“No, Taylor, I think this is a little more than our average fundraising letter,” Bahner recalled saying. “I dug into the reporting feature” — which gives details of each contribution — “and I’m like, ‘Holy cow, this is literally a Minnesota miracle.’”
Winkel took a look for herself, and sure enough, thousands of dollars were flooding in from across the country. Bahner looked closer at who was giving. An engineer from NASA. A nurse manager in Seattle. A floor worker from Best Buy. A retiree from Ohio.
Bahner’s campaign in Minnesota’s 34B District, it turned out, was the beneficiary of a project put together by Data for Progress, a scrappy left-wing think tank that operates outside the orbit of the Democratic Party. Earlier on Tuesday, the group had suggested on Twitter that if progressives wanted to “give smart,” they should donate to eight state legislative campaigns around the country where the winner could tip the balance of power in the chamber. Contributors have the option of equally splitting their donations eight ways, or deciding how much to allocate to each of the candidates.
