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Hey guys—Tim here, grabbing the mic from JVL for today’s Triad. I wanted to put together something today in reply to one of the questions I get asked most often: Who are the candidates most worth supporting in this year’s midterms—the ones best positioned to chip away at MAGA dominance in red or purple states? No caginess here: I name names, and explain what to keep an eye on. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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1. On Campaign Donations
I’m going to be blunt with you right from the start: Donating to political campaigns is a fool’s errand.
Most of the contributions are merely a cash transfer from your wallet to the bank that owns the mortgage on a political consultant’s beach house, with a few intermediary steps. Campaigns don’t put out PNL statements that tell you which department is delivering profits (votes). They often throw good money after bad because there’s no sense keeping money in the bank even if the campaign is doomed. And they waste gobs of your cash on pointless endeavors to keep their interest group allies happy (and quiet).
And a lot of the tools that are used to measure the effectiveness of campaign messaging are only slightly more sophisticated than a deck of tarot cards. I’d estimate that nine in ten elections are determined by the national political environment, economic trends, and the demographic makeup of the district—not by anything the campaigns themselves do.
There’s so much waste in political campaigns that at times it hurts my soul.
Think of all the good that could have been done with, for example, the more than half a BILLION that went into the losing presidential campaigns of Meatball Ron DeSanctimonious in 2024 and Tom Steyer in 2020. We could fund a year of the entire federal nutrition program for poor women, infants, and children (WIC) with the amount of money that losing political campaigns light on fire in a given presidential cycle.
In midterm elections, the story is similar. For the most competitive Senate and House campaigns, the law of diminishing marginal returns for advertising kicks in quicker than any consultant would want to admit. And now that the number of House swing seats has dwindled thanks to partisan gerrymandering, the unlucky residents of those districts will be treated all fall to punishing repetitions of the same six advertisements about the many evils of their aspiring representatives.
So when people ask me which candidates they should support with their limited resources, my natural instinct is to tell them to treat themselves to a spa day or send it to the local food bank instead. But that answer is understandably unsatisfying.
The stakes of this year’s midterm elections are high. Pro-democracy Bulwarkers want to do everything in their power to contribute to MAGA’s defeat, even if it’s on the margins and some of that effort is wasted. I get it.
So I began to take the question seriously: Where could people’s time and resources be best used in the coming months?
2. The Criteria
My answer is premised on the notion that I believe this could be a massive wave year for the Democrats, thanks in large part to Trump’s many self-owns over the past six months. In a wave year, surprising things happen. Back in 2018, the Democrats won House seats in places like Oklahoma City and Charleston. In 2006, I was working for Republican Jeff Lamberti’s “competitive race” in Des Moines, and we lost—like every single other Republican challenging a Democratic incumbent that year. Meanwhile, down the road in southeast Iowa, Jim Leach, a thirty-year (!!) incumbent Republican, got upset by Dave Loebsack, a random professor whose campaign was so nonexistent that he had to be nominated by a special convention because he failed to get the required number of signatures to be on the primary ballot. Loebsack stayed in the seat for the next fourteen years before retiring in 2021.
I want to help you find that professor. Someone who doesn’t have all the resources that they need from the national party committees. Or, in a handful of cases, a candidate who will be well funded but will need every penny to help the Democrats succeed in parts of the country where they have been struggling in the Trump era.
As for the Senate, Democrats need to win multiple seats in states Trump won by double digits. The races in North Carolina, Maine, Texas, and Ohio will get all the attention and money. But there are some others on my radar where the Democrats might have a chance to expand the map.
The rule of thumb I set for identifying these races were as follows:
They had to be at least R+5 in Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index (PVI)—a calculation of the 2020 and 2024 presidential candidates’ performance in a given state or district compared to the national average—and be places where Democrats have generally struggled to win in the recent past.
The Democratic candidate had to be legit and either a) they’re endorsed by someone I trust, or b) they just caught Ansley’s and my attention because we like the cut of their jib.
Bonus points if the Republican is particularly disgusting.
That’s it.
What follows is the first batch of candidates we are monitoring.¹ This does not include candidates in any states where the primary is still ongoing (with a few exceptions that I explain below). If you have a primary candidate you are really jazzed about, good on ya. But putting money into a Dem-on-Dem fight doesn’t really do anything in service of our liberal democracy—unless one of the options is that Nazi lady in Texas and luckily she was already defeated. Also, this list is not a ranking—though I do love to rank things—but for once I’m going to try to embrace the egalitarian spirit of the left.