordinary days, and the difference can easily be 2x or more.

A less quantifiable use of early money is year-round organizing. “Democrats show up asking for our votes every two years and then disappear,” complain some local organizers. To combat that alienating dynamic, organizations like Movement Voter Project, Flip the Vote, and others fundraise for organizing in disenfranchised communities. Although hard to quantify, advocates say this work has driven successes, some well-known (Fair Fight, founded by Stacey Abrams in Georgia) and others less so (a Minnesota trifecta created in part by local organizations).

4. Early funding supports critical infrastructure

Campaigns benefit from past investments in things like technology, staff training, data maintenance, best-practices research, and more (collectively called “infrastructure”). Improving infrastructure is obviously an ongoing process, not something that can happen right before elections. The benefits of improving infrastructure are obvious but near-impossible to quantify.7

Improving infrastructure requires a continuous stream of funding, rather than the boom/bust cycle of political donations. Infrastructure improvements often come from startups, but the rhythms of political funding are an especially poor fit for startups.

Conclusion & Next steps

Now you know that donating early is at least twice as impactful. What will you do?

Don’t let your donations lose more value! Click here to support a collection of projects recommended by large funders’ personal advisors.

Want to give early, but not ready today? Sign up here to get a few reminders of your intention. Pre-commitment is powerful!

If you’re comfortable being a public supporter of early giving, join a group of 40 major donors by signing the newly launched All by April pledge.

Follow me for more on impactful political funding.

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Acknowledgements

This essay benefited from many contributors and advisors, especially Haley Bash and Hadar Sachs, as well as Josh Rosmarin, Dave Peck, Matt Lerner, and Jeremy Smith; and from interviewees including Aaron Strauss, Dmitri Mehlhorn, Nick Meier, Josh Wolfe, Conner Johnston, David Wagner, Otis Reed, and Lena Tom, plus many others who preferred not to be named.

A product is something that makes impact by being used. An example is WarChest, which is financial management software for campaigns. Typically the biggest challenge for products is distribution, whereas discerning impact is easier.1 The biggest question is, “Can you get lots of people to use this?”

A program is anything voter-facing to influence beliefs or behavior. An example is Movement Labs’ experiments with texting voters a picture of their polling place to increase turnout. Typically the biggest challenge for programs is impact measurement, whereas distribution is easier.2 The biggest questions are, “Does this work?” and “How cost-effective is this versus competing approaches?”

How this distinction helps innovators and funders

1. Optimizing work on new projects

Lots of projects have elements of both products and programs.3 I usually advise innovators to start with finding success in distributing the product component, because (a) distribution is usually the likeliest failure point and (b) the feedback and iteration cycle for product distribution can be fast and inexpensive, which is mostly not true of programs.

2. Inventing products and programs requires different expertise

The startup world has a ton of wisdom to offer creators of new political products; I’d say that for-profit startup expertise is very helpful for around 60% of creating political products.

In contrast, creating new programs has few analogues outside of politics. Research on what’s been tried, and how well it has or hasn’t worked, lives mostly in academic papers and movement-led research. Absorbing and building on this knowledge is a specialized expertise.

Much of my work is sharing product knowledge with political professionals, who rarely have opportunities to learn this skillset but are the people best positioned to be user-entrepreneurs.

3. Funding products and programs requires different expertise

In my experience, donor advisors and foundation professionals have stronger backgrounds in programs than products. This leads to some behaviors that I consider mistakes:

• When evaluating a project with product and program elements, funders often focus too much on evaluating the program and too little on evaluating the product. This is unfortunate because measuring programs is often slow and costly, but measuring products is often fast and easy.

• Funders often underestimate the challenges of getting users for new products.

• Funders often underestimate the scalability of successful products. While programs typically scale only with greater funding, in-demand products can spread widely inexpensively (and hence create big cost-effective impact).

Closing questions

• What other categories would you add to this list?

• Are there worthy programs that are both hard to distribute and hard to measure? Or easy to distribute and easy to measure?

Note: The Product/Program distinction first came up for me in a conversation with Yoni Landau of Movement Labs.

A perennial challenge for political donors is knowing whether their funds make a difference.

Most efforts at fixing that have gone big, with some form of “Billionaire donors have a donor advisor, and now you can too; we will interview all the experts, or crunch all the data, and make you a list of donations that are most effective.” Some of these efforts have been successful, and some not as much. But for years, I’ve yearned to explore the opposite approach.

The opposite approach would be to recruit volunteers who could raise a few thousand dollars each, and pair each one with a single downballot candidate (state legislature or below) running in a swing state or district.1 This concept has stuck with me for several reasons:

1. It hits the two biggest obstacles.

The most common obstacles I hear when recruiting relational fundraisers are: (a) “I don’t know what to raise for,” and (b) “I don’t have wealthy friends.”23 This concept overcomes both of those.

2. It might be uniquely motivating.

This project is built on two true facts, both of which might be powerful motivators for volunteers:

1. For anyone who can raise at least ~$250/hour, fundraising is the most effective way to volunteer.

2. A few thousand dollars can make a difference in a downballot race.

3. It’s uniquely educational.

A relationship with a downballot candidate is a fantastic way for someone to learn about elections and political work.

