Liberals used to worry that “dark money,” campaign contributions from untraceable sources, would give the ultra-wealthy and corporations even more power than they already had. This fear became especially acute after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United loosened the restrictions on donations to super PACs, opening the door to a flood of cash from corporations.
But though politics has become increasingly expensive, with each election cycle breaking fundraising and spending records, the surge has come about in ways that aren’t unfriendly to Democrats. While Citizens United did enable the ultra-wealthy to donate huge sums to super PACs, there are lots of rich liberals as well as rich conservatives. At the same time, the online fundraising platform ActBlue has enabled non-wealthy Democrats to give relatively minor sums to whatever candidate or organization they wish at the push of a button. A rush of these small donations (technically, any donation of under $200 is “small,” and not itemized in FEC data) has helped Democrats establish fundraising advantages over Republicans in many races. This year, for the first time in recent memory, the national Democratic party committees kept pace with their Republican counterparts in off-cycle fundraising, a testament to enduring Democratic enthusiasm and a willingness among the party base to open their checkbooks. In 2020, small donors made up 27% of all money raised by federal candidates, up from 21% in 2016, according to an OpenSecrets report, and Democratic Senate candidates, in particular, raised money this way, with 41% of their total fundraising haul coming from small donors.
These trends are reason for some optimism. In theory, at least, candidates who raise large sums from small donors don’t need to go looking for funds from big business or special interest groups and might feel empowered to look out for their constituents’ interests rather than the bottom lines of big donors. And if Democrats can harness the power of all these energized small donors, they could make sure that they’ll always have a big enough war chest to compete with the more business-friendly Republicans.
The problem is that so far, small-donor money has too often also been dumb money. Small donations often go to campaigns that are unwinnable or candidates who face no serious reelection threat and wind up sitting on mountains of cash. These gifts frequently don’t follow any clear strategy, but instead chase a procession of shiny objects. In short, small donors aren’t leveraging their power in smart ways, and it’s hurting Democrats’ ability to win elections. Here’s how these dynamics play out:
Donations that go to hopeless causes
The statistic that Democratic U.S. Senate candidates got a whopping 41% of their donations in 2020 from small donors sounds impressive—heartwarming, even. But that number is juiced up by Jaime Harrison and Amy McGrath. Harrison, a candidate in South Carolina who now chairs the Democratic National Committee, got 54% of his money from small donations; McGrath ran in Kentucky and raked in an impressive 59% of her total from small donations. Both candidates also lost badly, with Harrison getting just 44% of the vote and McGrath an unimpressive 38%. At least in Harrison’s case there was some speculation that he could make it a close race with Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham, but no knowledgeable observer thought McGrath had a shot against Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell. The $55 million in small donations sent to her campaign represent an exercise in wishful thinking: Democrats hate McConnell and want him gone, so it’s easy to see that fundraising appeals promising that your money would go toward defeating him could get a lot of ActBlue clicks.
Ideally, small donors should be able to look at polling and past election returns and see through these false promises. But this process happens a lot, most recently in the case of Marcus Flowers, a candidate with an oddly murky past who hopes to run against the far-right conspiracy theorist and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in the 2022 midterms. Flowers has raised over $3.3 million, nearly $3 million of which comes from small donors, and it is all going to be wasted, since Flowers (or anyone) has a zero chance of unseating Greene, who, for all her faults, is a prolific fundraiser in a deep-red safe seat. Call this sort of thing “rage-giving”—donating money because you dislike the candidate’s opponent, even if that candidate isn’t going to win. But it’s hard to conceive of a more pointless use of your money.
Donations that make you feel good
The other face of the rage-giving coin is vibe-giving, or donating money to a political figure because you like their vibe or identify with them. The purest example of this is New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has become one of the top fundraisers in the House thanks to her skill in rustling up small donations. In 2020, she raised $20 million, more than $16 million of which came from under-$200 gifts.
In 2018, when Ocasio-Cortez was running for office for the first time as a left-wing primary challenger to incumbent Joe Crowley, donating to her had some utility, if you were a progressive hoping to push that House seat to the left. But now, Ocasio-Cortez can’t possibly need the money. She won reelection in 2020 by more than 40 points and ended the year with more than $4.2 million cash on hand. Donating to her may make you feel good in that it signals your allegiance to her brand of leftism or your affinity for her—Ocasio-Cortez has built a nationwide brand because she’s good at connecting with a wide audience, particularly young leftists. But donating to her simply isn’t going to have much of an effect on anything.
