Capitalizing on our past successes, in 2008 we will maximize the benefits of our efforts by dividing our candidate election work into two categories, with major emphasis on the second category.

First, we will again operate our unique, targeted program that focuses on persuading known environmentalists in about two dozen close congressional races, and in approximately 10 "swing states" in the presidential race. As we learned in the past two elections, this project can be extremely productive with this target population, and thus can be extremely valuable in tipping the results in close congressional and the presidential races. Because the program operates very efficiently using a highly targeted mail/phone campaign, the benefits in impact per dollar is high, while the overall cost is low.

Second, as we did in 2006, we will expend the bulk of our resources on a few big congressional races where we believe a determined, integrated campaign can successfully unseat prominent anti-environmental incumbents - while making a strong statement about the electoral strength of the environmental community in the process. To maximize the benefits for environmental protection, we will focus this work primarily on incumbent members of those House and Senate committees that have the major influence on environmental policy. These include, especially, the natural resource, energy and environment committees in the House and Senate, and also the Interior/Environmental Protection Agency appropriations subcommittees in both chambers.

Overall, our goals in 2008 are to:

• Work collaboratively to expand pro-environment majorities in the House and Senate by protecting our friends and defeating our enemies.

• Continue our special focus on key committees of interest.

• Build on our success in the Pombo race with comprehensive independent campaigns in 3-4 House and/or Senate races ("message races").

• Target known environmentalist voters with phone and mail program in additional 20-25 close state and district races as we did in 2006.

• Leverage all work for presidential campaign in swing presidential states.