4. It’s lightweight.

The 100 candidates are a built-in team to engage the volunteers over time. In contrast, even the best funding memo requires humans to provide ongoing updates and emotional connection. That’s why (great) organizations like Mind the Gap and Movement Voter Project require both paid and volunteer fundraisers.

5. It has lasting effects.

This project supports the pipeline of candidates and volunteers for future elections.

Let’s make it happen

I can put some money behind this experiment, but need a few other things:

1. An individual to drive it (either independently or within a relevant organization)

2. Partners to help recruit the 100 volunteer fundraisers

3. A great name for it

If you can help with any of those, or if you might want to be a volunteer fundraiser yourself, send me an email.

Say you want to get people to call their mayor, and your strategy has four steps: (1) Email people, to get them to (2) join a training, on how to (3) ask their neighbors, to (4) call the mayor. You can sketch out your possible impact like this:

Multiplying all those numbers gives 400, which is the number of neighbor-to-neighbor conversations you’d expect to produce. If 1% of those 400 conversations produce a call to the mayor, then you expect to produce four calls.

This type of analysis can help in several ways.

Use 1: Validation

A Fermi estimate makes projections explicit, which is the first step towards testing them. Lightweight testing to validate each assumption can save a lot of time and money by catching aggressive estimates early. Tests can help attract partners by de-risking your project; “scaling up something that appears to work” is more appealing than “trying something totally new.”

Use 2: Strategy

Fermi estimates can help you figure out where to spend time. In the example above, is it better to improve the conversion rate of your initial email, or of your trainings? Or maybe you should skip the training step altogether? The Fermi estimate lets you play with different possibilities.

Use 3: Comparison

Funders and entrepreneurs benefit from knowing the cost-effectiveness of various projects. If your program above costs $500 and produces 4 calls, that’s $125 per call. Might there be some other approach that costs half as much? Or perhaps existing methods cost $1,000 per call, so your approach is way better? This method of comparison is reductive (see “Searching beyond cost-per-vote”) but can still be useful.

Use 4: Scalability

By sketching out a Fermi estimate where everything goes well, you can get a sense of how large a project’s impact could be. In How to Start a Political Startup, I quote Ted Suzman:

[T]he first question I ask is: if it truly succeeds, how much does it matter? Try to imagine the largest plausible success case. In that case, how glad would you be to have worked on the project?

Concluding questions

• Where have you seen Fermi estimates be helpful or unhelpful?

• What other back-of-the-envelope analyses have you found useful in explaining or projecting impact?

Because in politics and other fields, donors are almost always mobilized through a combination of information and relationship.

When I encounter people making tools for donors, here’s the advice I give them.

Suggestions for donor-tool builders

Suggestion 1: Be extra careful to make something that real people want.

“In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product,” writes successful startup investor Paul Graham. The disappointments of past donor tools make this wisdom crucial.

Before making even a minimum viable product, find quick and cheap ways to test user demand. For example, you could pretend to be the product, and see if usage outstrips your ability to meet the demand manually.1 Preserve as much skepticism as you can muster; assume that your demand doesn’t exist until you can prove otherwise.

If you picture a large market of political donors blocked only by lack of knowledge, there’s a lot of evidence that’s wrong.2 When donors say “I don’t know what to give to,” don’t infer that donors do know what causes they care about. Too often, builders make tools for donors with developed preferences such as, “I care about climate change in Ohio and Kentucky.”3 I’ve met few donors who have such crisp preferences. Donors give for many different reasons; almost none of them sound like that quote.

Suggestion 2: Try something new.

Learn what’s already been tried and how it went. Talk to me and others who have worked in this space. Form a hypothesis of what past projects were missing and what you’ll do differently. Small tweaks in execution can make a big difference.

Ideally, form and test at least one hypothesis about what drives donations besides more information. For example, you could build a new method of relational fundraising or social proof. Or you could explore new methods of team-based fundraising, or gamification.

My model of the typical unmobilized donor is someone with not-yet-formed political giving preferences, who will act on a credible ask from a trusted source. In this model, the bottleneck is the number of askers (aka volunteer donor advisors), not the information. You could explore ways to help volunteer donor advisors move their contacts up a ladder of engagement.

Closing questions

• What sort of information have you seen mobilize new donors? Have you seen it work on its own (and if so where)?

• What tools do you think donors want?

Appendix: Where information worked

I tried to think of examples where information alone mobilized donors. The only one I came up with was late in the 2018 and 2020 cycles. When everyone’s hair was on fire to affect the outcome, a few projects raised mid/high-single-digit millions of dollars on social media by providing slates of state-level candidates where more funding could make a difference. In these instances, donors had a high latent desire to give, and a credible opportunity successfully channeled that.4

All of the other examples I can think of combine novel information with a healthy dose of relational fundraising, like these below.

1. Swing Left’s BluePrint product is the most successful still-live donor tool I’m aware of, having survived a few cycles. It raised $3.6 million in 2022, a good portion of which came from relational fundraising rather than organic spread.

