Post by Jennifer Tomkins
Alyssa Milano. Until yesterday, if you’d said that name, I wouldn’t have known who she was (I know, you’re probably wondering which rock I have been living under; I sometimes wonder myself). I hadn’t heard of “Wet Hot American Summer” or watched “Who’s the Boss” or — even more incredibly given that I’m a bit of a political junkie — known about her presence at the Kavanaugh hearings and her support of Christine Blasey Ford.
It took an article in the Hollywood Reporter describing how Milano has embraced Airlift’s approach to funding elections to put her on my personal radar.
According to the article, Milano has launched a grassroots fundraising initiative called the #2020Fund aimed at supporting grassroots groups that encourage voting in swing states. Her initiative will, like Airlift’s Raise the Midwest fund, raise money for organizations in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which Donald Trump won by just 77,000 votes in the 2016 presidential election.
Milano’s own fund will focus on the following groups (many of which have been or are still in an Airlift fund): in Michigan: Detroit Action, Michigan Liberation and Mothering Justice Action Fund. In Pennsylvania she is fundraising for 215 People’s Alliance, Pennsylvania Stands Up and Pennsylvania Student Power Network. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin-based organizations are Black Leaders Organizing Communities, Leaders Igniting Transformation Action Fund and Voces de la Frontera Action, Inc.
We at Airlift are THRILLED that Milano will be bringing her star-power — hitherto known only to the rest of the planet but not to me! — and her passion to the cause we share. We also share mentors; Milano is partnering with Movement Voter Project which is also an adviser to Airlift.
Airlift May 2019 Update
MAY 2019
Bottom up is a winning strategy.
Last year your Airlift donations helped flip 21 house seats (7 in CA where we were very active), shut out Republicans from statewide office in WI, MI and PA, gave Doug Jones a victory made possible by the 600+ organizers we funded in the weeks before his election, and supported Nevada’s amazing shift from painful Red in 2014 to bright Blue in 2018.
In Florida, Airlift supported Organize Florida, which helped win the right to vote for 1.4 million people.
We help the people on the front lines.
Airlift lets you contribute to the outcome of elections in a way that it is cost effective, research driven, and NEVER A WASTE OF MONEY. We employ an asymmetrical approach that substitutes local issue-driven campaigns for high paid consultants and TV ads that don’t reach the young people and people of color we are targeting. When these people vote, they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. The kind of year-round, neighbor-to-neighbor work we fund has proven to be the most effective way to engage them, turn them out and keep them involved..
627,000 Virginians had their drivers licenses taken away for failure to pay court costs. Thanks to an effort led by New VA Majority, they will get them back on July 1st.
What’s new this year.
Last year we raised $315,000 with the twin goals of building local power in battleground states and taking back the House. There is ample evidence that we were smart investors. This year, we face a bigger challenge. While everyone is glued to the primaries, we are focused on preparing the ground in the 5 states we must win to take back the presidency. Plus we need to retake the Senate. And we have to hold onto the House! 2019 IS NOT AN OFF YEAR – IT IS THE YEAR for building capacity in young and minority communities that will make the difference in 2020.
Say hello to Pennsylvania Stands Up (Lift the Midwest Fund), one of the 6 new groups Airlift is supporting in 2019. See them all here.
Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes. The GOP is making a huge effort to expand their base and win again in 2020. PA Stands UP is up for the challenge. In 2018 (then named Lancaster Stands UP) the group helped engineer a heroic congressional campaign in a R+14 district (PA-11) that showed it was possible to change the political terrain of the state. They knocked on 250,000 doors and held 70 town halls to engage people who had been politically abandoned. In 2018 they spread their reach to 15 rural counties and now they are working in coalition to scale their work to reach dozens of rural communities in non-metro PA.
Lancaster Stands up proved that small Pennsylvania cities could be mobilized.
Our groups are like little birds.
Our goal is to raise a million dollars in 2019 for these groups. This means we will be able to triple the amount of support we give to each group to $50,000. This is a drop in the bucket in candidate and TV land but $50,000 is a big number when you’re using it to pay organizers $15 an hour. Our groups are like little birds. They don’t eat a lot but they are always hungry.
HELP FEED THE GRASSROOTS!
