Mailbag: Donation recommendations and old-school heroes

Key upcoming races where you can make a difference

Before the mailbagging begins: In the spirit of promoting action over doomscrolling, today, I wanted to make Slow Boring’s first official political contribution recommendations of 2024.

Last fall, you helped us raised over $1 million for down-ballot candidates in high-leverage races.

This included investments in five important state Supreme Court races, one of which was won extremely narrowly by Allison Riggs in North Carolina. So narrowly, in fact, that her opponent is waging a protracted legal battle to try to steal the election, a distressing turn of events that probably deserves more attention relative to Donald Trump’s various antics.

But I also want to note that your contributions likely made the difference between victory and defeat for Riggs. Small dollar contributions to down-ballot candidates are incredibly important. Even as an unprecedented amount of money is sloshing around the political system, many down-ballot races remain underfunded. And because candidates receive favorable television ad rates relative to super PACs and other independent expenditure groups, your money goes further than a billionaire’s.

The Slow Boring community also backed a number of candidates in strategic House races. Two in particular that I want to call out are Adam Gray (CA-13) and Janelle Bynum (OR-05), both of whom won. Gray was a Blue Dog endorsee, and Bynum won a contested primary against a more left-wing candidate. These wound up being close races, and not only did our money help them win, but the fact that moderates won those primaries was integral to victory in the general.

This brings me to our larger theory of change.

To win elections, candidates need money. To win elections, it also typically helps to be moderate. But most small donors are quite left-wing, so the conventional wisdom in politics is that elected officials face sharp tradeoffs here.

But it’s not a law of nature that people with more moderate views are less engaged and less likely to contribute. We are allowed to get organized and motivated and do things. I’d like to send a signal to the world that there is a national network of donors who want to support moderates running in tough races. Ultimately, the only way to do things like win Senate majorities, contest red state gubernatorial elections, and improve the growth rate in the blue states is to show ambitious politicians that there is a path. Our contribution recommendations are in part designed to help light the runway for that larger project (relatedly, there is now a network for abundance-oriented elected officials to join).

The path forward for Common Sense Democrats

That’s why my top recommendation once again is Rebecca Cooke (WI-03). She had a wins-above-replacement-rate of 7.3 points in 2024 and ran ahead of Tammy Baldwin in her district. She nonetheless lost because she was running in a very red seat in a tough cycle for Democrats nationally. Cook recently restarted fundraising and we want to reward that and put wind in her sales to run again. Beyond that, there’s a good chance that Wisconsin will redraw its congressional maps in a way that’ll make this seat easier to win. One risk there, though, is that if WI-03 becomes more winnable, the party will end up with a more left-wing nominee. Cooke is the kind of candidate who deserves to be rewarded for the risks she took in 2024. The kind of candidate who, if she enters the House, could have a bright future in statewide politics in Wisconsin. And I want to tell the story to all kinds of people who live in red districts that if you take your shot and make a good-faith effort to over perform, we will celebrate that and help you.

Other recommendations:

• Wisconsin Supreme Court: Getting Wisconsin’s egregious gerrymanders undone requires winning a state Supreme Court race. The good candidate here is Susan Crawford, a Dane County Circuit Court judge and former prosecutor. In past high-stakes judicial elections, Democrats have enjoyed a large financial advantage. This cycle may be different. Elon Musk is investing major money in this race, and Crawford needs help.

• Pennsylvania Supreme Court: Three judges — Christine Donohue, David N. Wecht, and Kevin M. Dougherty — are facing retention elections. They first won in 2015, which facilitated an un-rigging of the state’s congressional maps in 2018, which in turn was key to Democrats winning a House majority. If they win their retention races, they get a ten-year term.

• Virginia Governor: The odds favor Abigail Spanberger winning this fall. She has built a moderate reputation in the House (progressives don’t like her), and I believe is inclined to take state government in a pro-growth / “abundance” kind of direction. I would, again, love to show the world that there is enthusiasm for this kind of candidate because of their common sense inclinations rather than despite them.

• House of Delegates: Democrats currently hold a very narrow 51-49 majority in the Virginia House of Delegates. Retaining that majority so that a Spanberger administration can implement a governing agenda would be highly desirable. Three solid incumbents facing tough races who need our help are Josh Cole, Josh Thomas, and Michael Feggans.

Contributions links for everyone on the slate (or for the entire slate divided equally) are here. Please contribute, and if you have friends who are interested in, angry about, or anxious about politics, please tell them about it. Taking action is better than worrying.

Now, on to some questions!

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Edine: With the rightwing vibe shift during the campaign and following the election, and the backlash to cosmopolitan liberal values, it seems like we've entered a period of peak selfishness. Just a general focus on wealth accumulation and a denigration of sacrifice and civil service. It’s hard to change these general cultural values with politics, but I wonder if pop culture could help shift these vibes (and may have even contributed to them in the first place). Do you think we could see or that it would be good to see a shift to stories about sincere, selfless people fighting the good fight, instead of stories about men behaving badly and focusing on anti-heroes and the impossibility of actually doing good in the world.

I agree with this.

I think that what started as a backlash to virtue-signaling and hypocrisy has become a celebration of selfishness and vice.

And I do think that leaves open a lane for some more earnest cultural products.

I’m a big fan of the Jack Reacher book series, and I like the Amazon show for this reason. Reacher is a purely altruistic character who is motivated by a sincere desire to help people and deliver justice. He is fiercely loyal to his friends, but also cares about total strangers. And importantly for this moment in political time, he’s a very masculine figure. Not just in the sense that he is strong and that he often does good by deliberately inflicting violence. He also has a lot of stereotypically male attitudes, often taken to a level of comical exaggeration. He’s stoic. He doesn’t care about creature comforts. He favors very direct, very blunt modes of interpersonal communication. He cares about other people’s well-being as a question of ethics, but he’s not that interested in other people emotionally. Reacher is the antithesis of virtue signaling in the sense that he is a true man of action rather than a manager of feelings or someone who expresses the right sentiments.

Contrast that with, say, The White Lotus, which I read as having a kind of unhealthy obsession with skewering hypocrisy. I loved the first season, liked the second, and we’ll see about the third. But even at its best, the pervasive cynicism of this show serves to essentially level all distinctions — whether you’re dealing with an entitled jerk or an actual murderer or just someone who is kind of clueless about the world, everyone is kinda bad so you have no reason not to be bad, too.

Reacher is cartoonish and unrealistic, of course. But I think White Lotus is selling a kind of faux sophistication as an alternative. The real world is not all black and white, heroes and villains, but if you look at a properly done grayscale image, you can see clear contrasts.

Matt S: Is there a charitable argument for not following Singer’s proposal to donate down to the level of subsistence? For someone who values some level of comfort (say a nice house, Beaujolais, subscriptions to substacks) but also wants to “do good” through charity donations, how does one go about the process of establishing the right balance?

I think that a lot of the discourse around this kind of thing displays symptoms of secular moral reasoning being haunted by the ghost of Christianity.