2. The information I’ve seen most effectively mobilize potential donors is a combination of a broad theory of the case, combined with specific recommendations. This comes in many different forms, such as this by Reid Hoffman’s donor advisor; these slides from Movement Voter Project; or Mind the Gap’s quant-heavy strategy. In a similar vein, I co-hosted several successful “Political Giving 101” sessions summarizing the Guide for New Political Funders. None of these spread on their own; all have required relational fundraising.

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
(Attributed to Pablo Picasso)

Most political media is like Picasso’s art critics; what gets coverage is not what professionals discuss. This makes it hard for outsiders to understand the actual work of winning elections. That’s a problem, because politics requires broad engagement from lots of people. Without good information widely available, it’s hard for outsiders to engage constructively as voters, volunteers, or donors.

Below are some publicly available materials that illuminate the actual work of electoral professionals.

Electoral Strategy

A good starting point is to see what a professionally prepared electoral strategy looks like. There’s no one right approach; the strategies below use different reasoning and reach different conclusions. But all have more depth than any political media.

• Reid Hoffman’s donor advisor Dmitri Mehlhorn describes his strategy leading up to the 2020 election, framed around defending against the “assault on truth” via evidence-based communication.1

• Way to Win and Movement Voter Project are progressive donor collectives that emphasize local community organizing. Way to Win has shared its full strategy from 2022; you can read highlights or see the full 110-page report. Movement Voter Project’s 2024 strategy is in the slides linked here.

• Mind the Gap advises donors on the most quantitatively testable and tested programs to fund. One of its strategy memos was leaked to the journalist Teddy Schleifer and is available here (scroll to bottom).

Messaging

Reading or listening to these interviews will give you more insight into Democratic messaging than watching hundreds of hours of political media.

The two experts below disagree on many areas but agree on some, such as the importance of explicitly calling out Republicans’ extremism on certain topics.

Dmitri Mehlhorn: The Man Financing a Political Counter-Revolution. Sample quote:

[P]eople on the left were extremely enthusiastic about taking the fight in terms of salience and issues, in a way that we found to be helpful to Mr. Trump and hurtful to Trump’s enemies.

A Dmitri Rebuttal by Messaging Expert Anat Shenker-Osorio. Sample quote:

When you ask [focus groups], “What is your beef with Democrats?” I can tell you that none of them – and I really do mean none – the first idea that comes into their own head is, they want to defund the police.

Their beef with Democrats… I’m sure that you can guess. That they’re slow, that they’re bad on the economy, that they spend too much money, a whole litany of things. … We ask them, “If you had to liken Democrats to an animal, what animal would you pick?” … the animals that they give us for the Democrats is a snail, a sloth, a turtle, some permutation of a thing that doesn’t do much, and does it slowly.

Testing messaging is difficult. If you spend $6 million testing anti-Trump messages, you might receive a summary of results like this one leaked to The New York Times. Here’s an interview with Ali Morrell of Blue Rose Research, who is on the front lines of message testing. Sample quote:

It’s a broader ecosystem of actors that are influencing people and influencing how voters think about the Democratic party, and therefore we can’t be thinking about this word [versus that] word, or this ad [versus that] ad, we need to be thinking holistically about what we stand for as a party and how we communicate that to voters.

Many practitioners are becoming less focused on the words of a message and more on its source. In other words, the same message will have a different effect coming from a political ad versus from a friend.2

Another good resource is the Message Box by Dan Pfeiffer.

Data and analysis

Mike Podhorzer is among the most insightful and long-tenured analysts of political data. For many years his work was limited to professionals, but last year he began sharing his great work via Substack.

After every election, “what happened” is a major topic of research and discussion. While the winners are mostly known right away, it takes until the following spring and summer to really understand who voted and what worked. The 24-hour news cycle forces talking heads to jump the gun with all sorts of hastily assembled statistics; professionals know to withhold judgment for months, until reports like these are produced:

• Pew Research Center: Validated Voters Report

• Catalist: What Happened 2022

Work on the front lines

Higher Ground Labs publishes a great overview of political technology. While there are lots of projects underway, most that they catalog are small and scrappy and could use support.

In my circles, the closest thing to a trade magazine is the Great Battlefield podcast by Nathaniel Pearlman. He has interviewed a number of practitioner insiders who rarely speak publicly. Here are a few episodes with people I happen to know and respect.

• Electing Progressive State Legislatures with Daniel Squadron Of The States Project

• Using Behavioral Science For Voter Turnout with Robert, Kristina And Heba Of Vote Tripling [now called Vote Rev]

• Ethical Email Fundraising with Josh Nelson of The Juggernaut Project

• Maximizing Political Donations with Laura Pearl Of Flip The Vote

• Relational Organizing For Progressives with Mike Pfohl Of Organizing Empowerment Project

• Investing Large Dollars to Save Democracy with Tamer Mokhtar

• Labor, Polling, Analytics And Progressive Politics with Mike Podhorzer

Closing question

What resources like these have you found helpful? I’ll update this post as I find good pieces.

