One other thing that the DNC does that’s potentially important (and that it should do more of) is pass money through to state parties so that they’re adequately funded. This is what is meant when you hear the term “50-state strategy,” at least the way it was practiced when Howard Dean was head of the DNC from 2005 to 2009. This can be especially important in red states, where there tend not to be enough Democrats (or at least Democrats with large enough wallets) within the state lines to keep the local party adequately funded.

However, the “50-state strategy” isn’t so much a short-term electoral strategy as a long-term plan to build out state party infrastructure, especially in terms of improving technology and data-gathering, and hiring larger staffs for field work. (Contrary to what you may believe, the DNC itself doesn’t have a large army of field staff, ready to be rapidly deployed into emergency situations like the Kansas special. It’s basically a bunch of people in an office in Washington looking at computers.)

Moreover, the “50-state strategy" didn’t entail the DNC passing money through to state parties to fund particular races. One way the DNC could’ve done something in the Kansas race would have been when the Thompson campaign asked the Kansas Democratic Party for help paying for mailers. The Kansas Democrats pled poverty, so the DNC could have given them a small cash infusion. (There’s no evidence to suggest Kansas asked DC for help, though perhaps the DNC could have offered of its own accord.) But, generally, DNC outlays are about the larger infrastructure, not individual races.

Would the state parties be in better shape now if the DNC had continued the 50-state strategy at the same level of intensity as during the Dean years? Almost certainly, yes. However, was the 50-state strategy responsible for, say, the Dems’ big successes in 2006? Probably not. Dean’s strategy was a very long-term one, with a multi-decade horizon, and only a few years of added attention wouldn't have had much effect yet.

The big Democratic wave in 2006, by contrast, came about primary because of a) the midterm dynamics that always apply, especially when there’s a very unpopular party in the White House and you’re the other party, and b) really strong recruiting and fundraising by the DCCC that year (though, of course, recruitment is helped greatly when potential candidates realize it’s a good year to run and win because of national factors).

What the DNC isn’t is a shadowy umbrella organization that controls all the other alphabet committees. The DCCC or DSCC, for instance, aren’t appendages of the DNC, and the DNC doesn’t give marching orders to them. In fact, the other organizations are rivals of the DNC, to the extent that they’re competing against each other for large donors’ contributions, and they zealously guard their own turfs.

If the DNC showed up and tried to take command of a particular House race, the DCCC would tell them in no uncertain terms to get bent. The DNC doesn’t send out messaging instructions or set standards for what kind of candidates the party should run. Beyond the platform writing process every four years, it doesn’t really have anything at all to do with what kind of ideology the Democratic Party promulgates.

The DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) is the committee that has jurisdiction over House races. Again, it’s not an arm of the DNC; it’s controlled by Democratic leadership within the House, and the job of DCCC chair typically goes to an up-and-coming Democratic House member. (Until last year, the chair was chosen by the leader of the House Democrats—since 2003, Nancy Pelosi. Under pressure from her caucus, though, Pelosi made the post an elected one in December, but the previous cycle’s chair, New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, ran unopposed for a second term.)

The DCCC raises its own money—it doesn’t get any from the DNC—and spends it exclusively on House races. Despite the fact that your spam filter is probably cluttered with the DCCC’s notorious "DOOOOOM" fundraising e-mails, much of the DCCC’s money, in fact, comes from the Democrats’ own House members, who are expected to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues to the committee (though they don’t always do that).

When members phone donors to solicit contributions—a dreary fact of elective life known as “call time”—they’re raising money to cover their DCCC dues as much as to add to their own campaign coffers. In return, the DCCC is always most responsive to its own existing members. They’ll pay to defend the ones who face competitive general elections, and usually they’ll also defend members against primary challenges. However, in good years (as 2018 is shaping up to be), they’ll spend primarily on offense, going against Republican incumbents and especially GOP-held open seats.

And despite the occasional accusations that the DCCC won’t spend on progressive candidates when they’re on the offense, they certainly will, if that candidate has a reasonable shot to win. The D-Trip spent considerably on Zephyr Teachout in New York’s 19th congressional district in 2016, for instance, but an even better example was downstate Illinois' 13th district in 2012: David Gill, not only an outspoken progressive but something of a perennial candidate, defeated the DCCC’s preferred choice, who was more moderate, in the primary.

Did the DCCC cut him loose? No, the 13th was one of the House races that received the most DCCC spending of any of them, and Gill lost by only one-half of a percentage point in the general. The DCCC thought this was a winnable race because of its presidential lean and because it was an open seat, regardless of the candidate’s ideology.

When people say “We should be contesting every seat” (or at least more seats), that’s an argument that should be directed toward the DCCC, not the DNC, which ultimately is interested in only one seat, the presidency. The DCCC decides how big the playing field should be, at least in terms of House seats (not Senate seats, or gubernatorial seats, or state legislative seats, each of which have their own committee—more on them in a bit).

