The Lincoln Project, Mother Jones says, “brought in $82 million this election cycle,” of which $24 million went to a co-founder’s firm. LP produced ads targeting anti-Trump Republicans, but Trump expanded his share of the Republican vote by six percent compared to 2016. Well, who knows, maybe it would’ve been more without the LP ads. But one can doubt it.
Now, Mother Jones says (here),
“Contrast that with a different kind of investment: The group Stacey Abrams founded to battle voter suppression, Fair Fight, raised $67 million, and used around 10 percent of its money for media. But Fair Fight and other groups, many led by women of color, invested in the long, unglamorous game of organizing—and flipped their state.
As [Mother Jones] reported, back in 2014 some 800,000 Georgians, three-quarters of them Black, were not registered to vote. With a $7 million investment, Abrams and another group she launched, the New Georgia Project, reduced that number by 200,000 in just two years; by this past October, another 600,000 were registered. Biden won the state by 12,000, and strong turnout sent Georgia’s two Senate races into the January runoff on which the balance of power in Washington now depends.”
And while Georgia wasn’t crucial to Biden’s victory, its two Senate seats up for grabs in next month’s runoff election are crucial for determining whether the next two years will bring progress or obstruction, because Democrats must win both of those seats to prevent McConnell and his Senate Republicans from blocking Biden’s cabinet nominees, judicial appointments, and legislative agenda. Those seats wouldn’t even be in play without Abrams’ efforts.
By the way, both those Republican incumbents are very rich, and got even richer by trading stocks using inside knowledge of the coming pandemic and the congressional response. Many of their constituents now face the end of unemployment benefits — and eviction moratoriums — because Senate Republicans refuse to spend taxpayer money on more Covid-19 relief for people who have nothing.
The goal is simple enough: Identify races and causes where your donation might help change the outcome. That’s not easy (I struggle with it), and the Mother Jones article doesn’t offer specific suggestions. It is, itself, a pitch for donations to support its journalistic efforts.
At this point, I’ll mention that I don’t subscribe to the media sources I go to for material and link to on this blog. All of what I use on this blog is free-access material. (Some of those sources limit the amount of free access, and I stay within those limits.) That’s because if I have to pay for access, so do you, and I want The-Ave.US’s readers to be able to go to original sources without hitting paywalls or paying to get there.
Below: A Lincoln Project ad, but it was Stacey Abrams’ black voter registration organizing, not LP ads, that help Biden win Georgia, a state that will now determine Senate control.