To pick a case study closer to the ideological center of the Democratic Party, Rep. Adam Schiff also does quite well among small donors, bringing in $11.4 million from them in 2020, which was close to 60% of his total fundraising. Like Ocasio-Cortez, he occupies a safe seat, so these donations don’t really have a material effect on the composition of the House. But thanks to his prominence as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee—a position from which he led the effort to investigate and impeach President Donald Trump—he earned national fame, and his campaign parlayed attacks on him from the right into successful fundraising appeals.
Members of Congress in safe seats who raise huge sums generally distribute money to candidates in swing districts, whether that’s through direct transfers or “dues” paid to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But if your goal is to help Democrats win the House, you shouldn’t be donating to these safe seats in the first place. If you want to help Schiff or Ocasio-Cortez, don’t give them money they won’t use efficiently; give it to candidates running in close races who share their views. Donating to someone guaranteed to win by huge margins is almost as bad as donating to someone guaranteed to lose.
Why small donors need to be smarter
The tendency for donors to give with their hearts rather than their heads can have real consequences. In 2018, a union ironworker named Randy Bryce, who was running for a House seat in Wisconsin that was empty due to Republican Paul Ryan’s retirement, cut a campaign ad that went hugely viral. Donations poured in, the national media started paying attention, and “Ironstache” became a celebrity.
This was a dovetailing of all the worst tendencies of small donors, who contributed nearly $5 million of the $8 million Bryce eventually raised. Ironstache had a down-home charisma and seemed like the kind of salt-of-the-earth character who could win a red district; his victory would fulfill a narrative about how Democrats could win if they embraced unions and the working class. And Bryce’s potential victory over Ryan—a dweebish GOP leader who had dreamed of cutting the social safety net since he was an overachieving high schooler—would have been a truly cinematic moment. But the national media hype didn’t translate to votes, and Bryce lost by 12 points during a cycle in which Democrats gained 40 seats. It turned out that Bryce had a patchwork of scandals in his past that made him a fairly toxic candidate; the net effect of all those donations and media attention may have been handing him a primary victory over a more electable candidate.
Not many people want to go back to the days of the metaphorical “smoke-filled room,” where party bosses would pick candidates without voter input. Progressives generally cry foul when national party committees endorse candidates in primaries or otherwise meddle in the name of getting the more “electable” (almost always the more centrist) candidate on the ballot. But in the age of the small donor, there’s a risk of candidates being elevated by national media hype, where a slick ad or good story trumps common sense. Small donors as a whole haven’t learned the lessons of Ironstache, judging by the way they have rushed to throw money at figures like McGrath and Flowers, who are better at securing media attention than they are at winning power.
Part of the problem here is that organizations are too happy to take advantage of the worst tendencies of small donors. In early 2020, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which had endorsed McGrath in her primary against Charles Booker, sent out joint fundraising emails implying McGrath had a good chance to beat McConnell. The money given to McGrath didn’t help her win any more than a little jacket would help a snowball survive hell, though it did provide her with an edge against Booker. (One wonders how the small donors who wanted to help her beat McConnell felt about their money being used to defeat a fellow Democrat instead.) Campaigns try to trigger fear or rage, as well: Flowers has been sending fundraising emails with lines like, “Marjorie Taylor Greene continues to prove that she cannot have a platform to continue to spread her lies and hatred. We need her OUT.” Fair points—but Flowers isn’t going to win an election against her with or without your money.
Campaigns can’t be blamed too much for this sort of thing. It’s natural for them to fundraise as much as they possibly can, and it would be silly to expect Ocasio-Cortez to send out emails saying, “I have enough money, don’t give to me!” (She does routinely raise funds for progressive candidates around the country.) But that doesn’t mean donors have to believe every email that comes across their inbox. Smart giving doesn’t have to mean exhaustive research. It can just mean donating to a candidate in a close race rather than a long shot. Of course, every candidate is going to make claims about how they have a chance to win, but c’mon—in this environment, no Democrat is going to perform well in a red state or district.
In politics, having the most money doesn’t guarantee victory, and it’s unlikely that your small donation will put a campaign over the top, just as it’s unlikely your vote will decide an election. But if you’re going to become a donor, you might as well take it seriously.