One Week to Go: What You Can Do Right Now to Help Democrats Win the 2018 Midterms!

OMG, it’s the last week of the campaign! After two excruciating, dispiriting, enraging, nauseating, depressing, sleepless years of Republican dumpster fire, it’s almost our chance to vote out the spineless toadies — and vote in a blue wave of incredibly talented, capable, experienced, energetic Democrats to Congress, governorships, AGships, and state legislatures across this great, if currently stumbling, U.S. of A.

But let’s not take any chances. My fellow Americans, let us rededicate ourselves to not screwing this up.

So: Here’s what you can do over the next week to make sure Democrats win as many seats as possible.

Know Your Ballot, Candidates, and Polling Place

• Go to BallotReady to make sure you know your candidates and any ballot propositions, and where to go to vote in person / how to vote by mail.
• If you’re a fan of the Crooked Media / Pod Save family of podcasts, you can do all that (and more, like checking your registration) at Vote Save America. If you’re more into Michelle Obama, Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monáe, Chris Paul, Faith Hill, and/or Tim McGraw, head to When We All Vote.
• To help you choose among candidates, there are some excellent, informative, opinionated, personalized voter guides, like those from #VoteProChoice and Everytown for Gun Safety + Moms Demand Action.

Make Your Plan

• Crush The Midterms is an excellent tool that asks you a bunch of questions about what you’re interested in and able to do, and prepares for you a personalized plan with clear actions and plenty of options.
• Swing Left’s Take Action tool is also a terrific place to start.

Volunteer Your Time

• Find what you’ll love doing! Use Mobilize to find just the right volunteer needs and events near you. Pulling together data from many Democratic campaigns, Mobilize helps you find and commit to what want to do, whether in-person or remote events: canvasses, phone banks, text banks, meetings, community events, fundraisers, meet-and-greets, house parties, voter registrations, trainings, friend-to-friend outreach, driving people to the polls on election day, etc. When you sign up, you can easily add to calendar, choose to get friendly reminders, and, afterward, give feedback on the experience.
• Canvass! Find and sign up for volunteer shifts via Swing Left, The Last Weekend (as in, the last weekend before election day, and also hopefully the last weekend of Republican misrule!), Vote Save America, Indivisible.
• Phone bank! If you want to make calls for surging Democratic candidates in key House districts, go straight to Swing Left or Indivisible. If you want to kick it up a notch and host a phone banking party for friends, Swing Left has a great, practical guide on how to do it.
• Travel to a swing district! For only $5, take a Swing Left bus from your city to a battleground district — fun, easy volunteering with a busload of other awesome volunteers. No driving involved, and no prior experience needed.

Mobilize Your Friends

Friend-to-friend outreach is by far the most effective way to increase Democratic vote totals. Here are some ways you can put your network to (tasteful, effective) work:

• VoteWithMe is a mobile app that tells you which of your friends is registered to vote where — and, most usefully, which ones are Democrats, which live in key swing districts, which ones have a history of skipping midterm elections. Makes it super-easy to find friends you’d want to contact and urge to vote. iOS and Android.
• You want to get your friends to the polls, but have no idea how to talk to them? Sign up for this OFA/Ragtag online seminar on effective GOTV conversations, Nov 1, 7pm ET.
• VoterCircle is a great tool that identifies the people you know who are target voters in a given state or district, and helps you write and send an email or text to encourage them to vote for the Democrat. For example, here’s the link for New Jersey, here’s Iowa, here’s Jenny Wilson for US Senate in Utah, and here’s Andrew Janz, who’s running against the sinister but incompetent Rep. Devin Nunes (CA-22). Wherever you live, VoterCircle figures out whom you know who’s a voter in that district, and makes it easy to nudge, without being a noodge. Both web and mobile apps.
• The Team app from the Tuesday Company plugs you into a campaign near you, and powers friend-to-friend outreach. Great mobile apps. iOS and Android.

On Election Day

• Everyone: March on the Polls! [Join a march. Host a march. Help others vote.]
• Students: Walkout To Vote! [Find a walkout. Host a walkout.]

Donate

• Still useful!
• House: For House races, check out Swing Left’s Immediate Impact Fund, where your donation is divided among 10 Democratic candidates who are in winnable races that will be decided by razor-thin margins. The current designated campaigns are Katie Porter (CA-45), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL-26), Abby Finkenauer (IA-01), Jared Golden (ME-02), Anthony Brindisi (NY-22), George Scott (PA-10), Colin Allred (TX-32), Ben McAdams (UT-04), and Abigail Spanberger (VA-07).
• House 2: Six days out, the Pod Save guys, using Civis Analytics data, just posted an FINAL final set of 10 House races where your donation will have the biggest impact. One click to donate to all, or choose & divide as you wish.
• Senate: On the Senate side, consider any of the following: Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Tina Smith (MN), Phil Bredesen (TN), Claire McCaskill (MO), Bill Nelson (FL), Beto O’Rourke (TX), Jackie Rosen(NV), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Jon Tester (MT).
• State leg: Downballot is where your last-minute donation can almost certainly have the biggest impact. Here’s a set of 8 key state legislative candidates you can contribute to with one click —a list identified by Run For Something and Future Now, who know of what they target. The Flippable Fund is an equally awesome, larger list of 19 critical legislative candidates you can donate to immediately.
• Governors: For governorships and other key stateside offices, check out Daily Kos’s 2018 endorsement list. Top of my list are awesome governor candidates Stacey Abrams (GA), Richard Cordray (OH), Andrew Gillum (FL), Tony Evers (WI), and Billy Sutton (SD), along with surer-things Gretchen Whitmer (MI) and Tim Walz (MN).
• AGs: If you live in a state with an attorney-general race, support your Democrat — I’m a particular fan of Phil Weiser (CO), Josh Kaul (WI), Kwame Raoul (IL), Joseph Siegelman (AL), Sean Shaw (FL), and Dana Nessel (MI).

Nerd Hard

• If you’ve got technical skills, it’s late, but not tooooo late to be useful. For starters, sign up to be a volunteer for Ragtag.
• More specifically, Ragtag is this week hosting digital security trainings for campaigns and volunteers — sign up here.

Obsess Over Polls

• Don’t. Bad for brain. Whatever time you’d spend scrolling Twitter in search of new polls, devote it instead to actually helping Democratic candidates win. We’ll all be glad you did.

Every Action Counts!

It’s never been easier, or more needed, to get involved and take action. If you want to talk through your options, get in touch with me. If I’ve ignored something that should be on this page, let me know.

One week left. Let’s do this.