“Rage-giving” may feel good, but it won’t change who has power.
One of my young political heroes is Amanda Litman. We’ve never met, but I’ve followed her career since 2015, when she was the email director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That’s not why I admire her. It’s what she did next, after Clinton lost, that so impresses me. She, along with Ross Morales Rocketto, a digital campaign manager, started a brand-new organization called Run for Something. It was one of many new groups that burst onto the scene after Donald Trump’s upset victory shocked many incumbent Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Instead of bemoaning their loss, or, worse, making noises about finding ways to work harmoniously with the incoming Trump cabal, as a number of Democrats initially did, Litman set out to do the hard work of rebuilding the Democratic base, specifically by encouraging progressives under the age of 40 to run for elective office.
In its first year, Run for Something pulled more than 15,000 young people into its pipeline, offering them coaching in all the organizational skills needed to effectively run for office and lowering the hidden barriers that traditionally have kept the candidate pool limited to ambitious young men with law degrees and connections. They endorsed 72 of them and nearly half of those won their races. By 2021, it had recruited, in total, more than 90,000 to consider running for office; about 10% followed all the way through. Run for Something has so far endorsed more than 1,800 candidates and a total of 637 have won their races. And most of them are the local ones that are the breeding grounds for the next generation of leaders: school boards, county and city councils. They’ve flipped control of the Indianapolis city-county council, helped elect the younger woman ever to enter office in Ames, Iowa, and elected the first Somali-American in Lewiston, Maine. It’s the same kind of work that the Right has been quietly doing for decades, with substantial long-term support from donors like the Koch brothers and other billionaires.
But I didn’t decide to write about Litman today because of this track record (which you can read more about here). It’s because of something she said to Ezra Klein two days ago on his New York Times podcast. They were talking about the differences between the world of Republican donors like the Kochs and other businessmen who have made long-term investments in institution-building to serve their interests, and Democrats who tend to get excited about individual candidates who they fall in love with, like a Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders. After noting that many Democratic donors are now, with good cause, shifting their attention to races for secretary of state and local election administrators because of the danger that the 2024 election could be stolen by Republican mischief at the local and state level, Litman said:
“I don’t want to fault anyone for giving to the thing that inspires them. Donate where you feel like you can make the most good. But I do think there’s a clear failure to match goals and actions. If your goal is to win and build sustainable power, throwing $90 million at Amy McGrath for Senate just because she’s taking on Mitch McConnell is not the way to do that. It just isn’t. And that is where things, I think, get a little lost in translation.”
Litman must have gotten some pushback for saying this, because that night she went on Twitter to emphasize that she wasn’t trying to be critical of anyone.
Just to be clear: I never fault anyone for giving to what inspires you. But *if* your goal is to build long-term sustainable power for Dems –> focus on local races where candidates can cut thru the BS + the winners can make structural + meaningful decisions. https://t.co/tiF0LAGOnq
— Amanda Litman (@amandalitman) February 2, 2022
Well, she shouldn’t be defensive because she is entirely right. And unfortunately, a lot of Democratic activists have to hear this message repeatedly, because they keep giving with their hearts rather than their brains.
This was a big week for political insiders, because the latest fundraising figures for congressional candidates, PACs and party committees were released by the Federal Election Commission. And they show that far from learning from 2020, Democratic donors are still setting their money on fire.
Take Marcus Flowers. He’s an African-American combat vet with no previous political experience who is running against incumbent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is probably the worst Trump bootlicker in Congress. So far he has raised $4.6 million to take on Greene, putting him way ahead of several other Democratic wannabes. Just under $4 million of Flowers’ donations are in what the FEC calls “unitemized individual contributions,” meaning they are under the $200 reporting threshold. These are classic “small donor” contributions. And they are all going to be completely wasted, because Greene’s district, which Trump won by 50 points in 2020, is overwhelmingly Republican. Even with the addition of a small piece of Democratic-leaning Cobb Country to her district, Greene is still a lock for re-election.
Every penny given to Flowers, no matter his merits, would be better spent by groups like the New Georgia Project, which organize statewide. But there’s nothing quite like rage-giving. And the consultants who make inspiring videos for candidates like Flowers get paid whether he wins or not. I’m looking at Run the World, a Wisconsin digital ad agency, that has banked more than $1.2 million in fees from Flowers’ campaign, or Blue Chip Strategies, a Georgia firm which has already eaten nearly $500,000 of Flowers’ cash haul. (Run the World took in $2.3 million for Amy McGrath’s quixotic 2020 campaign, which she lost by more than 20 points, so at least it is consistent in feasting off of sure losers.)
One of the silver linings for Democrats is how much the universe of people willing to throw a little money at their candidates has grown. In 2020, more than 15 million unique donors made a political contribution through ActBlue, the big Democratic donor portal. (WinRed, the Republican online hub, is a fraction of the size of ActBlue.) The capacity to build and win sustainable power is there. But it’s hard to change bad habits.