Uber targeting:
We only endorse candidates who:
1) Are strongly progressive
2) Need help—no easy races
3) Have a viable chance to win—no hopeless causes
We target races based on rigorous analytical methodologies, including Progressive Punch’s encompassing searchable database of congressional voting records to determine which incumbents are worth supporting based on how progressive they are. We don’t waste money on races that aren’t winnable or races that are winnable without our efforts. The races we get involved in are hotly contested, and an extra push from us makes the difference between victory and defeat. In addition, we target races with long-term goals in mind, seeing beyond the current election cycle to a future progressive Congress.
Learn more about the issue we use to choose candidates to support:
Federal Candidate Questionnaire
Electoral modeling construction:
We do granular profiling of voters a la Civis, Blue Labs, etc, that allows us to run micro-targeted campaigns.
A key ingredient in the Obama campaigns’ success, this involves constructing oversized polling samples so that the crosstabs are statistically significant. If this is Greek to you, don’t worry. The important thing is that we can identify if left-handed underwater piccolo players are the key swing group of voters in a given geographic area, e.g. a congressional district. This can be done for both persuasion of swing voters and for identifying who exactly would be the specific populations of strongly Democratic voters who have a low propensity to vote in that specific election. In the cases of both persuasion & mobilization, the construction of the models allows us to identify not just which exact populations to target, but also which specific messages will resonate with those populations.
Sussing out who’s really progressive and who’s pretending:
We vet candidates with an exhaustive multi-issue 39 question ideological candidate questionnaire and do hyper in-depth examination of voting records using the super-encompassing searchable database of Congressional voting records of our cousin organization, ProgressivePunch.org.
We won’t endorse a candidate without either a completed ideological questionnaire or, if they’re a congressional incumbent, scoping them out in detail at ProgressivePunch.org. We grade the questionnaires based on how progressive the candidate’s answers are—we are looking for candidates who share progressive aspirations for a society where all of us are afforded equal opportunity irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation or economic status. Everyone on whose behalf we work on is at least an A- or better across the board on all progressive issues. [We’ll endorse a B+, but we only work to elect people who are an A- or better. We also won’t get involved in a race between two strongly progressive candidates. In both primaries and general elections, we seek out night and day differences between the candidates.]
Individually targeted addressable messaging expertise:
Using technologically sophisticated tools, we specialize in addressable advertising that targets voters as individuals and not as members of large clumps of society.
Using multiple cutting-edge messaging platforms, we have a uniquely broad and deep range of messaging capabilities, and use them to create multi-layered, edgy, humorous and hard-hitting messages that target voters on an individual basis, rather than using the “mass audience” approach. These messaging platform technologies include satellite tv, Pandora, pre-roll video, individually targeted cable tv buys (in some parts of the country), and Apple iTunes (this last one in time for November we hope). So for example, we’ll be able to message Latinas between the ages of 30 to 40 who are Democratic primary voters are more receptive to an environmental message using some or all of these technologies in a given campaign.
Track record of running successful media and canvassing campaigns:
We have a great track record of successfully smiting the electoral Philistines, Republicans as well as ConservaDems.
We run successful media and canvassing campaigns employing innovative strategies and cutting-edge technologies. In both primary and general elections, state and federal, we’ve won much more than we’ve lost. For example in 2012 of the 6 legislative races we targeted in the general election—all with a Democratic Performance Index of between 48.0 & 52.9%–our worst performer out of the 6 lost by 266 votes.
Social media/peer to peer campaigns:
We are designing peer to peer campaigns where people can campaign to their friends via social media.
The Koch brothers will always have more money than any 14 rich people on our side. So it doesn’t make sense to just fire cannons at people who have more and bigger cannons. We need to use our numerical advantage—especially among America’s youth—to organize people to organize themselves. We’re on the cutting edge of experimentation with software that will allow people to do that without them spending any money and without us having to spend very much money to kick the whole thing off.
We don’t take a percentage:
We use 100% of donations for political communication and field efforts.
Our overhead is much lower than most organizations, and already covered for the year, thus we are able to use 100% of your future donations for political communication and field efforts. When we receive money from individuals or other organizations, such as labor unions, in order to purchase cutting edge addressable messaging (e.g. Pandora) we don’t take a cut of this money at all unlike a political consultant who would be making the same purchase on behalf of his/her client. Traditionally the percentage the client takes of the media buy is 15% which saves a whopping amount for our allied organizations.
Constant monitoring & testing of effectiveness:
We continually test our effectiveness through groundbreaking experiments conducted with an allied Ph.D. at UC Berkeley to evaluate the impact of our messaging technologies.
We assiduously measure the effectiveness of our messaging through rigorous analysis and challenging experiments. We never stop refining our approach through our collaboration with UC Berkeley’s nationally known expert on messaging technology effectiveness, David Broockman Ph. D. We also consult with the Analyst Institute in Washington DC on the same sorts of effectiveness measurements. We are ready to share our studies and results with allies and major donors.