I’ve been doing this every month since July. I summarized how much and to whom I’ve given in my September post. I’ve been staying at about $20/month, except in September I gave an extra $5 to the advocacy group Fair Fight 2020. In October, I gave to Warren and Booker among the Presidential candidates and I also gave $10 split among three Senatorial candidates – Mark Kelly in Arizona, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, and Sara Gideon in Maine.
Since last month, the horserace for the Democratic nomination for President has changed. Where Warren was a co-frontrunner, she’s fallen back a bit. Mayor Pete has seen a big bump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Cory Booker is not looking like he’ll make the debate stage in December.
I’m still a big supporter of Elizabeth Warren, so I think I should chip in a little extra to help her regain some momentum. I’m giving her $10 this time. I want to see Cory stick around in the race, so I’m going to give him $5 again. There aren’t any other Presidential candidates that I want to give money to right now. For tactical reasons – Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders. They’re not viable – Castro, Patrick. They’re billionaires – Steyer, Bloomberg. They’re terrible – Gabbard. I’m on the fence on a couple of candidates – Yang, Klobuchar, Harris – but I’m not there yet and I have my self-imposed $20 limit to consider.
I’m going to give the last $5 of my $20 to Fair Fight 2020 again. Aside from the Presidential primary, there’s still so much uncertainty in the Senate and House races, I can’t decide. Fair Fight is working to get all votes counted and I figure that’s a worthy cause at this point in the process.
On top of my usual $20 donation, I am also making one other, rather substantial donation this month. To my campaign. I’ll write more about my thoughts on campaign money in a longer post (at some point) on my campaign website – www.fro4knox4.com. I won’t be accepting donations for my campaign. I plan to self-fund. Not in the Bloombergian model of spending my millions on a nationwide ad campaign. No, but we’re well enough off that I can contribute $500 to my campaign to pay for basic things like a domain name and some candidate flyers of some sort. No Political Signs! Again, I’m going to come up with an official policy on how much I’m going to be willing to spend. I’m thinking no more than $1,000.00 over the course of the campaign. This isn’t just a political gimmick. I really and truly think money is one of the biggest problems in our politics and I want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. If I end up losing the campaign because the other side does huge fundraising and campaign spending, then so be it. But I plan on doing everything I can to make this one of my top two issues that I’m running on. As I said, look for a more detailed post at my campaign website.