Today we reached a big milestone! The Great Slate has raised over $6,000,000 for Federal candidates since its inception in 2017. When I started the project three years ago, like most of the 16,000 people who have pitched in I had never made a political donation in my life.

Let me review what we've done! We helped get this guy, Jared Golden, through a tough primary and elect him to Congress! It was the first time in 106 years that Maine's 2nd district unseated an incumbent. This year he's defending a seat that also controls an electoral vote.

We helped get this guy, Iowa's openly white nationalist congressman Steve King, out of Congress. J.D. Scholten, in his first run for office, swung the district by 20 points and came close to beating King. The suddenly unviable six-term incumbent lost a primary challenge in June

Two of the wonderful candidates we supported in 2018, when they were ignored by the national Democratic Party, Alyse Galvin and Diane Mitsch Bush, are now in the front ranks of the DCCC's Red-to-Blue list, the list of national races the party considers most winnable

We also learned some negative lessons. We raised a huge amount of money for candidates in Lancaster and Allentown PA to conduct a robust and unprecedented field program, knocking on doors and organizing for over a year, and learned that it doesn't really do much for House races

We tried fundraising for bold, unapologetic progressives in places like central Arkansas and southwest Utah, and convinced ourselves that the non-voting majority in those districts was not in fact disgusted with centrists and hungry for Scandinavian-style social democracy

But the thing I'm proudest of is supporting excellent candidates from rural America who have had to work for a living, and who can bring us real political reform, run independently of the national Democratic Party, which is terrified of novelty.

At the heart of the Great Slate there has always been an ambivalence about the whole effort. This is not how politics should be funded, and our system needs bottom-up reform. But to fix the broken rules, we have to win once from inside them.

Most of all, I'm happy that we've proven to the world that the tech community is not just Silicon Valley plutocrats and giant tech companies writing big checks to the Republican Party, but that the average working stiff, tired after a day in the code mines, also gets a voice.

My sincere thanks to my collaborators @adamjodonnell, @rootlabs, and @askaphysicist, and my girlfriend Krista who put up with a truly unreasonable amount of political travel. But most of all, thanks to everyone who took a chance on trying something new to get us a better Congress

This year we're trying something new—helping boost votes for Senate races by focusing on neglected House races in those states. If it works, we'll do it more! If it doesn't, we'll try other things. But the fundraising will continue until democracy improves https://secure.actblue.com/donate/great_slate