Large-dollar funders are seeing large drops

The donor collective Movement Voter Project just released a paper, "Sending Up the Bat Signal.” Their ED Billy Wimsatt writes:

In the 2019-2020 election cycle (and to some extent in 2021-2022), donors gave like our lives depended on it. This has not happened yet in the 2023-2024 election cycle.

Other well-connected funders are saying the same. “Every leader I know is currently experiencing a serious decline in fundraising,” one told me.

As I’ve written before, the first 6-9 months of a cycle (i.e. January to September of odd-numbered years) are a time when funders learn, evaluate, and plan. That’s well and good, but it creates a dangerous period for the many organizations that don’t end each cycle with a long runway.

Small-dollar donations also cause shortfalls

The typical organization on ActBlue is receiving less. While ActBlue reports small-dollar donations 10% higher than in 2019, that’s spread across nearly twice as many recipients.

For philanthropy broadly, donations in 2022 dropped 3.4% (or 10.5% adjusted for inflation) according to the Giving USA project, albeit after two record-setting years.

A tiny silver lining

Funding shortfalls aren’t all bad. Not every organization or program makes cost-effective impact, and those should be revamped or shrink, merge, or close. Few organizations will take those steps unless forced, and that force mostly needs to come from the funding marketplace.

But the funding marketplace is very imperfect (an “inefficient market” in technical terms), so a funding shortage hurts many good projects even if it also culls some less-effective ones.

Same old: Democracy needs more, bigger, earlier funders

Preserving American democracy remains a central challenge of our time, but political giving remains tiny in the scheme of things; just 1% of overall philanthropy, and roughly the same amount as Americans spend on Halloween(!).2

As donors inevitably come and go, it remains a critical and underserved task to bring new faces into the movement, and to better steward the ones already engaged.

Some folks doing good work on this include Movement Voter Project mentioned earlier, as well as Donor Organizer Hub, Flip the Vote, Focus For Democracy, Force Multiplier, and many others. Being a “volunteer donor organizer/advisor” remains a highly impactful role for volunteers, and one that the movement continues to overlook. And the Democracy Donors guide remains a good resource for newcomers.

What makes the CSW “closed” are strict limits that we’ve come to accept as natural:

• You can’t leave without losing your social graph.

• Outside developers can’t innovate by building with your social graph.

• Moderation and algorithms are centralized and standardized.

• The wall of the walled garden sits between you and your followers, requiring payment to prioritize your visibility.

• Consumer experiences are mostly stagnant.

These limits can be fixed. Social media can become open like email and the web, whose smooth interoperability we take for granted because they run on shared protocols.1 This is the view of many social media professionals, including all the founders of Twitter, social media researchers and analysts, and others.

But for the past decade, nobody could advance the OSW vision. With users concentrated on a few major platforms, there was no way for any new OSW platform to gain scale. Then in October 2022, Elon Musk created that opportunity by purchasing Twitter and alienating a large portion of its users.

Growing the Open Social Web

Now is the first opportunity in over a decade to bring a large mass of users to the OSW. We see this from explosive growth in OSW microblogging platforms.2

That explosive growth is critical, because here’s how I believe the OSW reaches scale:

1. More users join the OSW

2. More users attract more developers

3. More developers and users attract more funding (if needed)

4. More developers and more funding create new compelling experiences

I’m still learning, but my current best guess is that society needn’t care which platform or protocol wins out - as long as that platform and protocol are part of the OSW.3 At the moment, it's very unclear which platform or protocol will win; I don't see any clearly in the lead or moving fast enough to meet the moment.

(Readers not working on the OSW may want to stop here; the rest is very much in the weeds.)

I think there are two big things that would help the OSW seize this opportunity to reach scale:

1. Marketing

If the OSW were a well-funded company, it would be working to onboard all sorts of users: Celebrities, Politicians, Companies, Organizations, Governments & agencies, and probably more. There would be PR and direct outreach to each of these segments, plus support to help them create and manage accounts or servers. There would be publicly available materials to help individuals pitch people and organizations in their orbit. There would also be “developer relations for the OSW,” to bring in new developers and build confidence in the OSW’s future.

None of that is happening because no one project has the budget or incentive to take on all of that work. So this would be a useful role for philanthropic capital.

2. Project funding

OSW platforms have long operated on a shoestring budget, with most labor coming from volunteers. So most existing platforms are much smaller and less developed than they would be otherwise. Mastodon has by far the largest budget of any fediverse platform, at $600k/year (up from $120k last year).

Funding could accelerate projects like the following:

1. The OSW needs a fully-featured Twitter competitor, and it needs it now. It’s not clear which of the current platforms (Mastodon, BlueSky, Calckey, etc.) will get there first; it might be that they all get surpassed by another.4

2. New and better experiences that only the OSW can provide. This includes:

   1. User-selectable custom algorithms (announced by BlueSky and likely to follow in fediverse clients)

   2. Topic-focused clients (for example, if you follow 100 accounts related to sports, imagine a sports-focused social app that structures your feed around the games, players, or news that those accounts are discussing).

