Dear John,
Early voting begins Friday, so I wanted to give you a bunch of updates from the campaign as we work to turn out our voters during the final seven weeks of the election.
First, the good news: Our doors knocked and dollars raised this summer were among the best in the commonwealth, so thank you so much for volunteering and donating to us. (If you haven't donated recently or even if you have, please chip in $10, $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can today to help us with our GOTV efforts!)
Second: We put our staff, volunteers and resources to good use throughout the summer, which made itself evident when our first set of poll numbers were the best I've had for baseline polling in four campaigns. We also caught Republicans repeatedly lit-dropping oversized door hangers with the Governor's face on them (they don't even mention the candidates) without actually talking to voters, while we focused on having as many quality conversations with voters as possible.
In fact, at one door in Haymarket, I saw that door hanger, rang the doorbell, and a mom, a dad and their adult daughter all answered. They confirmed no one had asked to speak to them, that they were all Democrats and I earned all three of their votes. They then gave me the Republicans' door hanger as a souvenir and we took a group photo together.
Reminder: Every dollar you donate is a dollar I don't have to raise somewhere else, which allows me to spend more time knocking doors, so please contribute today.
Third: From August 1 through Labor Day weekend, I personally knocked on more than 1,100 doors, all in a persuasion universe, where I talked about my work to fix roads, feed kids, protect the environment, prevent gun violence, raise teacher pay and the standard deduction, and make Virginia a more inclusive commonwealth. I had a surprisingly high contact rate, especially in the age of video doorbell cameras where people can see who's at the door by looking at their phones, and a few things became clear:
-My positive message is landing really well.
-My challenger's attacks against me in the mail never come up at the doors.
-Voters never even mention my challenger's name at the doors. When they asked me who was running against me, I truthfully said his name and identified him as the Republican nominee without any editorializing, and more often than not received a shrug in return, so I just went back to my pitch about what I have done and can do for the district.
Fourth: In August, we launched our advertising campaign: mail, digital, TV, etc. Simply put, we've been all-in for weeks now and spent weeks shooting at an empty net on streaming TV and cable as the other side wasn't up.
That brings us to the other news.
The Republicans are now fully engaged in our race. As of today, they're up on cable with a $28,541 ad buy for the week (Sept. 19-25). They also launched their mail campaign at the end of July and the Governor subsequently donated $25,000 to their side. Not coincidentally, they just purchased a $25,005 block of radio advertising yesterday for ads that started running today -- a number we expect will escalate the closer we get to Election Day (November 7) since Republican voters are more likely to vote later in the election cycle than Democratic voters, who are more likely to vote early.
That's where you come in. We need to keep our campaign fully funded through the next seven weeks to ensure our ground game remains dominant and we don't fall behind in advertising on any medium -- digital, streaming, radio or TV. As long as we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to win this race -- but we need the resources to do it.
There's an adage in politics that once you go up with advertising, you don't go dark until Election Day, which means we have seven more weeks of our plan left to fund. So please contribute whatever you can today to keep us the frontrunner as the first votes are cast this Friday and we prevail on November 7.
Thank you so much, as always! More updates to come.
Warmly,
Danica
