You don’t always need all the science I described in my TED talk. In Campaign 2024, sometimes a hand calculator is enough.

Currently, four Senate races show polling margins within five points: Ohio, Nebraska, Florida, and Texas. The rest add up to 48 Democrats/Independents and 48 Republicans. Getting to 50 seats is currently a coin toss, with Republicans slightly favored. (That’s what the R+1.0% in the banner means. The closeness of Senate control is expressed in terms of voter margin: if margins were shifted by 1.0 point toward Democrats, we’d have a perfect toss-up.) Where should you focus your energy? Depending on whether you are door-knocking or donating, the answer is different. Today, a brief note on how to factor in media costs.

I have previously written at length about how you should focus your get-out-the-vote activity in places where the race is close (for example, the Pennsylvania Presidential race), and the number of votes cast is small (a congressional or legislative district, or the entire state of Alaska). The voter power calculation in the sidebar and the Congress page converts poll margins to probabilities (taking into account uncertainty in polls), and shows you how much leverage you get by turning out one vote.

By that measure, per-vote power is largest in Nebraska and Montana. See the first orange column here.

Even now, with Senator Jon Tester (D) seemingly lagging his challenger Tim Sheehy (R), getting out votes is valuable in Montana because so few votes are cast there, and we have to factor in poll uncertainty.

But when it comes to donations, we have to take into account how expensive it is to run a campaign. According to Axios, the Montana race is the most expensive Senate race in history. Consequently Montanans are inundated with ads:

Now go back to that table above. GRPs are gross rating points; 1,000 points means that people in that market see an ad an average of 1,000/100 = 10 times. It is safe to say that Montanans are well-saturated with ads at this point. Also, ads there are now likely to be very expensive. (In the table, all GRP costs came from a campaign except for Montana, which I had to estimate. If you have better numbers, hit me up.)

Factoring in ad costs, for the highest bang-for-your-buck, per-dollar power is largest in Nebraska and Ohio. Montana drops to third place. And in Florida, Michigan, and Texas, donations are drops in a bucket.

You can convert this insight into donations through these sites I have set up for Democrats and  for Republicans.