One of the most striking trends in politics over the last several electoral cycles is the rise of the small donor. Technology has made giving to candidates and causes as easy as tapping "donate" on ActBlue, and Democrats in particular have benefitted from a growing number of donors. In October 2020, OpenSecrets reported that small donations—gifts of under $200—made up 22 percent of the 2020 cycle’s total fundraising, up from 15 percent at that time in 2016. And small donations are especially important to the Democratic Party: A 2020 political science paper from Zachary Albert and Raymond La Raja found that such donations made up 23 percent of the party’s total haul in 2018, and 34 percent of individual contributions to the party.
This is good news in many ways. The conventional wisdom is that relying on small donors is a more small-d democratic way of doing business than courting institutional donors (like unions) or the ultra-wealthy, who may have parochial interests or causes that diverge from what the rest of the Democratic coalition wants. It also doesn’t look great for a supposedly progressive, or even center-left, party to go begging billionaires to fund their campaigns. Many left-wing politicians, like Senator Bernie Sanders, have bragged about the proportion of money they get from small donors, implying that it makes them more accountable than politicians who rely on large donations. At this point though, it’s malpractice for any politician, no matter what their ideology, to not try to court small donors.
The downside, which we covered earlier this month, is that small donors don’t necessarily know what to do with their money. In the recent past, they’ve funded bad candidates in poorly chosen races (Wisconsin’s Randy Bryce in 2018) or poured money to members of Congress who don’t need it (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). There’s no sign that small donors are getting smarter, with millions in small gifts going to fund a hopeless effort to unseat Tennessee Republican Representative Majorie Taylor Greene.
It’s maybe a little unfair to blame small donors for not spending intelligently. Anyone who has ever donated to any candidate can attest to the sheer volume of fundraising solicitations that bombard donors. Even the most pointless long-shot campaigns will appear to cite polls showing a close race, while incumbents in safe seats will imply they are somehow in danger. Not everyone can spend the necessary amount of time adjudicating these claims.
But the Democratic Party apparatus is full of smart people who presumably know more than small donors about where money should be spent. The major committees and big party figures could be doing far more than they do to effectively route small donations to where they’re most needed. The fact that they’re not doing so is not great news for the party.
What good small donor guidance looks like
Some larger donors have people around them who will offer advice and guide their giving strategies. Your average small donor doesn’t have that. But there are a growing number of organizations that have tried to steer small donors to places where they can have the most impact. Swing Left’s Blueprint tool is a good example of this. You tell the website which causes you are interested in supporting and it splits your donation among campaigns and groups working on that cause. If you wanted to give money to try to keep Virginia blue in this month’s elections, Swing Left had an ActBlue fund that split gifts between 10 swing seat legislature candidates, no research required. Other organizations, such as Future Now and Sister District, work to identify the most important and competitive state legislative races in the country and encourage donors to give to those campaigns.
Putting a lot of money behind a candidate doesn’t guarantee they’ll win. There have been plenty of examples from the last two years of Democrats out-raising Republicans and going on to lose. Other factors, like the general political climate, earned media, voter suppression, and gerrymandering, can determine outcomes. And campaigns have to spend the money they get in worthwhile ways, which is far from a guarantee. But it’s obvious that money can occasionally alter the course of elections, even if no one knows how much. The key is to get it to the races where it might potentially matter—close races, essentially.
The Democratic Party doesn’t educate its small donors
The major Democratic Party committees do try to focus spending on close races, for the most part, from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue and Frontline programs to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee’s Spotlight candidates. But they do little to dissuade wasteful forms of giving, and sometimes encourage bad behavior, like when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraised on behalf of no-chance Kentucky Senate candidate Amy McGrath.
To be sure, the party committees aren’t the worst actors when it comes to encouraging wasteful spending. McGrath was also supported by the likes of the “grassroots-funded” Ditch Mitch PAC, which encouraged small donors to essentially throw money away out of their hatred for Mitch McConnell. But it doesn’t seem like these committees are doing much to educate their small donors either. If you give to the Democratic National Committee or the DSCC or DCCC, a chunk of that money will be distributed to the campaigns and states deemed competitive by political operatives—but this process is fairly opaque. The party wants you to give as much money as you can as often as you can, but does it care if you’re donating in dumb ways? Not really.
How do you make donating more effective?
One thing party committees and major Democratic politicians could do more of is joint fundraising operations that lift up lesser-known candidates. One example of this is the “Squad Victory Fund” launched in 2020 by Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, which encouraged left-wing small donors to split gifts between them. Now imagine that instead of four prominent Democrats from safe seats linking up this way, you had several battleground Democrats fundraising, or even a cross-ideological coalition in which Ocasio-Cortez encourages her army of donors to give to a centrist who risks losing in 2022.
Committees could push funds that let donors split gifts between key House, Senate, and state legislative races and have the party’s best small-dollar fundraisers tell people to give to those funds. Why is Representative Adam Schiff, a sure bet for reelection, buckraking on his own behalf on Facebook? Shouldn’t he be asking people to give money to candidates who need it? Schiff will surely end up transferring some money to other campaigns, but there’s clearly some inefficiency there.
In the current political ecosystem, Democrats compete with one another for the same pool of small-donor dollars, with the big winners inevitably being the most famous candidates—who are also usually not the ones who need money the most. A better distribution of money would involve more centralization, i.e. some candidates raise less than they could in favor of steering dollars to more needy candidates, probably at the direction of party committees.
This would create a number of complications. Party committees have a history of favoring more centrist, establishment candidates, and Ocasio-Cortez would probably not bend over backward to do favors for a leadership that has been denying her House committee assignments she wanted. Democrats who run long-shot campaigns in red states would object if the party essentially told small donors not to give to them.
But consider the contradictions and illogic of the current situation. Some Democrats will be sitting on piles of money they won’t be able to spend usefully during the coming midterms, and other candidates will be badly in need of cash. Small donors could prove to be the engine that powers the party, but the party needs to figure out how to use them first.