If you were one of the many, many Democrats who contributed money to the party during the 2020 cycle, you may have come away disoriented and more than a little annoyed. Not only did long-shot candidates like Kentucky’s Amy McGrath lose, many of the swing state races the party was counting on swung hard and unexpectedly to the GOP. The millions of dollars contributed by individual donors, PACs and other outside spenders, if not exactly wasted, couldn’t win Democrats the Senate and wasn’t able to stop the party’s edge in the House from eroding badly. In key races from Maine to Florida and Texas, Democrats lost despite having big cash advantages over their opponents.
Clearly, something has gone wrong, and whatever the solution is, it won’t involve raising more money. But while strategists and organizers assess the efficacy of their messaging and turnout operations, what are donors supposed to do? It seems borderline pointless to redouble their giving efforts, given that the money edge in 2020 didn’t translate into victory in many cases.
One path forward would be for donors to think more about how to achieve the maximum bang for their buck. This is trickier than it sounds. A conventional donating strategy would be for donors to target races that are identified as close by public polling. But given the failures of public polls in several key contests, this seems like an uncertain strategy. Another path for donors, especially those with a lot of disposable income, would be to support Democratic institutions like the DSCC and the DCCC and the most prominent PACs on the premise that the professionals running these operations know what to do with money. But again, after looking at the unexpected wreckage of congressional and Senate races, donors might be leery of that model of giving.
So what would an efficient political donation strategy look like? A few suggestions:
Give early
This is a fairly hoary bit of political wisdom, an idea that gave the pro-choice PAC EMILY’s List its name (“early money is like yeast”). But it should be internalized by more donors, particularly the ones who pay attention to politics primarily on the eve of major elections and who give based on DNC solicitation emails.
Truthfully, by the time the DNC is jangling its cup in front of you and exhorting that “NOW is the time to FIGHT,” you probably should already have given if you wanted to make an impact. When you give money to campaigns in their embryonic stages—months before the election—you enable them to rent office space, hire staff, print promotional materials and build out voter identification, canvassing and fundraising operations, vital infrastructure investments that must be made well in advance of Election Day. Early donations can also signal a candidate’s viability to other donors and party figures and will help your favored campaign.
“That’s the irony of these Senate candidates who are raising tens of millions right at the end, and couldn’t even spend it all,” said Travis Ridout, a Washington State University professor whose work focuses on campaigns. “If they had that money a year in advance, it would have been much more helpful.”
One additional reason to get involved early: If you have strong views about a candidate facing a competitive primary, you can donate to support or oppose them—since primaries turn on a relatively small group of voters, your money has a much better chance of actually influencing the outcome.
Identify the places where victories really count
Dustin Moscovitz and Cari Tuna are a husband-and-wife donor team who evidently want to maximize the value of their giving. They are associated with the “effective altruism” movement that emphasizes giving to causes that do the greatest amount of good per dollar, and they clearly want to do something similar when it comes to political giving.
One area they’ve focused on is criminal justice reform, particularly electing progressive district attorneys. The idea here is that these local races are relatively cheap (at least, compared with congressional or Senate races) and DAs have an enormous amount of latitude to make policy changes. Immediately upon taking office last week, new Los Angeles County DA George Gascón (who was backed by Tuna, along with many other wealthy criminal justice reform advocates) announced a slate of reforms, including the elimination of cash bail for many nonviolent offenses and the banning of “sentencing enhancements,” which put some offenders in prison for longer. Winning a single election means a lot of people won’t be behind bars.
That’s in contrast to higher-profile races for Congress, where individual elected officials can’t do a whole lot. Control of the House and Senate represents an enormous amount of power (or at least it would if you took away the filibuster), but in an era of divided government, winning a single seat probably won’t bring about much policy change that is tangible to voters. This is especially a problem when Democrats are trying to convince swing and infrequent voters that electoral politics matters to their lives in a direct way—that argument becomes more difficult when Democrats don’t achieve the majorities necessary to pass legislation and make policy.
That’s one reason donating to state and local races is so important. State legislatures and city councils can enact far-reaching reforms and materially improve people’s lives. And these campaigns are in something of a sweet spot for donors. They are less expensive than higher-profile races, often in desperate need of resources, and the candidates are low-profile, meaning that their ads and mailers can actually make a big impact by introducing them to voters. Giving $1,000 to a down-ballot candidate in Maine would have had a much bigger impact than giving $2,000 to Senate candidate Sara Gideon, whose campaign was so flush with money it had millions left over at the end.
The good news is that there are now several organizations that are partly or wholly devoted to flipping state legislatures and securing wins for candidates below the mainstream’s radar. Victories at the state legislature level can trickle upward as Democratic legislatures can, in some cases, redraw district lines to advantage Democrats, but they are also necessary for advancing a progressive agenda. “In Maine, in 2018, we helped flip the Senate and lawmakers were able to show Mainers how their state legislature can improve lives by passing life-changing policies like lowering prescription drug prices [and] expanding high-speed broadband,” said Simone Leiro, a spokesperson for the Future Now Fund, a PAC focused on state legislatures. While Gideon lost her race, Democrats expanded that state senate majority and held on to their majority in the state house (though they lost a few seats in the lower chamber). “This type of lasting change is only possible through truly sustained engagement,” said Leiro—sustained engagement and sustained donations.
Maybe don’t invest in big money bombs on big races
In October, Dustin Moscovitz, the silicon Valley billionaire who wants to spend money wisely, dropped a $22 million gift on Future Forward, a PAC that spent more than $100 million on pro-Biden or anti-Trump ads, primarily in swing states like Florida, Michigan and Pensylvania. Moscovitz’s idea, according to reporting in Recode, was that late-in-the-cycle ad buys are unusually effective.
This makes some sense: Studies have shown that any persuasive effects political ads might have are short-lived; people may have strong reactions to them, but they wear off pretty quickly as the ads are forgotten. So if you launched a barrage of ads just before Election Day, your message would be fresh in voters’ minds.
But this theory is still being debated in political science circles, Ridout said. Other studies have shown that ads aren’t effective persuasive tools, period. In elections where the candidates have high name recognition and voters are being inundated with messages about the two sides, the marginal value of yet another ad campaign may not be particularly high. In 2020 especially, many voters had already cast early ballots before these late advertising pushes, and as politically active Americans become increasingly driven by partisanship and less prone to floating between parties, ads overall may be losing their power. “Ads are probably less effective than they were 20 years ago, just because so many people are so highly partisan and not willing to listen to a message from the other side,” said Ridout.
One difficulty about discussing the effectiveness of individual messages or tactics is that you’re always arguing a counterfactual. It’s possible that without Future Forward’s big ad buys, Biden would have lost Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But another way to look at it is that if you injected $22 million into smaller races early in the election cycle, it would be a major investment in down-ballot infrastructure, allowing many campaigns to build out operations they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. In the context of presidential politics, $22 million is just a drop in the bucket. Shiny objects like presidential or Senate races tend to draw huge amounts of money, especially near their conclusions, when the media is covering them nonstop and donors are swarmed with appeals. But perversely, those are the least efficient times to give money.
At the moment, left-of-center money is flooding Georgia, as well it should. But if donors are focused on giving efficiently, they’re turning their attention away from the elections coming in a couple weeks and asking how they can spend to influence 2022.
