In the last few years, Democrats have come to rely on small donations to fuel their campaigns. This is especially pronounced at the presidential level—many major candidates got a large chunk of their money from donations under $200—but senators and members of Congress have also come to rely on lots of little contributions rather than a few mega-donors. Email and social media campaigns have made reaching out to passionate Democrat supporters easier than ever, ActBlue has smoothed the donation process to the point where people can give with a single click, and the Trump era has activated a lot of formerly blase people into opening their wallets.
Small donors have also come to be seen as virtuous. On the left, particularly, fueling a campaign by relying on donations under $200 (a threshold for reporting set by the FEC) is seen as an alternative to relying on corporate-funded PACs or rich people, who may be trying to buy access to a candidate or trade cash for favors down the line. Small donors are also an alternative to sources like law enforcement unions, Wall Street or fossil fuel companies that may be viewed as politically toxic. Maybe best of all, a fleet of small donations can be a sign of true grassroots support, a large group of people who will support a candidate through election after election.
So who has actually been successful at courting small donors? The results from OpenSecrets data across all federal races don’t reveal a clean narrative about a certain type of candidate doing especially well among small donors. (You can also say “people who give small donations,” since many givers of under-$200 gifts make a lot of contributions.) Here’s a rundown of the most successful small-donor politicians in the Democratic Party:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders stand head and shoulders above the crowd in small donors. In his presidential campaign, the Vermont senator raised an incredible $114 million from small donations, far outpacing any other candidate’s small-dollar operation (that number represented 53% of his total fundraising). The New York freshman is already one of Congress’ most prolific buckrakers, thanks to her small-donor operation, which brought in nearly $13 million in the 2020 cycle—that represents an incredible 78% of her total fundraising.
Both candidates occupy the same left-wing end of the mainstream political spectrum (AOC was directly inspired by Sanders’s 2016 presidential run), a position that leads them naturally to grassroots fundraising. For one thing, their anti-Wall Street and pro-Medicare for All stances may make raising cash from some traditional sources difficult. For another, positioning themselves as opponents of fat cats is a powerful appeal to donors who don’t feel represented by Democrats like Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi.
But being left-wing isn’t a magic incantation that opens pockets. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are charismatic (in very different ways) and have built extremely powerful fundraising operations using social media and email appeals. Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, has been carpet-bombing Facebook with donation asks. She’ll likely be setting the gold standard in this aspect of politics for years to come.
Amy McGrath
No congressional candidate raised more money from small donors in the 2020 cycle than Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who came to prominence in 2018 when her Kentucky House campaign ad went viral. She lost that race, but targeted a bigger prize in 2020 when she ran against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The obvious driver of donations here isn’t McGrath’s populist politics (she defeated Charles Booker, a more left-wing candidate, in the primary), but her opponent. Grassroots Democrats loathed McConnell so much that they sent about $51 million in small donations, nearly 60% of her total campaign funds, to Kentucky. This was frequently derided by left-of-center commentators as a waste, since that money could have gone to more competitive races—indeed, she ended up losing by almost 20 points—but negative partisanship is a hell of a drug, and no one inspires more negative partisanship than McConnell. The prospect, however slim, of unseating him (and replacing him with a trailblazer for gender equality in the military) was enough to open lots of liberals’ wallets.
Jamie Harrison
Harrison was largely seen as a long shot to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, though one who had more of a shot than McGrath did. But in a disappointing cycle for down-ballot Democrats as a whole, he lost by 10 points, despite raising $57 million from small donors, which represented 53% of his total fundraising. In this case, small donors can hardly be blamed for throwing their money away—prominent Democratic Super PACs, including the Senate Majority PAC, injected more than $12 million in outside spending into the race, indicating that Democratic strategists viewed Harrison as viable. Still, in hindsight, the amount of money funneled to him and McGrath by ActBlue looks like one of the most enormous wastes of money in modern political history.
Ilhan Omar
The Minnesota House freshman shares a lot in common with her fellow “Squad” member Ocasio-Cortez. Both are women of color, both are outspoken lefties and frequent viral media stars who inspire fear and loathing among conservatives (both have received numerous death threats). Like Ocasio-Cortez, Omar depends on small donors, though she doesn’t bring them in at the same volume AOC does. Still, she got $3.1 million in under-$200 donations in the 2020 cycle, 57% of her total fundraising, a sizable chunk that allowed her to defeat a serious primary challenge from Antone Melton-Meaux, a candidate backed in large part by pro-Israel dollars (Omar is a frequent Israel critic). She won 57% to 39%, which is still closer than you’d prefer as an incumbent. That suggests she’ll be leaning on grassroots funding in the future to stay in the House.
Adam Schiff
More proof that small donors aren’t merely a marker for left-wing ideology, the California representative, one of the House’s most prolific fundraisers, brought in nearly $10 million from small donors, 57% of his total. How did he do it? Short answer: He was on TV a lot.
Schiff, who won his 11th term in Congress in November, achieved a new level of national fame as the House Intelligence Committee, where he has been the top-ranking Democrat, investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia and then became the center of the 2019 impeachment inquiry. He was a regular on MSNBC, was regularly insulted by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, and—along with his Republican committee colleagues—leveraged his fame to achieve new fundraising heights. That fundraising in turn could be leveraged into a bid for a Senate seat in California or a spot on the House leadership team.
One critique of the boom of small donors is that it encourages politicians to play to the crowd by becoming more ideological. But as the above review of the outliers who attract small-donor dollars by the bucketful shows, it’s not a simple matter of populism or doctrinaire liberalism getting small donors. (No one would put Schiff and McGrath in the same ideological pool as Sanders.) It’s about creating a fandom, a skill some politicians seem to have a knack for.
