Sometime last year Darcy Burner and I had a conversation about what role the netroots might play in the upcoming election, and I told her what I told all candidates: don’t expect us to raise much money. In fact, I was so convinced that the local netroots were not yet developed enough to function as an effective fundraising tool that I only created HA’s Act Blue page as an afterthought, sometime near the end of March. I thought maybe we might manage to raise a couple thousand dollars.
Man was I wrong.
In a little more than seven months, 361 HA readers have now contributed a total of $30,090.39 to Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark… over $4,600 coming during the last 24 hours. Wow.
Your incredible generosity has already accomplished two very important goals. Your contributions helped demonstrate the grassroots support that brought big donors and the DCCC into these campaigns. Without you, these races never would have become competitive.
And… your contributions have also helped demonstrate the growing power and efficacy of the netroots. If we were a PAC, our $30,000 would have made us one of the largest grassroots PACs in the state. This is the kind of money that forces politicians to take notice.
HA’s fundraising is even more amazing when you put it in perspective. Over the past seven months HA’s daily readership has averaged about 2,500 unique visits a day. (It’s now up to about 3,300.) That means on average, about one in every seven HA readers has contributed via our Act Blue page. Even more impressive, we’ve raised about $12 for every reader — that’s about four to five times the dollar-per-reader ratio of high profile sites like Daily Kos. Astounding.
So I want to thank all of you for your generosity and trust. When I first started pitching for Darcy and Peter, you had no assurances that either would make their race competitive. I promised you that you wouldn’t be throwing your money away, and you trusted me with your hard-earned cash. So again, thank you.
That’s it. I won’t be asking you for any more money this election cycle. But if you still want to contribute to Darcy and Peter they could definitely use your time. Personally, I plan to contribute a few hours via MoveOn’s innovative Call For Change program. Just sign up online and MoveOn will give you a script and some phone numbers to call.
Both races are going to be awfully close. Whoever turns out the most voters wins. Let’s do whatever we can over the next 10 days to make sure that the winners are Darcy and Peter.