However, those who say “We should be contesting every seat,” probably (or at least hopefully) don’t literally mean every seat, given that the DCCC doesn’t have infinite resources to work with, or even a lot of resources, given how expensive it is to run a competitive congressional campaign. Think of it this way: Suppose the DCCC has $43.5 million to work with in the final stretch of the election. That’s a mathematically convenient number, but also a realistic one, unlike the “billions” that some people seem to think the committee rakes in. (The DCCC raised $31 million in the first quarter of 2017, which is actually an above-average amount for that period in an off-year.)

So does the D-Trip (as it’s often known) spend $100,000 on each of the House’s 435 seats? In other words, do they spend $100,000 on our candidates who are running against likely targets like California’s Darrell Issa and Iowa’s Rod Blum, as well as $100,000 on preserving Nancy Pelosi in her ultra-safe seat in San Francisco and $100,000 on whatever sacrificial lamb we run in Texas’ 13th Congressional District, where Hillary Clinton won 17 percent of the vote in 2016?

No, you wouldn’t do it that way at all, unless your goal was two more years of Issa and Blum. It’s a legitimate argument—in fact, one well worth having—whether the DCCC should be spending $1,000,000 each on its 43 most competitive races, or $2,000,000 each in its 22 most competitive races (or, more likely, a more complicated matrix, like $2,000,000 in its 11 most competitive races, $1,000,000 in the next 11 most competitive races, and $500,000 in the next 22 most competitive races). But the “every district” goal is a distraction, unless you somehow have access to an unending font of money.

(If a military metaphor would help, think of it this way: Suppose you have 435 catapults, with which you need to besiege a city with high walls. Do you simply space them evenly apart and shoot straight ahead at whatever piece of wall you’re facing, regardless of how it’s constructed? No, you’d find the weak spots in the wall, and concentrate most or all of your firepower at those particular spots … at least if your goal was to breach the wall and get inside, and not merely to feel good about throwing rocks.)

So, if any of the alphabet groups would have gotten involved in Kansas, it would have been the DCCC, seeing as how that’s a House special election. Is it a valid critique to say they should have done more? Probably yes … but then, everyone was caught off-guard by the race—which didn’t become interesting until the closing weeks—including the NRCC, and even Daily Kos.

Kansas’ 4th District itself has been dark red for decades at both the presidential and House levels. Recent elections there had been extremely tilted toward the GOP, and the one publicly-available poll of the race showed Estes crushing by a 56-32 margin—and that survey came from Thompson’s own campaign!

And while Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is extremely unpopular, that wasn’t a convincing data point on its own. Why? When Brownback was similarly unpopular in 2014, but it didn’t stop him from getting re-elected, and it didn’t prevent Republican Mike Pompeo (whose departure to become Trump’s CIA director prompted this special election) from winning re-election by more than 30 points last year.

Internal polling in the last week of the race, though, reportedly showed a close contest all of a sudden, enough to get the NRCC (the National Republican Congressional Committee, the DCCC’s GOP counterpart) and its allies to start spending emergency money on ads. But, explained former DCCC political director Ian Russell, “Everybody’s internal numbers on both sides didn’t have this being a race in time to start a field operation.”

The DCCC didn’t spend on ads, either, partly relying on the argument that they didn’t want to give the GOP the opportunity to “nationalize” the race. That may sound like a B.S. argument to people who don’t pay close attention to the nuances of House races, but the DCCC’s involvement has, in fact, been used by the GOP to devastating effect against strong Democratic candidates in similar conservative Midwestern districts, maybe most memorably the race for Missouri’s 6th Congressional District in 2008.

But, for what it’s worth, the D-Trip did get involved, to the extent of coordinating 25,000 live calls into the district on the weekend before the election. It’ll have to remain a hypothetical argument whether DCCC ads would have activated more Democratic voters and gotten Thompson over the top; or whether they would have activated more GOP voters and made things worse; or, most likely, whether they wouldn’t have moved the needle much at all.

So how about the rest of the alphabet soup? The DSCC (Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) is the Senate-side counterpart of the DCCC. It’s funded by the Democratic senators themselves as well as outside donors, and it’s controlled by Democratic leadership in the Senate. It spends to protect vulnerable Democratic Senators and going on the offense in GOP-held Senate seats. As with the DCCC, it’s not a subset of the DNC, and it doesn’t have an ideology beyond simply winning as many races as it can.

The DGA (Democratic Governors Association) is the organization that’s oriented toward electing Democratic governors. The DNC doesn’t do anything about governor's races, either, which means that all those cries of "Why isn't the DNC helping?!?" during the Wisconsin recall election in 2012 were just as irrelevant then as the comments about Kansas are now.

The DGA is a little more loosely-organized than the DCCC and DSCC, seeing as how there’s no “leadership” structure among Democratic governors, to the extent that they obviously don’t elect a majority (or minority) leader, a whip, and so on. The DGA does hold regular meetings where the governors can get together and talk about policy and strategy, but the DGA chair (a governor, chosen by his or her peers) is mostly concerned just with allocating electoral resources toward competitive gubernatorial races. Also, the DGA is less concerned (than the DCCC or DSCC) with obtaining funding from member dues and tends to get a large amount of funding directly from organized labor.