Over 400 people gave $315,000 to Airlift in 2018. Over 100 people gave $500 or more. No matter how much you can afford to give, please vote now for a different kind of political giving. You can write a check to Airlift (See instructions below). You can donate online (hit the DONATE HERE button). You can give a monthly donation to reflect the ongoing nature of the challenge and the work. Airlift is a labor of love. We are an all-volunteer, zero-overhead organization. Money in equals money out.
DONATE HERE
Who we are, how it works.
Airlift grew out of a grassroots group called the Mill Valley Community Action Network, a California-based 501(c)(4) corporation. We are an advisory service only. We do not touch any money. Online contributions go through ActBlue. Contributions by check go to Tides Advocacy. They apply a small handling charge in both cases for the services provided. Airlift contributions are not tax-deductible. For more details go to airlift.fund/about.
The Airlift Team
Danny, Renee, Carol, Suz, Rachel, Roberta, Susan, Jenny, Ruth
Our website
Our 2018 Report
To donate via check:
Make your check out to Airlift and designate a fund if you wish. Otherwise your donation will be spread out evenly across all groups. Mail to: Airlift c/o Tides Advocacy, The Presidio, PO Box 29229, San Francisco, CA 94129
Copyright © 2019 Airlift, All rights reserved.
The 2020 Election Will Come Down to Five States
Last year we raised $315,000 with the twin goals of building local power in battleground states and taking back the House. There is ample evidence that we were smart investors.
This year, we face a bigger challenge. While everyone is glued to the primaries, we are focused on preparing the ground in the 5 states we must win to take back the presidency. Plus we need to retake the Senate. And we have to hold onto the House! 2019 IS NOT AN OFF YEAR – IT IS THE YEAR for building capacity in young and minority communities that will make the difference in 2020.
We have rounded out our portfolio to include 2 groups in each of the vital battleground states–Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
One of the new groups is Pennsylvania Stands Up (Lift the Midwest Fund),
Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes. The GOP is making a huge effort to expand their base and win again in 2020. PA Stands Up is up for the challenge. In 2018 (then named Lancaster Stands Up) the group helped engineer a heroic congressional campaign in a R+14 district (PA-11) that showed it was possible to change the political terrain of the state. They knocked on 250,000 doors and held 70 town halls to engage people who had been politically abandoned. In 2018 they spread their reach to 15 rural counties and now they are working in coalition to scale their work to reach dozens of rural communities in non-metro PA.
Other new Airlift groups include:
Black Voters Matter (Voter Motor Fund)
LUCHA (West by Southwest Fund)
One Pennsylvania (Lift the Midwest Fund)
Good Jobs Now Action (GJN) (Lift the Midwest Fund)
WI Working Families (Lift the Midwest Fund)
Read more about the newest Airlift groups.
(pictured: Pennsylvania Stands UP)
We don’t need to tell you: Our groups are like little birds. They don’t eat a lot but they are always hungry.
Feed the Grassroots! Donate here.
Airlift Wins in 2018
Airlift fund Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada is registering Native Americans to vote on 23 tribal lands in NV.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to Airlift in 2018! We turned your dollars into important victories. Check out our Annual Report. Guess what? 2019 is not an off year. We need to keep the pressure on. The earlier you donate, the bigger the impact.
Your 2018 Airlift contributions helped:
Flip 21 house seats, including all 7 in California! (West by Southwest Fund)
Restore voting rights for 1.4 million citizens in Florida (Organize Florida)
Turn Nevada almost entirely Blue! (PLAN Nevada)
Increase early youth voting in Texas by 500% (MOVE Texas)
Kick Scott Walker out of office in Wisconsin (Milwaukee BLOC Action Fund)
Pass redistricting in Ohio, Missouri and Michigan (Lift the Midwest Fund)
Flip 15 Virginia house seats and win Medicaid expansion for 400,000 people (New Virginia Majority)
Pass automatic voter registration in Michigan and Nevada (MI-Liberation and PLAN Nevada)
Hire 600 organizers in Alabama who won the election for Doug Jones (Airlift special project)
Want more? Read the Airlift 2018 Annual Report!
A Look Into Candidate Spending Leads To The Genesis of Airlift
Post by Danny Altman
In 2017, I started Airlift, which serves as a kind of Consumer Reports for political giving. It was sparked by the endless barrage of fundraising emails I was getting that read like hostage notes. I saw the same hyperbolic language and Threat Level RED graphics across a number of campaigns. I had a strong feeling that they were coming from the same boiler room because they all read and looked the same. But I didn’t have any evidence.
