I had a great conversation recently with Sara Huddleston, one of our candidates on the State Slate (which I hope to put online soon) that reminds me to re-iterate the 'reverse coattails' strategy we are following in 2020, by promoting downticket races. A short thread:
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You can assume that this Senate campaign, like all the competitive ones, won't be usefully able to spend a marginal dollar. So where else can we spend it? The approach we've taken this year is to look downballot, to see if candidates there can broaden the Democratic electorate
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One place to look is western Iowa, which is rural, Republican, and therefore invisible from Des Moines. We've been supporting
@JDScholten for a while. On his first run in 2018, he got 24,000 more votes than there are Democrats in the district. He swung his race by 24 points!pic.twitter.com/kNG1ghhUla
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And if you look further downballot in J.D.'s district, one very interesting feature is that there are big pockets of Latino voters in rural Iowa (since an immigrant workforce is the backbone of the agricultural economy), including all the big meatpacking plants we've heard about
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So who is mobilizing the rural Latino vote? Sara Huddleston, in Storm Lake, seems like a great bet. She's the first Latina elected to city council *anywhere* in Iowa, and has been organizing and registering Latino voters in and around Storm Lake for over a decade.pic.twitter.com/WES0c4hBL1
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Last time Sara ran for state house, she did it on a shoestring budget. But she grew the number of registered Democrats in her district by 10%. My question this year has been: what if we properly fund campaigns like J.D.'s and Sara's, who have shown they can expand the electorate?
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Nobody else is going after these rural Democratic votes, but in a statewide race, they matter! So rather than pouring money into the top of the ticket, to get spent on saturating Des Moines with TV ads, let's give money to candidates who can spend it to grow the voting base
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If you agree with this approach, I hope you will donate to our State Slate, where we are funding strategic downballot races to help us win all the way at the top of the ticket. The road to the Senate and White House runs through places like northwest Iowahttps://secure.actblue.com/donate/state_slate_2 …
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