Donate or volunteer? How to help a campaign before Election Day

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Image by: Nikos Michals

Did you know that you’re supposed to donate money to food banks, not the old cans of beans you have lying around your pantry? It’s true. Food banks are in a better position than you to purchase bulk food and allocate to the people who need it. Also, people experiencing food insecurity deserve more than the stuff you don’t want to eat!

The same principle applies in political campaigns. The two things they never have enough of are time and money. And you, a reader with a liberal conscience, default to thinking that your time is more valuable than your money. But in his book, my old boss Daniel Squadron had this to say:

Reconsider [the] list of volunteer activities — writing letters, knocking on doors, making phone calls, recruiting in-district volunteers. It’s a list of things that a campaign could pay for if it had the money. It feels good when volunteers are willing to do things for you; but it doesn’t make the campaign better than hiring someone would. Volunteers are only available when it’s most convenient for them; they can’t commit enough time to develop functional expertise to replace full-time staffers; and they’re doing the campaign a favor, so there’s no accountability.

Of course, if you’ve been going down to a vacant carpet store to volunteer for a local race for the last few months, this doesn’t apply to you. As with advertisements, volunteering now is making up for what you didn’t do over the last 23.5 months. But now that I’ve engaged your liberal guilt in a constructive manner, I want to reiterate that if you do anything over the next week, it should be donating money.

Alright, I can hear you now. “Hey man, this is a FREE newsletter, I’m not reading this from first class.” Duly noted, I know not all of you have disposable income lying around. But I’d go so far as to say that putting in a shift as a Taskrabbit over the weekend then donating the money to a campaign would be a more effective use of your time than trying to figure out a last-minute volunteering opportunity. In fact, if you live in a big, heavily Democratic city, you’d be better off going door-to-door asking for donations there than driving to another state in order to talk to strangers you have even less of a connection to. 

As for where to send it, before I was a newsletterer I spent seven years directing money with Give Smart to state legislative campaigns (which usually cost like 10% of congressional ones). And the people who run it now know what they’re doing, especially with the news that Michigan Republicans seemingly triaged the gubernatorial election, likely putting all their money into the state House to stave off a trifecta.

But that advice only applies for another week or so. Because the other dirty secret about politics is that if you send money to a candidate the weekend before the election, they might not get access to it in time. So THAT’S when, for lack of any better options, you might as well volunteer for a campaign, something you should have started doing months ago! I’ve created a helpful graph to illustrate this point:

And when it comes to volunteering for a campaign, there really is one option that’s better than the rest. And that’s going door-to-door, ideally after you’ve been trained for it. Cold texts and calls increasingly get screened out. Postcards are a better tactic for special elections. Canvassing really seems to be the only reliable way to get a hold of people.

As for where, just find the opportunity to flip a Republican-held seat, state or federal, closest to you. Ideally, it’s the district where you live! That way, you could actually meet your neighbors. I try to avoid simplistic explanations for why Donald Trump became president, but surely the collapse of bridging bonds as identified in “Bowling Alone” played some role.

Starting to volunteer for a campaign now is the equivalent of doing your homework on the bus. It’s better than not doing your homework at all, but you’d probably feel a lot better if you’d started earlier. But there’s still time to assuage your liberal guilt in a way that would really help the campaigns: by ponying up.

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AROUND AMERICA

• If you can’t give money to a political campaign (rules from your employer, not a citizen, etc.) but you can give something, I’d suggest donating to Dave’s Redistricting App (DRA), which has given citizens like you and me the power to judge whether maps proposed by politicians are gerrymanders and propose better ones in their stead. Before DRA, people had to draw maps in Microsoft Paint and calculate the political lean of them in Microsoft Excel instead of going to a school dance. Not that I ever did that!

• Vivek Ramaswamy’s repulsive anti-Amy Acton ad has dominated the news over the past few days, but I want everyone to take the time to watch the response above from Acton’s brother. Over the last ten years, courage has been degraded as a political asset, but perhaps it can start making a comeback.

Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures is out with a "six seven"-themed ad in #AL02 blasting his GOP opponent Rhett Marques on taxes:

"How high did Rhett Marques raise the gas tax? Six seven … Rhett Marques voted to raise the gas tax by 67%." pic.twitter.com/xfrOQuOo3e

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) October 20, 2026

• One of the worst things about election season is that it’s hard to avoid having your kids see the ads. So kudos to Shomari Figures for doing one that they’ll like.

• Did you know that Florida Republicans want to criminally prosecute anyone who mentions a grand jury finding that high-ranking state officials, including Attorney General James Uthmeier, illegally diverted $10 million? Thankfully, a judge ruled this week that Florida Republicans cannot criminally prosecute anyone who mentions a grand jury finding that high-ranking state officials, including Attorney General James Uthmeier, illegally diverted $10 million.

• In yet another instance of establishment Democrats ignoring corruption concerns, Hawaii state Sen. Michelle Kidani has been reportedly suffering from dementia since February. But if she resigned, then there would be a wide open primary to replace her. Instead, she stayed in office until the exact date where a party appointment would replace her instead. 

• By now, you’ve probably seen the viral clip where Abdul El-Sayed schools an obvious political operative for asking him to disavow (a word that only political operatives use) the Muslim Brotherhood. But did you also see that the operative, Tommy Teepell, was paid $250,000 to ask him that question, along with other “canvassing and influencer marketing”? Remember that the next time you see a struggling leftish influencer announce that they’re right wing now.

• Political analyst Chaz Nuttycombe has written a helpful guide to 20 of the most insane state legislative elections to watch in two weeks. The list includes a few races we’ve covered here before, including Fabián Basabe’s.

• It seems like U.S. Rep. Mark Green might have resigned from Congress so he could get a large commission to ram through an arms deal between a private contractor and the Haitian government. And somehow, that’s related to the chaos of administering Dolly Parton’s estate.

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INTERNET STUFF I LIKED THIS WEEK

I’m incredibly jealous of Lucy Rohden. I wish that I could make deadpan videos online as well as she does. I try; check out our Instagram feed where I talk about all the insane bills Republicans try to pass at the state level. But I’m going to have to work to be as good as her. Every Sunday, she’s forcing me to up my game.

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BOOK CLUB

Daniel Walker Howe’s “What Hath God Wrought” is widely considered the final word on American history in the early 19th century, and with good reason: The book’s fantastic. He has a keen eye for characters and details that makes it more than just a notebook-emptier. One overriding theme is that the liberal do-gooders in that period of American history also happened to be deeply religious. So when we see the current wave of clergy running to clean up an increasingly amoral government, it’s actually a return to our country’s roots.

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HELP US OUT

Thanks to everyone who told me that Warby Parker really is the best place to get glasses these days. Now that I work in radio, there are worse fates than looking like Ira Glass.

As for this week’s question, there’s a hypothetical I learned about in “What Hath God Wrought” that’s been nagging at me. Henry Clay came incredibly close to becoming president in 1841, refusing to be William Henry Harrison’s running mate in a brief fit of pique. If he had become president, it seems like the Whigs would have had the best chance to actually implement their American System, and they would’ve pursued economic development instead of saber-rattling at Mexico and Canada.

So my question is, if that happened, how would history have changed? What would emancipation have looked like? Would we have eventually gotten control over what’s now the American West? Would we have the equivalent of the Reconstruction Amendments? My mind’s been spinning on this one. Email me and tell me what you think!

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