From all of us at the California Donor Table, thank you to everyone in our network - members, donors, donor advisors, grantee partners, and staff - who came together to support our work as we continue to make California more progressive and build power in communities of color across the state! We deeply appreciate you all being part of our community. Fall Election Recap November has been long and exciting as election results roll out slowly in California because we count each and every vote. As anticipated, the results have continued to trend progressive and align with our community's values. We are celebrating civil rights attorney and reformer Pamela Price winning as Alameda’s first Black and first progressive DA, passing California’s first Democracy Voucher policy in Oakland, electing Aisha Wahab as California’s first Afghan American & Muslim elected to the State Senate, re-electing formerly incarcerated organizing group leader Tamisha Torres-Walker as Antioch City Councilmember, and, last but not least, electing the first Black woman to be Los Angeles Mayor - Karen Bass! CDT supported many progressive candidate and independent expenditure campaigns to help elect a squad of values-driven leaders to the state legislature. These wins have sent record-breaking numbers of progressives to the California State Legislature, from progressive slates of CDT/Voices for Progress and the CA Working Families Party, as well as electing more women to finally pass one-third representation for the first time in history thanks to year-round recruitment infrastructures like Close the Gap CA. Of the fourteen legislative campaigns CDT supported, more than half of the races were won with support from our Progressive Era PAC and CDT members like yourself, aligning your funds with the strategic plans of the political ecosystem of organizations we have been building for more than a decade. The overturning of Roe was out of touch with the majority of Americans' values, Proposition 1 for reproductive freedom passed with over 66% approval, and Californians elected pro-choice candidates up and down the ballot. And the congressionals–oh the congressionals. Don’t accept the narrative that CA failed. In 2016 Dems held 73% of CA’s congressional seats. In 2018 we upped that to an incredible 87%. In 2020 we went down to 79%. This cycle, with the state losing 1 seat due to reapportionment, Democrats will likely win at least 40 out of 52 seats–bringing us down to a 77% Democratic congressional win rate. The country needed more from us, especially with the redistricting and campaign debacle in our fellow blue state NY, but a 77% win rate is a damn good one. That’s especially true given that all statewide Democratic candidates won less than below 60% of the votes this year. CDT is proud to have organized, as far as we can tell, the only national donor convening promoting IEs rooted in communities of color to win CA’s congressional races. If the nation needs California Democrats to win more than 77% of our congressional races in the 2024 presidential cycle and beyond, we’ll need to be more than a footnote in national donor and political networks ‘national’ plans.
For more on our election results, you can review a recording of our November Member meeting, where we talk in-depth about the battles we took on from the Federal to the local level. Please email Rebecca Hamburg at rebecca@californiadonortable.org for a link to the recording. | 
