Dear John,
The Sister District community is absolutely on fire, and more ready than ever to go big in the most important electoral year of our lifetimes.
This year, we supported 17 candidates in 4 states, and we had a big impact on campaigns that ended with tiny margins. In fact, we almost doubled our per-candidate fundraising and phone calls—raising nearly $800,000 in small dollar donations and contacting hundreds of thousands of voters.
That’s why we’re setting a goal to raise $54,000 before the end of the year. If we hit it, we’ll be able to hire another full time organizer to recruit volunteers and grow teams in the 9 most important battleground states. Help us do it with a $20.20 contribution today.
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Razor-thin Margins
Many of our races came within just a few hundred votes, so we know that our volunteer efforts clearly moved the needle. Here are just a couple of our tightest races:
- Shanda Yates (MS-HD64): won by 168 votes (1.55%)
- Alex Askew (VA-HD85): won by 800 votes (3.45%)
Our Volunteers are Powerhouses
We’re still crunching numbers, but it’s safe to say that Sister District volunteers went above and beyond in 2019. We wanted to highlight some of the numbers that blew us away the most, and we’ve shared a deeper analysis on our blog (with more to come!).
- $735,830 raised
- 19,324 door knocks
- 208,520 phone calls
- 287,980 text messages
- 201,202 postcards sent
And we had a huge impact on individual campaigns:
- 57% of Delegate-elect Josh Cole’s volunteer phone calls
- 66% of Delegate-elect Shelly Simonds’ volunteer phone calls
- 82% of Delegate Hala Ayala’s text messages
- 100% of Senator-elect John Bell’s text messages
- 100% of Representative-elect Shanda Yates’ text messages
- 100% of Delegate-elect Alex Askew’s postcards
Our Sister District legislators-elect represent incredible firsts. These include:
- Ghazala Hashmi (VA-SD10) became the first Muslim woman elected to the VA Senate.
- Joshua Cole (VA-HD28) is the first Black person, and the youngest, to ever hold this seat.
- Alex Askew (VA-HD85) is the first person of color, and only the second Democrat in 45 years, to hold this seat.
- Shanda is the first woman to hold this seat, and she unseated the House Republican floor leader, who held the seat since 1988.
We could not be more proud of the work we did in 2019 to safeguard our democracy, flip Virginia blue, and flip a district in a deeply red state.
To keep our momentum going into next year, we need to triple our funding and bring our successful model of voter contact and grassroots fundraising to triple the number of campaigns we supported in 2019!
Please help make that happen – chip in $20.20 today to help us hit out $54,000 goal and hire another full time organizer.
- The SDP Team
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