Are donations close to Election Day still helpful? How quickly does MVP regrant to groups?
Are donations still helpful? Unequivocally yes!
How quickly does MVP regrant to groups? Nearly every day.
While early, year-round, and multi-year funding is always best, donations in the months, weeks, and days before Election Day are still enormously impactful.
Here is more of an in-depth explanation, for those who appreciate the nuance.
Where is the best place to donate?
A simple option is to give through Movement Voter PAC and we’ll redistribute according to our electoral strategy optimized for winning the Presidency, Senate, House, and key down-ballot races.
By moving money to the field as quickly as we can, we are seeking to do our part to address the deep lack of funding for independently-run, locally-based voter mobilization efforts, which we view to be the most glaring vulnerability on the Democratic side of electoral politics.
If you haven’t yet, read more about this problem — and how we solve it — in our recent memo, Bat Signal 4: Democrats’ Underfunded Ground Game.
How quickly does MVP get money to the field?
In the final months before Election Day, we switch from monthly to weekly grantmaking approval meetings and move 501(c)(4) and PAC money to our partners nearly every day.
Does “late money” still help?
Yes. Because the grassroots electoral field is so chronically underfunded while the electoral stakes remain so high, our grantee partners need last-minute funding for:
Objective #1: Turning out every last vote
Because elections so profoundly set the conditions for progress, groups often incur expenses pre-election that they will need to cover post-election — for example, scaling up their door-to-door canvass team so they can complete multiple passes to their full target voter universe. See more examples here.
Objective #2: Ensuring every vote counts
Now more than ever, the work of winning elections does not end on Election Day. With threats of voter suppression, political violence, and a growing and emboldened movement of election denialism, our partners’ plans quickly pivot from voter persuasion and mobilization to election protection, such as:
- Ballot curing (helping voters correct simple errors on their ballot that would have disqualified their vote).
- Work to ensure vote certification; and
- Organizing mass public displays of support for election results.
MVP local partners engage in each of these activities in the lead-up to an election.
Groups are taking heroic risks to ensure victory — sometimes depleting precious reserves in the process. But after Election Day, they are on the hook for these risks. By covering these costs upfront, we can support them to go all out NOW.
Are donations still useful after the election?
Yes — one of the most advantageous aspects of investing in local organizing is that our contributions have a long-tail impact that lasts long after Election Day, regardless of the results.
Win or lose, candidate campaigns disappear after Election Day.
Sometimes, campaigns even raise so much money that they saturate the airwaves with ads and still are literally unable to spend it all before the election — leaving countless dollars inefficiently languishing, instead of being sent to where they could have made up the margin of victory elsewhere. For more on this, check out these sobering reads at The New Republic and Open Secrets.
Every dollar to local organizing builds power that lasts.
Often, the most critical window to achieve the most consequential policy wins is in the first few months of the new term of office. Our partners depend on steady, uninterrupted funding in order to maintain their staffing, operations, and organizing momentum — so that they can seize the legislative, judicial, and other policy opportunities that any prior electoral victories have now afforded them.
MVP funds year-round, on-the-ground organizing because Election Day is just an inflection point, not the endpoint, in the long arc of social change. By giving today, you are supporting the most effective organizing groups in the most critical places to win on Election Day, ensure every vote counts, and build the lasting power we need to enact transformative policy progress.
What is the end goal of all this?
We envision a thriving field of grassroots voter groups that are 100% funded, organizing at their highest potential, year-round, year after year. To get there, however, we’ll need to transform the culture of philanthropy and of political giving — and we need your help to do it!
In early September 2024, we estimated that the grassroots electoral field had a current partisan budget gap of at least $200-$300 million in the top nine battleground states alone.
If this all sounds like a lot, it is. But for comparison, in the 2020 election cycle the Democratic side spent over $7 billion, and in the 2024 cycle AdImpact projected that political ad spending alone would top $10.2 billion.
Every year, Americans donate $500 billion to charity. Given that Biden-voting counties in 2020 make up 71% of U.S. GDP, we can assume at least half of that $500 billion comes from people who vote for Democrats. So every two years, Democratic-leaning donors give more than $500 billion to charity — over 100 times what is given to the entire field of local organizing, progressive advocacy, and voter engagement (i.e. the most cost-effective way to fund lasting progress).
So we know that the money is there. If Democratic-leaning donors shifted 1-2% of their existing charitable donations, the field would have $5-10 billion a cycle. If we could only educate and organize Democratic-leaning donors to donate more strategically, we could solve so many societal problems “upstream.”