Another Reason Democratic Small Donors Keep Setting Their Money on Fire
Why do Democratic political donors keep giving to candidates who either don’t need their money or can’t win?
A few weeks ago, I wrote here about Run for Something, a post-2016 political start-up that is building a pipeline of young people who are starting their political journeys at the bottom of the ladder, seeking election for local offices like school boards, county and city councils and the like. Its co-founder, Amanda Litman, had dared to criticize grassroots activists for doing something stupid, telling the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, “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.”
Rage-giving, or, to be nicer about it, giving because you passionately love a candidate or hate their opponent, is totally understandable. In 2020, the three Democratic senate candidates running against a trilogy of hated Republican incumbents, Amy McGrath, Jaime Harrison and Sara Gideon collectively raised almost $300 million against, respectively, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and they each lost. Gideon had nearly three times as much money as Collins and lost by 9 points. Even more galling, she ended her campaign with nearly $15 million unspent in her campaign account. Now she’s treating her defunct campaign bank account like a personal foundation and is giving it away to local nonprofits. McGrath’s campaign team knew weeks before the election that she had no hope of closing the gap with McConnell, and yet, as Michael Sokolove detailed in a recent New Republic expose, they kept sending out emails begging for money and claiming that the race was “tightening.” (You can read a thought-provoking defense of McGrath’s digital fundraising here.)
Now, as the 2022 election cycle starts to speed up, Litman’s message can’t be repeated enough. Because lots of people are still making dumb, unstrategic decisions about who to donate to. And it’s only partially their fault.
Democrats face an uphill battle in their efforts to sustain their control of Congress this fall. The president’s party almost always loses seats in the mid-term elections; the only recent exception is 2002, when post 9–11 war fever helped the GOP gain seats (the last time Democrats did this was 1934). Most of the time, the reason the party of whoever is holding the White House loses seats is because their partisans relax and stay home, while the other side is more motivated, hoping to blunt the president’s power. That dynamic may prove overwhelming this fall.
On the other hand, never before has the out-party been so blatantly dedicated to a cause outside the boundaries of normal partisan conflict. If Democrats lose the House of Representatives, they won’t be handing power to normal adversaries — they will be giving it to the MAGA Party, which denies that the 2020 election was fairly won by Biden. An overwhelming number of current House Republicans voted against certifying the Electoral College results. The Republican National Committee even claims that the insurrectionists who surrounded and invaded the Capitol on January 6th 2021 were engaged in “legitimate politics discourse.”
All the more reason for grassroots Democrats to get a lot smarter about how they vote with their dollars.
A look at the most recent campaign finance filings, which cover money donated through the end of 2021, show that a lot of donors are still throwing their money away.
Take the race for New York State’s Senate seat, now held by Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In 2021, Schumer, a veteran at fundraising, took in $31.1 million, spent a little over $5 million and ended the year with almost $36.3 million in the bank. This despite the fact that he has no meaningful challenger; the other five declared candidates in the race have raised less than $80,000 between them!
A great deal of Schumer’s haul comes from wealthy special interests: Wall Street firms, real estate, hospitals and nursing homes, tech, entertainment, and so on. In many cases, huge sums come bundled from top employees at individual firms, places like the Blackstone Group and Alphabet. These donations are strategic, but not in the sense I’m raising here. These companies and industries donate to powerful politicians like Schumer because they are already aligned with him politically, or because they are buying access to his office. Schumer of course wants this money because it makes the odds of him being challenged much lower. But that’s what he needs — should small donors feed him?
While most of Schumer’s money came from individuals giving the legal maximum ($5,400 per cycle), more than $1.2 million came in amounts that fall under the FEC’s $200 threshold for disclosure of individual donor details. These are small donors giving to him for no good reason.
The same can be said of the small donors who gave more than $5.7 million in unitemized individual contributions to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this past year. In 2021, she raised $12.3 million in total, spent $5.3 million and ended the year with $5.4 million in cash on hand. She, like Schumer, has no serious challenger this year.
Why do small Democratic donors keep giving to people like Schumer and Pelosi? One reasonable answer might be that they trust them to use the money well and know where it’s most needed. In 2020, Pelosi poured $3.7 million of her campaign warchest into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority PAC, which exist solely to help elect more House Democrats. But she also gave a whopping $1 million to the Democratic Party of South Carolina a week before the election. That’s a state where Trump whomped Biden by 12 points; Lindsey Graham beat Jaime Harrison by 10; and just one Democrat managed to hold onto his House seat: James Clyburn, a top Pelosi ally.
At least Pelosi moves a lot of her money out the door to other Democratic candidates and party committees. Schumer hogs his. Of the $35.2 million that he’s raised in total for his personal campaign account since 2017 (the beginning of his current six year term), he’s transferred less than one percent to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee so far. And yet he sends out emails on a daily basis begging grassroots Democrats for money so he can “expand our majority this year.” (In 2016, the last time Schumer was up for re-election, he waited til September and then gave a $6 million of his haul to the DSCC.)
It’s the emails, stupid. The biggest reason small Democratic donors keep giving money unstrategically is the deluge of abusive and misleading emails they get claiming that the sky is falling unless you fork over $20 now. It’s not a coincidence that one of the single biggest categories for campaign giving across the board is retirees. Some are well-off, but a lot are just gullible.
Changing this won’t be easy. That’s because those emails work. Some Democratic campaign consultants are trying to pressure the firms, like Mothership Strategies, that send the most manipulative fundraising emails, or failing that, get the big intermediaries that manage those email programs, like Every Action, to clamp down on the practice. But right now the field is totally tilted towards a repeat of 2020’s excesses.
Maybe we need better ways of answering the question, who should I give to? One simple answer I always say is, if you want to build progressive power for the long-term, give to groups that are doing that, not candidates or party committees. The Movement Voter Project raised and channeled more than $100 million in support for such groups in 2020. But they have yet to reach the millions of small donors who put so much money into campaigns.
Perhaps the answer starts with people examining their own track records. If you are someone who has given money to political campaigns, go look up your own history. OpenSecrets, the pre-eminent source for information on campaign money, will have most of your records here. Ask yourself: How many of the candidates I supported won? How many were people I know? How many were people that actually represent me? And how many were people I supported for emotional reasons who had little to no chance of winning, or who didn’t need my money? We can change our own behavior, but only if we start paying closer attention.