   3. Cross-platform clients (imagine having a single feed that includes your accounts on Mastodon, Twitter, and BlueSky; and being able to post once to all three, and seeing all of your post’s engagements in one place).

3. The other immediate need is infrastructure to support the ecosystem broadly, including:

   1. Moderation support, including “moderation as a service” for anyone running OSW servers5

   2. Platforms and tools that support safety for marginalized groups on the OSW

   3. Resources and community for developers working on the OSW

   4. Tools for onboarding social clusters to the OSW

   5. Bridges between OSW protocols

   6. Search tools that respect user privacy

   7. New OSW methods of identity verification

   8. New OSW methods of revenue generation

   9. Hosted server providers

   10. New media that covers the OSW

A major challenge is that the projects above mostly don’t have a clear path to either huge social impact, nor to venture-scale returns. Therefore neither philanthropic nor for-profit investment has begun to flow.

One solution would be to engage some very large funders who could support this entire basket with (say) $15 million. While the success of any one project is hard to predict, it seems more predictable that funding a basket of the projects above would result in faster OSW growth.

1. Donations and volunteers

2. Logged voter contacts

3. Data / contact info, to get items 1 and 2 above

4. Targeted impressions via TV and digital ads (this consumes the bulk of campaign budgets)

This creates a problem; in politics, THESE ARE NOT THE ONLY THINGS THAT MATTER.2

Because many other things matter, there are lots of important innovations that don’t produce items 1-4 above. Entrepreneurs creating these innovations can end up in what I’ve named the Valley of Yes.3 (I’ve been there too.)

The Valley of Yes is when you’re making something good, that might be making important impact, but without real product-market fit. Your product is good enough to get some sales, but not at a high price point, and not to enough customers to make big impact. The Valley of Yes exists because organizations will pay some modest amount for a good tool, even if it doesn’t advance their core KPIs.4

The Valley of Yes is dangerous. Once an organization buys a non-core tool, they don’t have much incentive to focus on it because it’s not producing their core KPIs. Because they don’t have incentive to focus on it, they’re unlikely to produce amazing case studies. And without amazing case studies, your sales will remain challenging.

If you think you might be in the Valley of Yes, be brutally honest with yourself about the impact your product drives and how important it is. If you’re in the Valley but don’t acknowledge it, you’re less likely to escape. In the Valley, you can have just enough success that major changes seem unnecessary, which heightens its danger.

How to escape the Valley of Yes? A few thoughts come to mind:

1. Figure out how your product can drive one or more outcomes 1-4, then demonstrate that and market it that way.

2. Make some existing activity obviously and wildly better or cheaper, like Mobilize did.

3. Produce amazing case study results of outcomes besides 1-4, either with clients or on your own. Emphasis on “amazing;” the bar is clients saying “I can’t imagine ever going without this.” I can’t think of examples of this working, but it seems possible.

4. Go directly to donors and argue that your product makes such important impact that they should fund it, despite limited market success. This is a very high bar, but it’s an option (more discussion here).

5. Explore whether your product has utility outside of politics, where the TAM (total addressable market) is almost infinitely larger. You can still offer your product to political users, but they don’t need to be your main audience.

These options mostly echo common startup wisdom, such as finding a core of users who badly need your product (Paul Graham’s analogy of a well) or focusing on users who would be very disappointed if they lost the product (Rahul Vohra).

Closing Questions

• Do you agree that the Valley of Yes exists?

• How have you seen entrepreneurs get out of it?

Thank you to Raub Dakwale and Hamza Salem for their suggestions.

Funders seeking electoral change can pick from three strategies:

Strategy 1: Invest in existing practices.

Strategy 2: Innovate to earn specific votes less expensively.

Strategy 3: Innovate to make campaigns more efficient.

To illustrate these categories, we’ll use the following “cost curve of votes.” In this oversimplified electorate of 24 people, it costs a campaign the following amount to earn each person’s vote:

Strategy 1: Invest in existing practices

For example, based on the cost curve, one could spend $50 to earn the vote of Voter #5.

Strategy 2: Innovate to earn specific votes less expensively

Innovation is risky, so new approaches should produce votes much less expensively than existing methods.1 In the example below, someone has created a method to earn support from Voter #18 for $100 instead of $180.

Examples in this category include PushBlack and the Empower Project.2

Strategy 3: Innovate to make campaigns more efficient

Better tools make the movement more efficient, i.e. the same amount of resources can earn more votes. This makes earning each vote slightly less expensive, which looks like this:

Examples in this category include:

• Mobilize, which automated work that had been done manually

• Deck, which facilitates targeting resources more effectively

• Vote tripling, which increases the efficacy of various campaign activities3

Many types of projects are important but hard to capture in this framework:

• Anything not election-focused (e.g. think tanks or tools for monitoring police abuses).

• Election security

• Multi-cycle infrastructure (the framework above looks at only a single cycle)

Strategies 2 and 3 are some of what people call “infrastructure,” and what my most-read essay calls “the Stack.” The movement badly needs better ways to measure the impact of such investments, even roughly. If the framework above is useful to you, please share your thoughts to help further develop it.

