Last Week’s California National DNC Moment Took Decades to Create

California Donor Table
2 min readAug 28, 2024

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How are you feeling?

Let me tell you, even though most of the convention evenings went past my bedtime, I am feeling fired up! I’m sure you are as excited to win as I am. Watching VP Kamala Harris, the first reformer district attorney from CA and Tim Walz, a Midwest governor who’s delivered unprecedented progressive policies to his state be the center of the DNC was inspiring.

How’d we get here?

I’ll leave the story of Biden dropping out of the race to others. But Kamala got here substantially with support from the founders of CDT. In the early 2000s CDT’s co-founders backed her as S.F. DA before they started CDT because she was a reformer. They then started CDT in 2005, and started the first SuperPAC for Obama in 2007. And then in 2010 when Kamala ran for CA AG against the popular Republican LA DA, they strongly backed her on the coordinated and independent sides, being some of the first and few donors to robustly give. While even then many other CA donors couldn’t see what they saw in Kamala, Karl Rove did — he spent a million dollars against her in the general election because he saw her as a future danger to fascist Republicans like him. She won that race by the barest of margins, less than 1%, in a brutal 2010 cycle when Democrats lost across the country.

And, on a slight tangent, those same donors became the first out of state donors to Stacy Abrams in 2009. Those same donors have backed congressional candidate Lateefah Simon, who the nation met when she spoke at the DNC Convention on Wednesday night, for almost two decades.

Now that the convention is over, we all get to take a moment to regroup, and we have 74 days to make a federal Democratic trifecta happen.

Michelle Obama implored all of us to “do something” and here’s our recommendations for what to do:

Together we’ve gotten us here. Together we will make this happen.

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California Donor Table
California Donor Table

Written by California Donor Table

The California Donor Table is a statewide community of donors who pool their funds to make investments in communities of color so they have the power they need.

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