@Jason Great question. Our baseline budget per campaign for a mid-sized city or county (100k-1M) is $300,000 over two years. We expect a statewide campaign in a state like Colorado or Oregon would ideally want at least $1.5M over two years. However, that varies depending on the pre-campaign support for the policy. A proposal that has very high support to start with would cost less as you'd only need to defend your lead. We've done some survey testing recently for a few policies that would be very disruptive to the industry and are showing upwards of 70% support in blue states. There's an argument to just get a measure like that on the ballot (which we could do for $100,000 or so) even if you don't have much budget for a campaign. We got our measure on the ballot in Denver using entirely volunteer circulators, with one staff organizer who cost about $30k for 6 months. Most of the budget above is communications during election season.

Animal welfare has been mistakenly categorized into the short-termist bucket. NRI is making a smart long-term investment in a more effective animal advocacy movement in the future, hedging our bets in the likely event that current efforts fall short.