Most startups fail. And usually “the real problem was that customers didn't want the product,” writes prominent startup figure Paul Graham.1 Even outside of startups, most product launches fail.

So making political change by creating a new product is risky; if people don’t use your product, it won’t make impact.

But when widely adopted, new political products can create big cost-effective impact. Over the last five years I’ve been a co-founder of (mostly successful) organizations doing that work. Throughout that time, I’ve benefited from the following insights from the startup world, and I hope they help you as well.

Insights to invent and market new products

Insight #1: Start with wells, not indentations

Paul Graham writes:

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. …

You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. …

Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot.

You can’t get there on Day 1, Graham continues:

A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well. … Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type.

To find a deep well, it’s usually best to start off focusing on a narrow set of users. Collective Impact found a “deep well” serving celebrities with roughly 250k to 1 million followers. Outside of that range, our well wasn’t as deep. We didn’t have the resources to “excavate” further, but that was ok; we were successful focusing mostly on that niche.

Frank Slootman2 summarizes his formula: “Narrow the focus. Up the quality. Increase the speed.” And speaking of speed…

Insight #2: Learn quickly by marketing before building

You can’t learn what people want by asking them questions. Here’s Graham on a better way:

In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them. […]

The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.

You should do this before spending time and money building the product.

One term for this is a “painted door test;” imagine painting a storefront that sells X, and then counting how many people try to enter. That's much quicker and cheaper than actually creating the store. To put it graphically, the left is what I used to think was required, and the right is how the world usually works.3

DoorDash, now worth $23 billion, started with a quick and costless experiment. Here’s the story as told by co-founder Stanley Tang:

We decided to create a simple experiment with restaurant delivery. We spent about an afternoon just putting together a quick landing page. When I went on the Internet, I found some PDF menus of restaurants in Palo Alto. We stuck it up there and added a phone number at the bottom, which was actually our personal cell phone number. And that was it. We put up the landing page and called it PaloAltoDelivery.com. … What we wanted to see was just would we receive phone calls, and if we got enough phone calls, then maybe this delivery idea was worth pursuing.

So we put it up there; we weren't really expecting anything, and all of a sudden we got a phone call. Someone called! They wanted to order Thai food. And we're like, “This is a real order; we're going to have to do something about it.” So we're in our cars and we're like, "We're not doing anything right now, might as well swing by, pick up some pad thai, and let's try to see how this whole delivery thing works." And we did.

The experiment’s success made Tang and his friends more confident that they were on the right track. In politics, successful experiments like this can help persuade partners and funders to support your work.

If local delivery hadn’t been a viable business, think of how much time and money Tang would have saved via this simple test.

Insight #3: Understand your users

To make something people want, you need to understand what people want. The only way to deeply understand your users’ goals and challenges is to talk to them — a lot. Talking to users is so important that accelerator Y Combinator advises early-stage companies to do nothing besides talk to users and build product.

Just a few key insights can be all you need:

Doing another startup has retaught me the lesson that once you know precisely what users care about (answering more complex questions, better battery life, etc.), that continuous, relentless focus on attacking the problem can get you further than you or others initially imagined. - Suhail Doshi4

To understand your users, it helps if you’re one of them. Some of the best political entrepreneurs have worked in the movement (even briefly), saw unfilled needs, and created products to fill those gaps. Graham talks about how helpful it is to build something that you need yourself:

As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.

Quick note: It’s not always obvious who your users are or should be, so be openminded and flexible about this.5

Insight #4: The only two responses

When offering your prototype to users, there are only two real responses:

1. “I want it now”

2. Everything else (aka polite interest)

Polite interest is dangerous, because it can trick you into making a product that people don’t actually want. Graham describes a probably-bad startup idea; a social network for pet owners.

It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. …

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

Some responses that are not “I want it now:” “Let me know once it’s ready,” or “I’d be interested to try it out.” Instead, here are two personal examples of what “I want it now” should look like:

1. Following up a pitch by emailing colleagues, “NEW APP IS THE ANSWER TO OUR PRAYERS!!" (And signing up soon thereafter.)

2. Being moved to tears by what your product achieves (as one celebrity was after Collective Impact empowered him as a relational organizer).

Other examples can include “getting literal love letters from customers” (Elad Gil) or reactions like “Where have you been all of my life?” (Steve Blank)

If you’re not getting “I want it now,” keep refining the product and/or pitch. The longer you go without “I want it now,” the bigger the changes you should contemplate.

Insight #5: Sell the brownie, not the recipe

You may recognize that line from messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio; this is advice where startup and movement insights overlap. Nonetheless, it’s surprisingly hard to execute.

Here’s a fun example (be sure to read all the slide text):

In other words, you don’t market a fire flower by talking about its green leaves, or even that it makes your overalls white. Through enough listening to your users, you’ll find the right message, which here would be something like, “Survive a hit and kill enemies from far away.”

The only way I’ve ever found the right message is through lots of conversations with users. Eventually, one says things in a way that makes everything click.

