Not all elected officials who are powered by small donors are populist demagogues.
If money is the mother’s milk of politics, then the Internet is every politician’s best friend. In 2000, which was arguably the last pre-Internet election, just 777,000 people — one-quarter of one percent of all adult Americans — gave $200 or more to federal candidates, PACs or party committees. In 2020, more than 4.7 million people contributed $200 or more. Millions more give smaller amounts, with roughly 15 million unique donors reported on the Democratic side alone by fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue during that election cycle. (WinRed, the main GOP counter to ActBlue, doesn’t release individual donor data).
What happened between 2000 and 2020? First, people learned from using big consumer websites like eBay and Amazon that it was safe to spend money online. And then campaigns discovered how much easier to was to raise money online and they poured resources into figuring out how to do that most effectively.
According to Tim Miller, a Republican political consultant who has in recent years become a top critic of Donald Trump, this is terrible news. Last week, in a big opinion piece published by The New York Times, he took a flame-thrower to the entire landscape of online fundraising. After noting that early proponents of the Internet’s rise on the political scene welcomed the increasing importance of grassroots fundraising, believing that it would strengthen democracy by reducing the influence of big, corporate money, he writes:
“As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.”
What follows is a “pox on both your houses” style jeremiad blaming online fundraising for the increased harshness and polarization of our politics, starting with Rep. Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during a speech by President Barack Obama before Congress in 2009, which was a fundraising bonanza for Wilson, and leading inexorably to the empowerment of “congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators.” Overall, Miller claims, “it’s a race to the bottom to inflame a party’s own voters with the most intensity and frequency.”
Miller isn’t wrong to point out that both parties use hyperbolic language in their emails to raise money, and that this kind of fundraising tactic is corrosive to democracy. But there’s nothing new about claiming that the sky is falling or that extremists on the other side are on the verge of destroying our country. Richard Nixon won his first race for Congress in 1946 by red-baiting his opponent, Rep. Jerry Voorhis, and then got himself into the US Senate in 1950 by accusing Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas of being “pink down to her underwear.” In the 1970s Republican activists like Richard Viguerie and Phyllis Schlafly built up huge direct mail fundraising lists by terrifying their donors with wild claims about the dangers of school busing, pornography and women’s rights.
But Miller is making a tougher argument: that grass-roots fundraising itself is anti-democratic because it is empowering the worst politicians. There are a couple of problems with this argument.
First, despite the rise of online fundraising, the majority of the money in politics doesn’t come from grassroots givers. Three-quarters of the money raised in 2020, a whopping $9.9 billion, came from the people donating more than $200, according to OpenSecrets.org. Despite there being more small donors overall, their cumulative contributions mattered much less. Big givers power politics far more than small ones.
Second, and this is crucial, there is a huge difference between the Democratic politicians who are most successful at gaining support from small donors and the Republican ones. Here is a list of the top 25 Members of Congress ranked by what percentage of their 2020 warchest came from small individual givers. Not all elected officials who are powered by small donors are populist demagogues.
Fifteen of the people on this list are Democrats; ten are Republicans. Setting aside Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, who as the respective leaders of their caucuses are gigantic fundraising magnets, it’s fair to say there’s one key difference between the top Democrats and top Republicans on this list.
The Democrats who get most of their funding from small donors are indeed more independent of the wealthy special interests that dominate Congress. Several of them, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Katie Porter on the House side and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the Senate side, have tangled fiercely with powerful groups like the banking lobby, the real estate lobby and health care interests. Getting so much of their money from small donors has made them freer to bite the hands that feed so many of their peers.
On the other hand, nearly all of the top House Republicans on this list voted against certifying the 2020 election. They continue to promote the Big Lie along with a host of culture war hot button issues, and it is that, plus their subservience to Donald Trump, that has helped them become such magnets for donations from small Republican givers.
Miller is a stylish writer so it’s tempting to swallow whole his brutal but witty takedown of the gutter politics and grifting that seems to dominate politics today. And yes, there are unscrupulous players on both sides of the aisle who take advantage of the gullibility of many grassroots givers, as I noted here just last week in dissecting Marcus Flowers’ doomed but extremely well-funded campaign against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. But we don’t have more racist, demagogue populism today because small-dollar fundraising has become easier since the rise of the Internet. We have more of it because one party is trying to hang onto power by feeding the worst beliefs, impulses and fears of its base.
Overall, the rise of online small donors definitely is liberating for politicians who want to be able to speak more freely and risk offending wealthy, powerful interests. If some of those politicians choose to use that newfound freedom to speak lies rather than truth to power, it’s not the money that’s making them do it: it’s the poison that’s already in their minds and in the minds of their supporters. Making it harder for small donors to support who they want, or somehow — as Miller suggests — bringing back “gatekeepers,” won’t change that deeper problem.