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Democrats are spending record amounts attacking each other in primaries. Outside organizations, including super PACs, have put $53 million into Democratic congressional primaries this cycle already, dwarfing the $30 million spent by this time in both 2018 and 2020. It’s a huge pile of cash, especially considering that the seats being contested might as well be deck chairs on the Titanic.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but as everyone knows by now, Democrats are likely to lose the House as well as the Senate in the midterms. And the 2024 Senate map is less favorable to Democrats than the 2022 map, meaning that there is a clear path to a scenario where, after the 2024 elections, Republicans hold the 2024 presidency, the House, and a filibuster-proof 60 seats. Several things would need to break the GOP’s way for that to happen, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Conversely, the Democrats need a lot of luck just to retain their narrow majorities. Whoever makes up the Democratic House caucus, it’s likely that they won’t be able to pass legislation for at least a few cycles — and as we’ve seen, even when Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the White House, making bills into law is a challenge.
High emotions, low stakes
When donors and PACs spend on House primaries, they’re trying to affect elections that are several degrees of separation from actual legislation. This is especially true in cases where the seat being contested is in a deep blue area: The practical effect of replacing one Democrat with another Democrat is low, at least in the short term. (We can get into some long-term thoughts below.) In the open primary for Ohio’s 11th District in 2021, the candidates raised a combined $10 million, and millions more were spent by outside groups. But while people felt strongly about the candidates, I’m not sure anyone articulated why the policy differences between Nina Turner and Shontel Brown would be hugely important once either one got to Congress.
Or take the primary for Oregon’s new 6th District, which is rated “likely Democratic” by Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report. There’s a lot of controversy around this race, primarily because one of the candidates, Carrick Flynn, a white political newcomer who is into effective altruism and pandemic preparedness, is being backed to the tune of more than $10 million by a super PAC funded by a crypto billionaire. Flynn is also supported by ad spending from the party-leadership-aligned House Majority PAC, which upset Democrats who wondered why there was so much money backing a white man when multiple women of color were running for the seat (the 6th is 20 percent Latino). These are all important points.
Should Flynn win the primary and take a seat in Congress, though, he’ll likely be a freshman member of the minority party, with very little power to do anything about pandemic preparedness one way or the other. This is the main problem in investing heavily in primaries — when you win, your candidate won’t immediately enact your favored policies, as they would if they won a presidential or gubernatorial race. Instead, your candidate gets to Congress, and as often as not, winds up just sitting there.
What should donors spend on instead?
While millions have been spent on Democrats who are fighting with other Democrats, state legislative contests are still underfunded. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party organ in charge of these elections, has raised $30 million and expects to roughly double that number by Election Day. And state legislatures have an enormous amount of power. For instance, if and when Roe v. Wade is struck down, they’ll have the ability to criminalize abortion or make it legal. (Our overview of state legislative races and reproductive rights is here.)
There are also lots of grassroots organizations working on mobilizing voters in swing states that don’t have enough support. These groups help Democrats win up and down the ballot, and their work is vital in states like Georgia and Arizona, which have been slowly turning purple, and which Democrats badly need if they ever hope to maintain a majority in the Senate. (See our brief: Giving to Elect Democrats and Build Progressive Power in 2022.) One organization that effectively distributes money to many of these groups is the Movement Voter Project, which we profiled here.
Now, it may be that your pet issue is only possible to address using the powers of the federal government. If Congress passed a pandemic preparedness bill, it would have a lot more impact than a similar bill passed at the state level. There’s only so much that state and local governments can do. But we should also be clear-eyed about the capacity of Congress to pass legislation and the influence individual House members have over what happens in Congress. If you’re spending millions on federal races and zero on state legislative races, you’re doing it wrong.
Incidentally, Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto billionaire who has put his money behind Carrick Flynn in Oregon, previously donated $5 million to Future Forward PAC, funded by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. In 2020, FF PAC spent over $10 million in an effort to beat Texas Sen. John Conyrn, who was never in serious trouble and wound up winning by double digits. State legislative candidates and organizations working on their races sure could have used that $10 million. Even billionaires who are explicitly committed to using their money for maximum impact, like Bankman-Fried, aren’t immune to lighting it on fire when it comes to politics.
Should donors think more about the long term or the short term?
One counter to all this is that the goal isn’t just passing legislation in the short term, but gradually, bit by bit, changing the composition of the party. Electing Democrats who aren’t reflexive defenders of Israel, for example, may lead to a situation where approving large amounts of unconditional aid to Israel is controversial. That’s certainly the calculus of pro-Israel PACs who have been spending millions over the past few cycles supporting their candidates against Israel-skeptical left-wing candidates. This logic is mirrored by progressive groups who are expending their own resources trying to elect socialist or socialist-friendly candidates in safe blue districts, thereby slowly reducing the number of centrists or compromise-friendly liberals in Congress.
But these projects have time horizons of decades. For all the publicity generated by the House’s handful of young, dynamic leftists, they have yet to make much of an impact legislatively. With Democrats poised to fall out of power once more for at least a couple cycles, it’ll be some time before the Squad and its affiliates can do much of anything.
Fighting over the ideological soul of the party — which is how a lot of these primaries are often framed — might seem attractive to donors who are themselves ideologues. Supporting candidates who are aligned on key issues likewise seems important if you are obsessed with those issues. But meanwhile, it’s important across a whole host of issue areas for Democrats to win and maintain power at the state level in races that aren’t as saturated with money and media. It’s to those races that donors should be looking, not primaries.