An essay on applying this advice is titled, “Your product demo sucks because it’s focused on your product.” Instead, start by learning about your audience’s needs, then tailor your presentation accordingly. This has the dual benefits of (a) increasing your knowledge about users, and (b) improving the odds of a successful pitch.

Quick note: In politics, the “brownie” is usually producing votes, donations, or volunteers. If you don’t have a credible link to driving one of those, think hard about how to express your product’s contribution.

Insight #6: Focus on traction

It’s in your interest to focus on traction. You want to make impact, and that only happens if people use your product. Traction is evidence that people are using your product, which means it’s also evidence that you’re not wasting your time.

Traction is a broad word that includes many things, including when people:

• Pay money for your product

• Use your product

• Adopt your product into their work (e.g. using your technique to reach voters)

• Share your product with their networks

Unlike the for-profit world, it’s not fatal if people can’t or won’t pay money for what you’re making. However, this raises the bar for demonstrating your project’s impact; I write more about this challenge here.

The longer you go without traction, the greater the risk of wasting your time by making something few people want. Lack of traction can be a red flag that something big needs to change in your marketing, your product, or both.

Quick note: Choosing which metrics to focus on is usually challenging. Here’s a piece with some advice.

Insight #7: The goal is product-market fit

There’s no single definition of product-market fit (PMF), but here’s a representative one: 

If it’s not glaringly obvious your company has product-market fit yet, with customers pulling the product from you, it very likely doesn’t. - Sarah Guo6

Put another way, PMF is people wanting to use your product, which is a requirement for it to make impact. Therefore, “the only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit." That's Marc Andreessen7 talking about for-profit products, but the same holds in politics.

Most new companies never reach this stage; “Every startup requires lucky miracles to get product-market fit,” writes Garry Tan.8

This article describes some other ways to identify PMF, including:

1. Before the product exists

   1. Visible excitement

   2. People are willing to pay for it

2. After the product exists

   1. Retention: Users stick around

   2. Surveys: Users say they’d be very disappointed if your product went away

   3. Exponential organic growth

   4. Customers clamor for your product

   5. People are using it even when it’s broken or rough/unfinished

Ramping up distribution before finding PMF is usually a mistake; without PMF, newly acquired users will drift away. Relatedly, novice entrepreneurs are often tempted to try a shortcut: “We’d grow so fast if we could get Large Organization X to get its members to use our product!” This sounds logical but is usually wrong and actually dangerous.9

Conclusion

I wish you great success in finding PMF for your political products. Please reach out to david@bluem.ventures if you need advice on that journey.

Thank you to everyone who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts, including Matt Singer, Ted Suzman, Colin Van Ostern, Matt Hodges, Zack Rosen, Nathan Woodhull, and Shai Sachs.

Further reading

Some additional thoughts are in my earlier and slightly overlapping essay, How to start a (political) startup.

Here are some seminal essays I reference often:

• How to Start a Startup

• How to Get Startup Ideas

• Do Things that Don't Scale

First Round Review has a wealth of advice on strategy and operations. Here are a few pieces I’ve noticed and enjoyed:

• How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit

• Build Products That Solve Real Problems With This Lightweight “Jobs-To-Be-Done” Framework

Group 1: Investors and techies

My friends in this group generally have jobs analyzing complex data to make the best possible decisions (e.g. what to invest in, what features users want, etc.). As part of these jobs, second-order effects like moral hazard and market distortion are everyday considerations; political realities are far from their minds. These folks want to see government implement technically well-designed policies.

With regard to student debt, I’d summarize this group’s views as concern that it’s a giveaway but not targeted at the most needy; will just lead to higher educational prices without fixing underlying problems; will increase already-high inflation; and that all of those may end up harming the most needy.

Group 2: Political professionals

My friends in politics generally have jobs that involve fighting to get the government to help people (and facing many defeats along the way). This often gives them a close-up view of real peoples’ struggles, which make the needs especially salient. Also salient are political realities, which are part of regular discussion. A policy’s second-order effects easily become secondary to getting anything done. These folks generally want to see the government do things that help people; and in general, the faster and bigger the help, the better.

With regard to student debt, I’d summarize this group’s views as believing that the vast majority of debt cancellation will help those in genuine need, and that this is non-competitive with helping those even needier. Regarding bad second-order effects, they’d point to technical reports that these effects may not be large, and figure that such issues can be addressed later.

Synthesis

Both groups’ goals are good and worthy. Obviously it’s good for policies to reflect our best technical thinking. Similarly, it’s obvious that impacting government requires working through political realities that often force technically suboptimal policies.1 My professional background is in Group 1, but since entering politics I’ve gained a lot of sympathy for Group 2.

Whichever group you’re in, I hope this helps you better understand the other.

• Mean that someone supports popular policies;

• Refer to a large bloc of voters with centrist opinions;

• Have any consistent definition among political professionals or voters;

• Have a useful definition in the dictionary.

As a result, the word “moderate” is worse than nonsense; it doesn’t mean anything, but people think it does.

It took me years in politics to realize this. Here’s a summary so you can get there faster.

