1. Does The League of Conservation Voters have a good track record? Looking at OpenSecrets ( https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expenditures.php?cycle=2016&cmte=C00252940 ), it says $1,416,321 was contributed total to federal candidates, but on the recipients page it only shows 500k~ worth, and they seem pretty spread thin. I suppose 5 million would mean quite a lot of money going to candidates in competitive districts that need it, though, but not if the contributions continue to be as small as they have so far. Wouldn't it be better to take that 5 million and dump it into about a dozen House races and a few Senate races?
This is a question I've asked myself many times. Does it really make sense to give to a political advocacy organization that will waste a lot of the money on races where it is not needed, versus just focusing it where you believe it is most needed?
My experience in higher education development tells me that fulfilling multi-million dollar pledges in the space of a couple months is an overly ambitious goal. The urgency of the election will certainly help, but for such things a timespan of
years would not be unusual.
The comment on it being late also reminded me of something interesting I heard once. I have a friend who's involved in political fundraising for various Democratic causes. I ended up talking to him about this once, because I was researching the impact of political giving on higher education giving (which is my area of work). He told me that most giving happens in the month before the election, but it would have a much greater impact if it were done earlier in the cycle. With that in mind, large commitments of this sort are not nearly as valuable at this stage of the game as they would be in, say, the Spring.
