spacedogxyz / crush2020

Crush2020

When we crushed the midterms two years ago, we figured the formula would be easily replicated for the 2020 election. Little did we know that a pandemic would bring political organizing as we know it to a grinding halt, making many of the typical means of volunteering and supporting campaigns nearly impossible.

It’s because of this deadly serious wrench that we need democracy-supporting tools more than ever, which is why we've built Crush2020.

Much like Crush the Midterms, Crush2020 asks users a series of questions to determine their geography, their availability leading up to Election Day, the skills they can lend to campaigns, and how much money they can budget to donate to competitive races. But with the myriad challenges facing voters this year, it also helps them request absentee/mail-in ballots, keep track of important voting deadlines, and suggests alternative forms of volunteering that suit our socially-distanced world.

Development

This site is built with Gatsby.js and the US Web Design System React components

yarn install
yarn develop
go to http://localhost:8000

Data

The matching system uses data from the following sources:

• FEC: House and Senate candidate names and reported funds raised
• FollowTheMoney.org: Statewide and state legislative candidate names and funds raised
• CookPolitical: House, Senate, Governor and Electoral College ratings
• BallotPedia: State legislature seats up and current party margin
• Mobilze.us: Volunteer links
• ActBlue: Donation links
• MovementVoterProject: Organization issue areas, descriptions and links
• VoteAmerica: Voter registration forms, deadlines, and vote-by-mail information

No ownership over this data is claimed and it is included in the respository merely as a development convenience. Data from FollowTheMoney.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Deployment

Crush2020.org is hosted on Netlify. Push to master and it'll go live in a few minutes.

To work on the backend functions locally, install netlify-cli

yarn start
go to http://localhost:8888

Submitted form data is stored in FaunaDB, and can be queried using their unique IDs. User contact data is stored in ActionNetwork, along with issue and interests as tags.

crush2020's Issues

Hide donation recommendations if user selects $0

Or maybe just remove the amount from the link and button

Ensure browser back/forward works

Some users are going to do this, and it seems to mess up the form state.

Have some rules to mitigate at https://github.com/spacedogXYZ/crush2020/blob/master/src/components/form/form.js#L86, but it only works for back (may need to track locations in popstate listener).

Let users scroll through organizations

We have lots more organizations that might match with a user's location and interests than can be displayed. Right now we pick a random one, but we could also have a simple horizontal scroll instead.

Reported slow loading

This is a gatsby site hosted on Netlify, but we've received reports of slow loading (up to 85 sec)

We have Sentry performance monitoring installed, but it's not working due to getsentry/sentry-javascript#2935
Checking google analytics shows an average page load time of 2.2 sec, but doesn't report percentiles.

Stuck on the "Pick a competitive state and help win big nationally" page.

I'm on the "Pick a competitive state and help win big nationally" page and have selected a few states.

However, I only get the next "Please select your answers" when I click the next button despite how many states I select.

https://www.crush2020.org/form/reach

After reloading form page, components are outside of their wrappers

Renders correctly when going through the flow as intended, but appears broken on refresh.

Add endorsements

• Future Now Fund (state-leg)
• Indivisible (congress) https://indivisible.org/candidates
• Obama (senate, congress, state-leg) https://medium.com/@BarackObama/first-wave-of-2020-endorsements-43b2b0c667f6
• Let America Vote https://letamericavote.wpengine.com/news/pressreleases/2020/end-citizens-united-and-let-america-vote-endorse-83-state-level-reformers-across-the-country/
• Tech Solidarity (state) https://techsolidarity.org/resources/state_slate.html
• Working Families Party https://workingfamilies.org/our-2020-endorsements/

If you click "RI" on the map, you get "Massachusetts".

For the map, what are your thoughts on using boxes like:

https://newsignature.github.io/us-map

Improve map on mobile

Currently has distinct behaviors for hover/select, which don't translate well to mobile. Also, the aspect ratio of the map works for landscape, but for portrait we should investigate alternatives (list the states alphabetically with their outlines from the SVG?)

Keep global state?

Currently using component-level state and hooks for the form, and getting weird effects if someone goes back/forward or clicks to internal links and then back to form. Consider Redux

Move candidate data to server

When we get state-leg candidates in #2, we'll have more than we want to send over the pipe for each user.
Move the data to fauna, and create a Graphql query for it in the Plan component.

TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of undefined

Sentry Issue: CRUSH2020-1

TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of undefined
  at c (./src/components/plan/index.js:419:62)
...
(11 additional frame(s) were not displayed)

Page transitions

Nice transitions between form pages would make it feel more "app-like." Did an experiment with gatsby-transition-link but it seemed slow. Maybe due to a conflict with the navigate rules at https://github.com/spacedogXYZ/crush2020/blob/master/src/components/form/form.js#L82

Source url parameter

So we can track partner traffic and conversions. Make sure to send it all the way through to Action Network, so we can segment list later.

Tests!

The plan creation is entirely frontend based, and uses a reducer pattern to modify the react state. A decent testing framework would improve our confidence in this code.

Get state-level data

Currently using FEC download for federal candidates. Find a source (hopefully free) for state-level candidates. FollowTheMoney.org has them, but will cost $1000 for the data download. Applied for fee waiver for this open source project.

Race narratives

To give some context about why each race is interesting and winnable. We did this for Crush18, and it was very useful (but a ton of work).

TypeError: undefined is not a function

Sentry Issue: CRUSH2020-2

./src/pages/index.js in c at line 16:24
const IndexPage = () => {
  // check for source param and forward to form
  let source = undefined
  if (exists(window) && window.location.search) {
    let urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)
    source = urlParams.get('source')
  }