The DLCC (Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee) is the organization that’s tasked with organizing and funding the thousands of legislative races all around the country, a nearly impossible job given how much data needs to be kept track of, and how much money they need to accomplish their goals versus how little priority anyone ever pays to legislative races.

(Which is lame, considering that legislatures are the real fundamental building block of the Democratic party: They form the bench for higher level statewide or U.S. House races; they enact policies at the state level which have a huge impact on local residents’ lives and serve as a laboratory for national policy; and in many states, they have control over the redistricting process for the U.S. House.)

While it’s generally wise to advise against giving money to the DNC, DCCC, or DSCC and instead preferable to give to individual candidates, an exception might be made for the DLCC. That’s partly because they’re sort of like the cool, struggling indie label amidst the lumbering, bumbling majors like the DNC, but also because it’s so hard to find information about which legislative candidates you should give to, since they so rarely make the news at all and there are simply so many of them to sort through. The DLCC can streamline that process, making sure your money gets to under-the-radar races that truly need it.

Side note: Please do not confuse the DLCC with the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council), a centrist think-tank/advocacy group that, most importantly, no longer exists, as of 2011. The DLC was never an alphabet group in the first place, to the extent that they specifically raised money for candidates and spent on elections.

Rather, they’re most associated with the rise of Bill Clinton and other centrist southern governors in the early 1990s, and while they gradually sank into irrelevance after that peak (and became chiefly associated with former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman), they still, for some reason, tend to get invoked as a boogeyman in the lefty blogosphere. If you want to cite a group that embodies that mindset but don’t want to sound like you just woke up from a coma for the last 20 years, you can always refer to Third Way instead—they could use some punching.

So, the question you may still be asking at this point is: Whom should I actually be giving my money to? As stated above, I’d offer a caveat for the always-excellent DLCC, but for the most part: none of the above. You should be giving to the individual candidates that you like, that you think have at least a chance of winning. And that’s what we at Daily Kos endeavor to do: to find those candidates that we think you’d like, who have a chance of winning, and flag them so you can donate to them as you choose.

Partly, I advise this because you have a lot more control over what happens to your money by giving to individuals; if your money goes to one of the alphabet groups, a fair amount of it simply goes to that group’s organizational overhead, and then it gets spread around to a variety of candidates, some of whom you may not care about or outright not like.

But also, more practically, speaking, your money goes further by giving to individuals. There’s less overhead in a campaign, and if the money gets spent on broadcast ads, candidates (because of FCC regulations) get a cheaper rate when they buy directly. Outside organizations, whether they’re the committees or PACs, pay a significantly higher rate to air the exact same ad.

One continually surprising thing is that a lot of comment board complaints about the DNC or DCCC are often couched in terms of the last time someone from that group called asking for more money. But that just leaves me wondering: You almost certainly got that call because you’d donated to one of those groups in the past, so why were you giving money to the DNC or the DCCC in the first place, knowing what you know? I mean, I’m probably more toward the establishment end of the Daily Kos spectrum and I’ve never given money to either the DNC or DCCC in my life. Not because I hate them, but simply because I know my money’s more valuable to and better spent by the individual candidates that I genuinely like.

Think back to my metaphor earlier about the besieged city. The alphabet groups, like the DCCC, are the heavy artillery: they’re the ones who have the financial firepower to finish the job. But who are the spotters, who identify where the wall is weak in the first place? Think of Daily Kos (and other online groups who are ideological in nature, rather than duty-bound to put their incumbents first) as the guerrilla fighters who are on the ground, who can move around nimbly and see things before they happen.

That’s our role: We’re the spotters. We can use our small dollars to lay the groundwork, and signal the bigger groups where to train their fire. It’s what we’ve done in the Georgia special election; the massive sums that Daily Kos readers raised for Democrat Jon Ossoff’s campaign showed the DCCC that this race was legit.

There’s, of course, some tension about how that should happen, and it was captured very well by some competing quotes from the McClatchy article about Kansas cited earlier, one from the outside:

“The DCCC will continue its longstanding and failed model of helping only most favored candidates until grassroots disgust makes that stance untenable,” said Jeff Hauser, a longtime progressive strategist. “Taking `chances,’ especially in a cycle which might well prove to be a wave, should be the DCCC's default approach.”

And one from the inside:

“The DCCC has to be honest with its donors about where they have opportunity,” Russell said. “If you cry wolf all the time, it makes it very difficult to actually move resources you have a real race.”

Both of those things can be true. And yet … I’m not sure I agree fully with Hauser that “taking chances” is the DCCC’s job. If anything, the “taking chances” part is the job of the netroots: Daily Kos and its allies. We’re the ones who (usually) spot the early-breaking races. If enough of us do so—if there’s a critical mass of contributions that’s too big for the committees to miss—that’s a signal that can, and usually does, get the big guns involved.

Still don’t believe me? Here’s the DCCC’s 2012 targeting director, and he seems to agree: