Democrat Sara Townsend, running for Virginia's House of Delegates

Democrat Sara Townsend, running for Virginia's House of Delegates

Despite the all-too-frequent reports of giant super PACs dumping in millions of dollars at a time to influence elections, small donations from places like the Daily Kos community still have a huge impact. When we put money directly into the hands of campaigns, we're giving it to the people who understand their races best and know the smartest ways to deploy resources. Super PACs hiding out in Washington, DC can't possibly know what candidates and their staffers who are actually on the ground know.

What's more, when we're talking about legislative races, budgets are smaller, and so, too, are the number of votes that decide elections. In other words, we get some serious bang for the buck, which is why we've endorsed eight great candidates running for the state House and Senate in Virginia.

So what exactly would our dollars go for? We know that Virginia Democrats are making smart investments in field and data operations, rather than simply trying to flood the airwaves with ever more ads. But with just one week until Election Day, we wanted to get a specific sense of how our donations would be used, so we reached out to the campaigns we're backing to find out what they could do for around $5,000 in additional contributions. We got some very interesting responses:

John Bell (House District 87 in Northern Virginia):



If our campaign can raise $6,000 more, that will get us: • Mailers to 6,734 targeted households

• Digital advertisements that will make over 500,000 impressions on targeted voters

• Five full-time field staffers for the final get-out-the-vote push

If we were fortunate enough to receive further support from the Daily Kos community, we would use it to boost our innovative digital get-out-the-vote plan. Our GOTV plan includes a two full canvass passes through a big GOTV universe, four pieces of direct mail, and online ads to be served to key target voters. The field and mail programs are paid for, and with $4,200, we could pay for our online program. With about $4,200, we could serve GOTV cookie-matched ads to the most important turnout target voters for four days leading up to election day.

If Daily Kos were able to raise a few thousand more dollars for our campaign, it would help us to pay for a GOTV direct mail piece that hits on the gun issue—Sara supports gun safety and her opponent is very much against it. It would also help us with a strong digital and online program for the final week and a half—running web ads, banner ads, and Google search ads to reach targeted voters in the district.

Money raised now would go toward paid canvassers to make sure Democratic voters who tend to not vote in off year elections know about this year's races and the stakes; digital GOTV advertising to reach voters who may be tough to reach by door or phone; and water bottles and supplies for canvassers.

(House District 94 in Hampton Roads):(House District 31 in Northern Virginia):(House District 32 in Northern Virginia):We're talking everything from carefully targeted digital ads to mailers on gun safety to humble water bottles so that hard-working field staffers don't go thirsty as they knock on countless doors. And notice that not a single campaign said they'd spend our money on TV ads.

The Daily Kos community has already raised an incredible $80,000 for this effort. There are eight candidates on our slate, and each of them could do a lot with another $5,000. If we can help all of them equally, that would be another $40,000 raised. Can we do it? I think we can. In fact, if our past experience is anything to go by, I know we can.

So please, donate $1 to each of these excellent candidates to make sure they have the resources they need down the stretch run.