Way back in 2003, a webmaster for an AIDS advocacy group named Nicco Mele was having trouble finding the website for then-Gov. Howard Dean, his favorite Democratic presidential candidate, so he did the Dean campaign a favor and bought a Google ad to direct searchers to the official site. Thousands clicked on the ad, far more than Mele thought, and he called the campaign up and suggested he might have stumbled on a way to make money. As Mele told Politico in 2012, he reached Zephyr Teachout, Dean’s director of online organizing, who said, “Nobody here knows how to do that,” and invited him to join the campaign.
Dean’s unsuccessful presidential primary campaign has gone down in history for its web savvy, rare at the time, and many of its staffers went on to bigger roles at Democratic organizations and the Obama campaign. That phone call Mele made marked the dawn of online small-dollar fundraising, a way for candidates to connect with the millions of people who want to give them money. It’s revolutionized how campaigns ask for money, and how ordinary Democrats interact with campaigns. And these days, “online donations” are practically synonymous with ActBlue.
Technically a PAC, in practice, ActBlue acts as a conduit between donors and Democratic causes and candidates, passing along money minus a 3.95% credit card processing fee. The group’s tools are ubiquitous among Democrats—click on practically any fundraising email and you’ll be sent to an ActBlue page, and if you signed up for ActBlue Express, you can give without re-entering your card information. In 2018, FiveThirtyEight found a donor in West Virginia who had given $14,000 through ActBlue, with an average donation of $11. That adds up: In the third quarter of 2020 alone, $1.5 billion in donations went through ActBlue. How did it get so big? Here’s the timeline:
2004–2006
ActBlue was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Matt DeBergalis and Ben Rahn in 2004, but it took a cycle for anyone to notice. It raised over $15 million during the 2006 midterms, and stood out the following year, the New York Times noted, for not trying to endorse candidates; any Democrat could use its service. From the start, ActBlue focused on making its services as easy to use as possible. “ActBlue also automatically sets up pages as soon as a Democrat registers for a federal office or for a state office in 23 states,” the Times reported. “It also holds fundraising training sessions online and in-person around the country.” But it was slow going: As one Democratic strategist recounted to Politico recently, ActBlue would sometimes solicit donations on behalf of Luddite candidates without "donate" buttons on their websites, then call them up and explain the group had raised money on their behalf.
2008
The 2008 presidential race was ActBlue’s coming-out party. People spread donation pages through email and blogs (remember those?). All the major primary contenders took ActBlue donations, which only made sense—it was far easier to use the service than trying to build something like ActBlue from scratch. Not using ActBlue would have been tantamount to turning away free money. On March 31, 2008, ActBlue brought in nearly $800,000, almost as much as it had raised in all of 2004.
2010–2012
This period was one of steady, if not Earth-shattering, growth for the PAC. ActBlue brought in $64 million in 2010 and $151 million in 2012, but more importantly, it kept up with a changing tech landscape, launching a mobile version of its service in 2010. (“An ever-growing number of Americans check their email on their cellular phones,” its blog said at the time.)
2014
If 2008 showed that ActBlue was going to be a permanent fixture on the Democratic landscape, 2014 demonstrated the kind of power it could wield. It raised over $280 million—a more than 430% increase from 2010—and brought in an incredible 130,000 donations, for a total of $5.8 million, on the last day of that September. As a New York Times story on ActBlue noted, it achieved those marks by constantly experimenting with which appeals to donors worked and how to make it so easy to give that it became addictive. It certainly had become an addiction for some serial small donors who gave hundreds or thousands of times through ActBlue.
2016–2018
That ActBlue raised over $650 million in 2016, a particularly frenetic election year, isn’t shocking. It’s more impressive that this number rose to $1.26 billion in the 2018 midterms; $750 million of that came in the last two quarters of the cycle. The number of local candidates and organizations who got money from the platform spiked from 700 in 2016 to over 2,400 in 2018, reflecting Democrats’ fresh focus on down-ballot races, where they had taken a beating during the Obama years. And as an ActBlue report pointed out, a majority of money given through individual donations to congressional and Senate candidates came through its platform.
2020
The biggest moment for ActBlue in 2020 came in the hours after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, when the platform raised $70 million in a single day, and $6.3 million in a single hour. It was able to do that because by now, it has completely taken over Democratic fundraising. Every candidate from Joe Biden on down used it; every Democratic donor is intimately familiar with it, and many have taken out whatever stress they feel on the "donate" button.
That dynamic has again been on vivid display in the Georgia Senate runoff races. According to FiveThirtyEight, the two Democratic candidates in the race—Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff—each raised more than $50 million between November 4 and 23.
ActBlue has driven a revolution in small-dollar donations, which are still dwarfed by big donors. The bad news is that 2020 proves that floods of cash don't guarantee victory. Candidates who were expected to win floundered in both the Senate and House; some, like Maine's Sara Gideon, lost what looked like winnable races despite having huge cash advantages over their opponents. ActBlue may not be the key to winning elections. But it provides ammunition the Democrats sorely need.
Photo credit: CashGuy / Shutterstock.com
