The State Slate is an effort by the tech community to help excellent state candidates in competitive races nationwide.
Our first and second rounds of fundraising raised nearly a half million dollars for 22 candidates. In this third round, we'll be helping 11 more, this time in Florida and North Carolina.
You can read about our full list of candidates in detail here.
What's at stake in these elections? Both Florida and North Carolina are states that have refused Medicaid expansion, creating needless suffering for hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans.
Both states also have a history of gerrymandering and are expected to gain seats after the 2020 census. Districts redrawn by a Republican-dominated legislature will affect the entire country for at least a decade.
We need 5 seats to win the North Carolina state house, and 14 to win the Florida state house. Rapid demographic change makes this an achievable goal, and 2020 is our best chance to break Republican domination in both state legislatures!
Florida and North Carolina are both also Presidential swing states, and North Carolina has one of the closest Senate races in the country. In a year when most voters will be voting by mail, the kind of local, community-driven get out the vote effort that is the specialty of state house campaigns could be critical to winning not just the state house, but at the top of the ticket as well.
Best of all, state campaign budgets are low by political standards! The $20K we are working to raise before summer's end represents a significant and highly useful proportion of fundraising for our candidates.
Every dollar you give means more time the candidate can spend campaigning instead of fundraising! These are winnable state races, if we just put the work in!