We are elated to announce our biggest news in the 21 years since we began covering elections: Daily Kos Elections is striking out on its own as an independent site called The Downballot!
If you’re already a subscriber to our newsletter, the Morning Digest, you’ll automatically be ported over to our new site, and you can expect to receive your first email from The Downballot on Monday. But to make this work, we need folks to become paying subscribers. Much more on that below, but if you’re already sold, then you can upgrade your subscription right here!
But first things first: We’re doing this all with the blessing of Daily Kos, from founder Markos Moulitsas on down. Daily Kos has been our home since 2011, and it’s been a marvelous one. We’ve done our best work here, forged incredible connections with our community of readers, and built a reputation for accurate, unbiased coverage that now stretches far beyond these orange walls.
Along the way, our relentless focus on downballot elections—those thousands of races below the presidency—has helped elevate these critical but often-overlooked contests, leading to crucial victories. We’ve published data used in every corner of the political world, established special elections as an indispensable analytic tool, and even literally put candidates on the map. We couldn’t be prouder of the work we’ve done.
But the media landscape has changed considerably in our time here. Newsrooms across the country have faced cutbacks as advertising revenues have plummeted, and Daily Kos is no exception. At the same time, we know that so many people have come to count on the service we provide. We want to be sustainable for years to come.
So we’re changing, too. Instead of depending on advertising, The Downballot will be a subscription-based site, and we’re asking you, our readers, for your support. Today’s technology has opened up a new model for the media, one that gives small outfits like ours the opportunity to thrive by allowing us to rely on loyal readers rather than fickle advertisers.
If you find our work valuable, we hope you’ll also find our price modest: $7 a month, or a heavily discounted $60 a year. You can subscribe right here:
We’re a lean, mean machine, with not a nickel of unnecessary costs. We dispense with all the fancy, expensive tools and rely on free products, like Google Docs. We estimate that 98% of our expenses are for personnel.
We estimate we need at least 5,000 paid subscribers to reach break-even (it depends on the monthly vs. annual breakdown, plus we have to fork over up to 18% in fees for every subscription).
But we have a goal beyond that as well, and it’s not a financial one. Rather, we know that countless people have come to rely on our work analyzing and elevating downballot elections, including journalists, activists, political professionals, academics, and enthusiasts. As more than one person has told us, we’ve become a public utility—a key piece of infrastructure in the political ecosystem.
And we’d really like to stay public. That means we do not want to put up a paywall—and, at least at the start, we won’t. There are other successful newsletters that operate in the same way: They’re able to keep all their content free because their supporters choose to pay for a subscription even though they don’t have to. We’d be over the moon if we could pull that off too, but of course, we need you to make it happen.
So we’re asking folks to contribute to our cause the same way you might to NPR or PBS—or Daily Kos itself. We’ve preached the mantra of donors getting the best bang for their buck for years. Well, we can guarantee that your contributions will be put to extremely good use, without a single wasted penny.
And one further note: We have no big backers—no corporate sponsors, no billionaire benefactors. Our operations are 100% supported by individual subscribers.
All right, so what exactly will The Downballot be doing? Glad you asked!
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We’ll publish our one-of-a-kind newsletter, the Morning Digest, every weekday morning without fail. The Digest summarizes and analyzes every important development in every competitive downballot race across the country, from Senate to city council, guaranteeing that our readers are the best informed in their fields.
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We’ll keep producing a wide variety of unique data sets that shed light on all of these elections and set the gold standard for accuracy and transparency. And we’ll do everything we can to ensure this data remains publicly available.
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And we’ll put out our podcast every Thursday morning, where we take a closer look at the key downballot stories making news each week and interview major political players for insights into their work. Our guests have included members of Congress, top data analysts, and even Julia Louis-Dreyfus!
Our focus includes—but is by no means limited to—contests for the Senate, the House, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state supreme court, state legislature, mayor, county executive, district attorney, sheriff, and city council, as well as ballot measures. If there’s a race too obscure for us, we have yet to come across it.
These offices hold tremendous power, but they seldom get the attention they deserve. Our mission is to rectify this imbalance, and we know we’ve had an impact. But there is much, much more work to be done.
If you’d like to join us on this journey, you can subscribe below.
And since we know you may have questions for us, we’ve put together an FAQ that hopefully answers them. But please feel free to fire away in comments if you have any others. We can’t wait for what comes next!
