An estimate of per-dollar leverage

Because of media costs, maximizing your per-dollar leverage is different from your get-out-the-vote leverage.

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. (Indeed, if Democrats outdid their poll margins by just 1.0 point toward Democrats, we'd have a perfect toss-up. See the data analytics at the Princeton Election Consortium.)

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 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 Democracy Moneyball formula converts poll margins to probabilities (taking into account uncertainty in polls), and shows you how much relative 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.

Calculation of per-voter and per-dollar leverage in key 2024 Senate races. Probability leverage is calculated as described in the Democracy Moneyball post.

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 first table. 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.

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.

Now, one caveat, especially about Nebraska. Polling margins can change, especially in instances where there are a lot of nominally undecided voters. Nebraska surveys report a median of 19% uncommitted voters, larger than in Montana (6%), Ohio (10%), or Florida (11%). The success of the challenger, who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, depends on whether voters are willing to break with their overall tendency to vote Republican over the last decade.

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