September 29: Modified to take into account change in Florida ratings.

If you’ve been giving to races we’ve identified as high voter power, you may have noticed that once in a while, we make small changes. The reason is that our best estimate of return on investment responds to events or additional analysis. We will continue to follow this process until November 3. If you have more to give, I recommend checking once a week.

Today we introduce a new criterion, how well races are already funded, information that our friends at Data2ThePeople have been investigating.

The voter power calculations in the sidebars of this website give estimates of the ability of a single vote (or small number of votes) to shift the probability of the outcome: for President, for individual Senate seats, and for control of state legislatures. In the case of state legislatures, power is measured by ability to change the redistricting of congressional seats – Redistricting Moneyball). These measurements are exactly what you need if you are registering or turning out voters. They are also an approximation of where campaign donations will be most effective. This has driven the choices in the WinRed and ActBlue links.

For purposes of donations, this can be taken a step further by considering one additional real world factor: how well a candidate is fundraising. This is especially important in state legislative races since at that level, an entire campaign budget can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. In key Kansas legislative races flagged by Data2ThePeople, September fundraising ranged from $4,570 to $20,113. Running in other states is more expensive. Still, raising as little as $10,000 is liable to get you a really nice thank-you note.

For example, close North Carolina state House races have raised $1.5 million more for Democrats than for Republicans. So Carolina Democrats are being removed, and Republicans are staying. Kansas Senate candidate Barbara Bollier (D) has raised $5 million more than her opponent Roger Marshall (R). The impact of additional money is likely to be marginal. So we are removing her (and leaving Marshall on).

Conversely, Alaska Democratic/Independent Senate challenger Al Gross lags incumbent senator Dan Sullivan in fundraising. Donations there are especially powerful because Alaska has so few voters.

Finally, Florida state legislative fundraising is quite weak, despite the overall money-saturated campaign at the Presidential level. The most recent CNalytics ratings show a shift in races that take the chamber further out of the 20-80% range (nominal probability of bipartisanship 13%). It is time to de-emphasize Florida.

The resulting optimized choices as of today are:

Finally, if you find our analysis useful, consider giving to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.