New Congress Fund 2024: Swing the House
Welcome to 2024! The wildest Presidential Race since 1968. President Biden's honorable decision to step aside and make room for new leadership has reinvigorated the Presidential race and opened a much clearer path for Democrats to hold the White House.
But the fight to protect American democracy continues further down the ballot!
As always, the New Congress Fund focuses on one overriding question: what's the best and most impactful way to give to Democrats this cycle? Here's our theory: retaking the House is both the most direct and most likely way to prevent backsliding from the progress that President Biden has made in the last four years and that Democrats have successfully fought for over decades in the (unfortunately still not improbable) world that Harris loses. Direct donations to high quality House candidates delivers resources for targeted field operations and lowest-dollar cost broadcast advertising that can activate voters in critical swing districts. Consistent with our past, successful modeling/targeting, we've done the math and selected what we see as the 15 most important House races to invest in this cycle.
Our work starts with a bottoms-up, district-by-district build of the 2024 House map and then screens based on following criteria:
Races that we believe are amongst the most likely to be the "tipping point" for House control, i.e. the decisive 218th seat by partisan lean
Bias towards races in Presidential swing states and to lesser degree key Senate races (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona having both)
Districts we expect to be the most closely fought based on partisan composition and historical results
A focus on races where incremental money particularly matters, e.g. because ad spend goes further or because we view them as under resourced relative to their potential importance
The data nerds can find more detailed stats on these races here.
Despite the surge in support for Harris-Walz -- the top of the ticket remains a toss up. The Senate map is very tough, but well funded. Our races are mostly in exurban and rural, lower cost media markets -- where a 30 second ad during the nightly news can cost less than $1,000. Our candidates are overwhelmingly moderate and while there is no ideological tests applied here, that's what it takes to win in these critical, generally slightly Republican leaning areas. All your donations go DIRECTLY TO THE CANDIDATES, no PACs, no overhead or consultants, no inefficient spend.
On compliance, none of our candidates are state and local officials, so we've made it as easy as possible for anyone who has corporate compliance review.
The Races:
We're targeting 15 races. These are direct donations to the campaigns -- no PAC, no overhead, no legal fees, no consultant fees, etc. Moreover, spending by campaigns is guaranteed the lowest possible media cost, so these gifts are ~7x more valuable than donations to a PAC.
Six of these races are Democratic seats we have to defend (one is an open seat being vacated by Elissa Slotkin to run for Senate), 9 are currently held by vulnerable Republicans. Ten are in swing states. While we didn't impose an ideological test, it's true that these are moderates, the kinds of no-nonsense leaders we need to get things done for our country.
Defend These Seats
New Leaders in Congress
Join us!
We're the New Congress Fund (NCF). We're dedicated to an analytical approach to Democratic fundraising, targeting our dollars at races that will have the largest impact on political power in Washington, DC. In 2018, that meant supporting 11 House challengers that were most likely to be the tipping point for House Democratic control, focusing on moderately Republican leaning districts. In 2020, we ran two efforts: early in the cycle, we held the largest single event to support 14 vulnerable House freshman in potentially decisive races and in the fall of 2020 we raised money for close House races in the purplest Presidential swing states -- helping vulnerable Dems and pushing Biden into the White House. In 2022, our view was that if Democrats were to win the House it would be the slimmest of margins and supported a slate of 10 candidates including those we thought had the best chance to win in very Republican leaning areas, like Alaska and ME-2. While our approach does not look to "pick winners"--to the contrary we look for races we expect to be close, hard fought, and tough to win--across our targeted funds ~80% of the candidates we backed have won, well above the win rates projected by most models. For more detail on our previous efforts, click here.
2024 is already the wildest Presidential election since 1968, and yet the field of swing states and swing districts is narrower than ever. Still we're committed to the highest impact political giving.