Our 2020 Candidates
Thank you to the 135 candidates who stepped up to run for statewide, state house, state senate, congressional, and other offices this year. Missouri Democrats were honored to have the most diverse group of statewide candidates in our history run as our ticket this year. Thank you to Nicole Galloway, Alissia Canady, Yinka Faleti, Vicki Lorenz-Englund, and Rich Finneran.
While we didn’t make further gains in our statewide offices, Representative-Elect Betsy Fogle flipped a state house seat in Springfield and we moved the needle in 53 of our districts around the state. Many states lost ground in their state legislatures and we’re happy that we maintained and grew our numbers of Democrats in the state legislature this election cycle. Thank you to the House Democratic Campaign Committee, led by Reps. Quade & Meredith, for your work in our state house races.
MDP gave 130+ state and local candidates and hundreds of local Democratic activists training resources and dozens of in-person and virtual training sessions that our staff and education and training committee developed, including candidate basics, field and voter contact, finance, communications, and much more, and we continue growing those resources and training opportunities.
MDP found ways to decrease the cost of our Voter Activation Network for field work so that it would be more affordable for candidates. We provided opposition research, issue research, and polling to 26 different state legislative candidates, gubernatorial, and Democratic committees – for the first time since 2010. And we sent out over 1 million pieces of mail educating Missourians about our Democratic candidates this year.
Our 2020 Local Parties
We granted $20,000+ in support to local committees to aid in their voter registration efforts or visibility efforts.
Through MDP’s Show Me Votes voter registration organizing program, local Democratic leaders hit 29,461 doors to lit drop voter registration packets, MDP mailed pre-filled voter registration forms with return postage to 22,000 unregistered, likely Democratic, voters, and texted 20,000+ unregistered, likely Democrats, to get them registered before the October 7th deadline. We had the highest number of registered voters in Missouri’s history heading into the November election.
We reorganized our local Parties starting in August and have more local parties organized right now than we have in several years.
Before the pandemic hit, our leadership traveled in-person to over half of Missouri’s counties. After the pandemic, we quickly adapted to engage our communities in digital means like Zoom and facebook live — always putting the safety of our Democrats first and listening to science and public health experts, and still hit another 1/3rd of our counties with socially distanced and safe events like our Tour De Yard Signs.
Electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
We held our first-ever virtual Delegate Selection Caucuses, utilizing mail-in and digital voting for over 5,000 participants across the state and electing our most diverse group of delegates to attend the virtual State and National Conventions. We couldn’t have done this without the steadfast help of our staff and fellows and local Democratic Party leaders.
As this year was like none other, we didn’t open as many in-person offices. To counter that, we launched our first ever Tour De Yard Signs, traveling 3,500 miles across Missouri to over 35 mostly rural Missouri areas for pop up events to get yard signs out. We distributed over 15,000 Biden/Harris/Galloway yard signs across the state along with thousands of yard signs for down ballot candidates and No on 3. This was one of my favorite experiences this year and it was wonderful to see so many people socially-distanced outdoors to get yard signs out.
Internally at MDP & Show Me Change
We set a goal to diversify our workforce and help new progressive staffers get a foot into the political professional field. We still have work to do on this, but we made some progress with our Building Blue Fellows program that paid our interns for the first time ever ($15/hour). We had 18 Fellows in the Building Blue program; 42% were people of color, 58% were women, and 100% were Missouri locals. Some of them went on to run campaigns of their own this cycle too. For our Coordinated Campaign – the Show Me Change organizing team – 50% of staff were Missouri local, 32% were BIPOC, and 24% were trans/gender non-binary.
Our Coordinated Campaign, Show Me Change, led by Nicole Galloway and Democrats up and down the ballot, made over 950,000 direct voter contact calls, 7 million+ text messages, 100,000+ pieces of literature dropped, and had ~4,000+ volunteers.
We greatly expanded our grassroots donor base, and thanks to your help, we raised 459% (so far) more in 2020 than we did in 2019. From the 2018 to 2020 cycle, we drastically increased our number of individual donors and first-time donors by over 300%.
Moving Forward
The Missouri Democratic State Committee recently elected new leadership to lead our Party. Our new leadership is the most diverse we’ve ever had. They have hit the ground running over the past few weeks and are having conversations with Democrats from around the state.
We welcome:
Michael Butler of St. Louis City, our first ever Black Chair of the Party. Michael is the current Recorder of Deeds for the City of St. Louis, a former State Representative, and former Chair of the St. Louis City Democratic Committee.
Genevieve Williams of Neosho, a proud citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. Genevieve is a former congressional candidate, former DNC Member and former MDP Vice-Chair.
Manny Abarca of Kansas City, our first Latinx officer of the Missouri Democratic Party. Manny is a local School Board member and Treasurer of the Kansas City School Board and Deputy District Director for U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver.
Cydney Mayfield of Pilot Grove, a former candidate, returning Treasurer for the MDP, and an accomplished attorney.
We’ve spent the past two months also partnering with Contest Every Race to recruit candidates for the 2021 municipal elections. We’re happy to report that over 3,500 candidates were interested to run in the 2021 municipal elections and we’re excited to continue working with them from the filing period through their elections. Building our bench starts at the local level!
As we head into 2021, I will be moving on from the MDP and we’re talent scouting to recruit an Executive Director to work with our new Officers, committee members, and the Democratic community to lead the Missouri Democratic Party forward. It has been my great privilege and pleasure to serve the Missouri Democratic Party. Help us talent scout a great Executive Director by sharing the job posting with your networks or applying yourself.
As we head into 2021, I would be remiss to not make one final ask of you to help the Missouri Demmocratic Party get off to a strong start. Will you become a member today?
Happy New Year!
Onward,
Lauren Gepford
Executive Director, Missouri Democratic Party
