Methodology

Surprisingly to us, there isn't a definitive group analyzing House elections to tell you the best places to donate.  The Red to Blue, House Victory Fund, and Frontline Dems lists are all great, but they're a bit too broad. 

Where do you donate if you really care about House control?  How do you make sure that your donations are going to matter if things are tight?  Do you feel overwhelmed by the texts asking you to 'chip in'? 

We crunched the numbers and created our list with the following principles: 

1. Most importantly, we care about House control.  We want to invest in the races right at the tipping point.  The most important victory for Democrats is the 218th!

2. Swing states matter most, 2/3 of these races are in swing states where dollars will also affect turnout for President and for tight senate races.  

3. We prefer media markets that are relatively cheap -- so we excluded CA and FL right off the bat.  

4. Many people who are donating work in finance or have corporate compliance that prevents them from giving to state and local officials. 

How did we do -- here are the summary stats for our 15 races: 

• Taking back control of the house starts with defending our most vulnerable members and open seats, and also supporting enough races to flip R seats to D.  In our 15 races:  six races are currently occupied by Dems, nine are targets to flip. 

• There are 47 races that are within 5 points of even in terms of partisan lean.  Our 15 races average a 2.7 point lean to Republicans.  

• The average win probability of the races we've selected is just over 40%.  We do NOT expect to win them all.  

  • The win probability of the six races held by Dems is 56%, of the nine races currently held by Rs, the probability is only 30%. That's actually right where we want it. 

• For our dollars to matter most, we're targeting a scenario of Harris-Walz running about 2 points ahead of Trump-Vance nationally.  This scenario would make the Electoral college a squeaker, and would raise our expected win probability in these races to about 50%.  

Our analysis starts by pulling in all the public data from Cook, Sabato, 538, and Split Ticket, we focus in particular on partisan lean and win probability.  We then try to build a composite rank from the most Democratic district to the most Republican, and find aim for the dead center.  

This year, for example, there are 47 races with a plus or minus 5 composite partisan lean, 27 of those races are currently held by Democrats and naturally the partisan lean of that group is about half a point towards Dems.  Unfortunately, the way the map is playing out (more Dems on defense), the full House average win probability is about 49% for Dems, meaning that the central tendency today would have Rs picking up a small number of seats.  

That's why our selected races are slightly "right of center" -- we're optimizing for the scenario where Harris is slightly ahead nationally, pulling these races closer to a dead heat.  Then we maximize our impact by crowding as much funds as we can into efficient spend in these crucial districts.  

Our belief is that WITH YOUR HELP, one of these 15 races will be the 218th seat that Democrats win.  

If anyone is reallly a glutton, we're glad to share our mad-hatter spreadsheet.