Well I just found Exhibit A. In a scathing investigative piece in the Washington Post, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Anu Narayanswamy find the boiler room and take us inside.
The solicitations piled into voters’ email accounts — sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters.
“We’re on the verge of BANKRUPTCY.”
“Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!”
“Trump is INCHES away from firing Robert Mueller.”
The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little-known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections.
Mothership is now under fire for its “aggressive and misleading tactics.” Their fees, in some cases double the industry average, are built on exaggerating fears and eroding the trust of small donors. According to federal records, Mothership raised a total of $150 million in the 2018 cycle, and kept $35 million of that in fees.
Mothership’s first client was John Ossoff, for whom they raised $31 million. Most of that went to their media pals to spend on television advertising. David Broockman, a professor at Stanford, has reviewed every bit of serious research that’s out there. His conclusion: the effectiveness of political TV advertising is close to zero.
For comparison, Lucy McBath just won that same Georgia Congressional seat from Karen Handel, who beat Ossoff. McBath’s total budget was under $3 million. And she didn’t run as a middle of the road candidate.
Mothership is soaking small donors, wasting a lot of money, and making out like bandits. But who says there’s no honor among thieves? They’re also sharing the spoils with their ex-colleagues and friends, many of whom they met at their previous employer, the DCCC.
About a quarter of the payments that flowed to Mothership during the midterm elections came not from campaigns, but from political entities run by operatives with whom the Mothership founders have personal and professional ties.
Believing that there had to be an alternative to this barrage of misleading and threatening emails, I decided to go down a different path. Working with a team out of my local Indivisible group, we got amazing help from Tides Advocacy and the Movement Voter Project to start our own fundraising site at Airlift.fund. We now work in concert with other donor groups who believe that your money doesn’t have to go through DC to get to Macon or Milwaukee.
Our research showed that giving to effective local grassroots groups is much more powerful than directly funding candidates or party organizations. Airlift funds a seriously vetted collection of groups fighting for issues that motivate young and non-white people. I call these people “natural born Democrats,” because if you can get them to the polls, they will overwhelmingly vote Democratic. These are the people who voted for Obama and stayed home in 2016. These are the people who came back in 2018!
The groups we fund work neighbor-to-neighbor, all year long. So instead of parachuting people into battleground states and districts, we support local feet on the street. In the run up to elections, they already have deep relationships with unlikely voters and know what it takes to get them to the polls. If you would like to get more info on how it works, go to Airlift.fund.
A version of this blog originally appeared on Daily Kos.
Mothership Strategies raises $31 million, loses an election, and proves that scare tactics work on small donors.
Victory Against Voter Suppression in Georgia
Congratulations to 2 Airlift-funded groups, Working Families Party and New Georgia Project, on their victory against voter suppression in Georgia. How did they do it? The grassroots way: by texting every voter in the district and sending canvassers door-to-door. After facing overwhelming pressure, election officials in Randolph County voted to not close polling locations that primarily served people of color and lower income voters. We will remain vigilant in our support of these groups and New Georgia Project founder Stacey Abrams, candidate for Governor of GA who has worked for years to increase voter registration and turnout. We applaud you and have got your back!
Airlift Helps Fund Native Outreach in Nevada
Pyramid Lake Paiute. Timbi-Sha Shoshone. Fort Mohave. They see themselves as the forgotten ones. Beverly Harry, a Navajo woman who is part of PLAN, Airlift's group in Nevada, drives the state visiting 23 tribal lands. Her goal: take advantage of a new law pushed by PLAN that creates new, easier to reach voting locations for native people
Airlift Adds a New Group: POWER CALIFORNIA!
Based in Oakland, Power California is building a disciplined, culturally-attuned movement of black, Latino, Asian-Pacific, Native, LGBTQ, formerly incarcerated and undocumented people. 29 groups with a long term vision for shared power, training leaders, getting out the vote—all working together to register 175,000 new voters who speak 12 different languages.
Working Families Wins Big Primary Victories in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Vermont
Airlift is all about the power of bottom up. Working Families, in our Network Effect fund, pulled off a string of important state and local wins in the August 14th primaries: Randy Bryce, who forced Paul Ryan into retirement in WI-01. Jahana Hayes, a teacher who will likely be Connecticut’s first ever black member of Congress. And Christine Hallquist, who won the Democratic nomination for Governor of Vermont. Victories like these took years of organizing on the ground.