Prominent “moderates” disagree on the meaning

I asked two prominent Democratic “moderates” for their definition of the word, and they gave different answers.

First I asked a leading figure in the “moderate” Democratic ecosystem. Then I asked a prominent politician described as “moderate” by major media. Both gave me perfectly fine definitions, but the definitions didn’t match, indicating that even prominent “moderates” lack a shared definition.1

But that’s just two conversations. Maybe if we paid someone to speak with lots of “moderates,” more clarity would emerge? Nope.

The New York Times says nobody agrees

In June 2022, the New York Times published a ten-thousand-word feature on “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat.” The reporter finds:

While there is a growing group of Democrats who believe that their party needs to become more moderate, it’s not clear that any of them agree on — or, in some cases, even know — what it means to be a moderate Democrat anymore.

This confusion isn’t limited to political elites; voters don’t agree on a meaning either.

“Moderate” voters mostly aren’t centrist

A plurality of Americans (including me) self-identify as “moderate.” But this group holds widely varied beliefs, indicating that they use the word to mean different things. Writing in 538, here’s how political scientist Lee Drutman maps their opinions:2

And it’s not just the self-identified “moderates” who have disparate views. Poll respondents labeled as “moderate” often aren’t; “When you dig into their policy positions, the people who show up as moderates in polls are actually pretty damn extreme,” wrote Ezra Klein in 2015.

Other studies reach similar conclusions, that the middle third of the electorate is very much not a centrist voting bloc. Pew Research recently described the middle third as having “very little in common politically [except] relatively low interest in politics[.]”

Not finding any answers from the political world, I tried the dictionary - but without success.

The dictionary doesn’t help

The dictionary defines moderate as "having moderate political views or policies." That’s circular and not helpful.

Wikipedia is more concrete: “A moderate is considered someone occupying any mainstream position, avoiding extreme views.”

“Extreme views” are presumably unpopular, whereas “mainstream position[s]” are by definition reasonably popular. So maybe politicians labeled “moderate” are popularists, i.e. they support the most popular policies, or at least avoid very unpopular positions? This would make sense, but no.

Prominent “moderates” are not popularists

As used by the media, “moderate” is not a synonym for “popularist,” nor does it mean that someone avoids extremely unpopular positions.

For example, noted “moderate” senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are not popularists; they support some popular policies and some unpopular ones. They also oppose some very popular policies.3 Sinema opposed one of the most popular policies I've ever seen polled; this non-mainstream view doesn’t stop her from being called a “moderate.”4

Conversely, politicians labeled “progressive”5 aren’t anti-popularists. Like Manchin and Sinema, “progressive” politicians support and oppose a mix of popular and unpopular policies.6 Both “moderates” and “progressives” would say their agenda is closer to true public opinion, but neither group is strictly popularist.

Conclusion: The word has no definition

A definition is “a statement of the exact meaning of a word, especially in a dictionary.”

The word “moderate” has no definition:

• The dictionary’s definition is tautological, and Wikipedia’s doesn’t match how the word is used.

• I used to think “moderate” meant popularist, but that’s not how media uses the term.

• Prominent “moderates” and political experts disagree on the meaning.

• Self-identified “moderates” have varying and often-extreme opinions.

My best answer

So what do people mean when they say “moderate?”

My best answer is from Jonathan Chait, who says “the press defines moderation as disagreement with the party.” But unfortunately this definition is hackable; if someone disagrees with their party’s most popular policies, they are heterodox but not “moderate.”

Until someone can propagate a better definition, the confusion will continue.

The difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.1

Most organizations that convene donor “communities” seek to drive funding to the conveners’ own priorities. That means these organizations are building an audience rather than a community.2

As a result, most donors are left without a strong peer community. That’s a problem, because community is an important part of keeping people engaged for the long term.

One way to tell whether an organization is building a community or an audience is to see which of these two images best reflects its conference programs:3

My experience is that most conferences are 100% programmed as the lefthand model, with community-building left to happenstance in hallways and mealtimes.

The underlying incentive problem

Building community requires helping people to do what they want, not what you want. Therefore, organizations aiming to raise for their own priorities find it hard to invest in building authentic community, because it doesn’t advance their ultimate goal. In his great article “Why You Can’t Get Paid To Build Community,” David Jay describes the challenge:

The work of community becomes not about giving people agency to collectively achieve your shared goals, but about getting them to do what you want. The result is a community filled with bad conversations where deep connection and trust are rare. … [and] often becomes more about containing the creative possibility of community rather than enhancing it.

Fixing the incentive problem

It sounds obvious, but for an organization to focus on building community, I believe that it needs to set goals that focus on community-building. For a political funder community, this could look something like:

1. Interactions between community members4

2. New donors engaged (whatever they give to)

3. Individuals supported in relational fundraising (whatever they raise for)

Total funds raised should be a distant second to the goals above.5

Goals like these free an organization to be of genuine service to its members in achieving their own goals, and to treat its community as an end, not a means.

Closing question: Who have you found to be great at building communities, whether for political donors or any other group?