Feeling Powerless? Activate America Says There’s Something You Can Do

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the most important consideration for us is we want to make sure that we focus on races that are within what sort of campaign professionals refer to as the margin of effort, which is basically what is the difference between putting people power into a race and how much can you move the needle for those races? Typically, the conventional wisdom says that that's about a five point gap.

The margin of effort kind of can move a race about five points.

It's really important to campaign in areas where it's much harder for Democrats to win because that's the only way that we win down the road.

But for us and for our volunteers, it's really important for them who are doing all of this work to feel like their contribution can make a difference in terms of the outcome.

So our starting every cycle is a little different.

Is it a take back the House cycle? Is it a hold the Senate cycle? So for us, it started off as a take back the house cycle, I think was the narrative in early 2025.

That has emerged into, oh, could we also take back the Senate as well? And we are cautiously optimistic.

The numbers and the data and the indicators are all increasingly optimistic.

Of course, as we like to say, polls are not predictions.

It is groups like Activate and our volunteers doing the work that make the blue wave actually happen.

But our starting point this cycle was Cook Political Report.

You know, there's so many races that need attention.

And so we needed something to help kind of pare that down.

So we started with all of the toss ups and the lean Republican seats in Cook Political.

As Cook has evolved their ratings, we have also sort of evolved our targeting.

And then of course, there are some exceptions.

We knew that the Texas Senate race was gonna be a live one if Ken Paxton were to win his runoff.

So on the night that Paxton was declared the winner, we launched our first postcarding campaign, even though the ratings agencies hadn't caught up yet to the fact that that was gonna be competitive.

Likewise, we're still focused on Maine's second congressional district, even though that is rated as a likely Republican seat that's currently being held by a Democrat.

We thought that it was important to really fight as hard as we could to hold on to that seat.

Um, so, you know, that has kind of informed our, um, our, the map that we have sort of developed.

There are other races that I think are right on the bubble.

You can look at Nebraska Senate, Kansas Senate that, you know, I think we definitely think could use some help, but we, as an organization trying to maintain So our discipline in terms of our theory of the case have not moved into those races quite yet.

Although if we see continued ratings changes to those states, could very well move into them later on down the road.