Fundraising.
Starting from scratch & running against a seven-time incumbent.
Georgia’s State Ethics Commission requires candidates and incumbents to report all contributions, expenditures, loans, and investments on a rolling basis. And in election years these filings are required at the ends of January, April, June, September, and October!
So, let’s take a look at how our final filings came out and what they can tell us about how the two campaigns compared on Election Day.
Our campaign had mass & momentum.
From the very beginning, our SEC filings demonstrate a consistent trend—our campaign succeeded in engaging with individual donors across all three counties in the 56: Cherokee, Cobb, and Fulton. And while our campaign benefited from some institutional donations, the lion’s share of our fundraising came from an expanding cohort of individual donors.
If we contextualize this individual-donation data, two powerful success metrics are revealed:
First, if we examine the total donor populations of each campaign, we find ours dramatically outperformed our opponent’s by a factor of 4.26! From July 1, 2023 through October 25, 2024, our campaign benefited from 324 individual donors—many of whom were repeat contributors—compared to our opponent’s 76—most of whom contributed just once.
Second, if we plot our campaign’s fundraising performance over time—scaled for the duration of each SEC reporting period in months (seven, three, two, three, and one, respectively)—we see clear and accelerated momentum. While it took seven months to raise our first $9,257—mostly from friends and family—we managed to raise $13,991 in just 25 days in October!
Our opponent excels with institutional donors.
Another consistent trend was our opponent’s reliance on institutional donors to keep his war chest flush.
Political and trade associations are known to favor incumbents over challengers—even when that incumbent votes against their stated interests—but my review of Albers’ corporate donors left me more than a little surprised. A little hurt, actually. As a design consultant, I’ve spent thousands of hours working for AT&T, The Home Depot, Publix, T-Mobile, UPS, and Walmart. Where was the love, fam?
I have to hope companies like Gas South and Quiktrip were cynically paying for access and not enthusiastically endorsing John Albers’ history of anti-LGBTQ legislation, his opposition to abortion-access without exception for the life of the mother, or for his inaction addressing the rampant corruption and violence in our state prison system.
Our campaign enjoyed far more support across the district.
In addition to engaging with more than four times as many individual donors, our donor base also represented a more geographically diverse and representative population.
Mapping our campaign’s donor addresses, we can see both how our campaign continued to grow and continued to represents a broad swath of the population across all the communities in the 56 as well as kindred communities in the surrounding uncontested State Senate districts, too—represented by senators John Mclaurin (D-14) to the east and Kay Kirkpatrick (R-32) to the west.
And when we compare this map to our opponent’s geographic footprint, the difference couldn’t be more dramatic. While we both benefited from a higher concentration of donors in our shared hometown of Roswell, John Albers’ reach is almost nonexistent beyond the boundaries of the 2020 redistricting. Indeed, you can count the number of Albers’ individual donors from Cherokee and Cobb on one hand!
We also had way more fun.
Our campaign tried a number of unconventional fundraising strategies, from signature events to letter writing campaigns (which proved surprisingly effective in this era of span messages, emails, and phone calls).
We enjoyed success with small milestone events, proving getting older can be profitable. We followed the first piece of campaign advice I ever received—to NOT print tee shirts—and produced merch only as a fundraising activity. We even had a surprising success with “hot candidate summer.”
I am incredibly proud of the hard work my campaign team has done to reach out and engage with the residents of the 56—across all our communities, neighborhoods, and cities!
