Donating to a Democratic Party committee is a leap of faith. Organizations like the Democratic National Committee or the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which Blue Tent has covered here and here) are great at soliciting gifts and telling stories about why supporting the party is important. But once the money is in the committee war chests, it gets routed to any number of causes, some of which donors may not approve of, like backing centrist incumbents against left-wing primary challengers. The big committees have also occasionally made some poor tactical decisions, particularly in 2016. When you hit the “donate” button on ActBlue, you’re hoping that the committee you’re giving to knows what it’s doing, which isn’t a guarantee.
That’s why Swing Left’s Blueprint program is so fascinating. Launched for the 2020 cycle, it aims to push Democratic dollars into races and organizations where they will have the most impact. “Most Democratic donations don’t go to the races or organizations that matter most for our democracy,” the Swing Left website notes. Some notable inefficiencies include the millions sent to longshot Senate candidates Amy McGrath and Jamie Harrison, who lost by double digits in 2020.
The way Blueprint works is that donors create a profile on the Swing Left website and select their priorities, choosing from options like “engaging voters in battleground states” or “defending the House majority.” After assigning percentages to each of these, donors can then donate via ActBlue and split their gift among these categories. Each category, in turn, represents a pool of money that is shared among candidates or organizations in battleground states.
Why this is innovative
This doesn’t sound impressive on the surface. Most left-leaning groups have the same priorities and targets as Swing Left, and in 2020, Blueprint money went to the same Senate races and state legislative contests in swing states that other organizations targeted. In 2020, according to Blueprint’s impact report, the project raised over $5 million. (Of that, $1.5 million went to state legislative candidates, $1.2 million went to Senate candidates, and $2.3 million went to civic organizations.) Blueprint’s plan fell into the same trap that other left-leaning organizations, including the Democratic Party itself, fell into—namely, that Republican turnout was more robust than anyone thought it would be. The impact report sought to explain those losses: “Systemic polling errors led us to believe that the state legislative environment was more competitive—in Democrats’ favor—than it turned out to be. As a result, we did not prioritize defensive opportunities (seat holds) and lost some of the seats Democrats had flipped in 2018.”
But while Blueprint can’t magically win races by itself, it at least provides donors with a sense of where their money goes. Every category on the Blueprint dashboard has an explanation of how its pool of donations will be distributed. Gifts to the Senate category are split between Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and whoever comes out of the primary in North Carolina; gifts to the Swing Left National Congressional Defense Fund will be allocated after the redistricting dust settles and it’s clear which races are worth targeting. (Hopefully, the polling is better than it was in 2020.)
It’s also notable how Blueprint speaks to donors, referring to all of their gifts as “investments.” The goal is to achieve the highest impact per dollar possible, which means careful targeting of races and organizations, as well as an emphasis on smaller, state-level contests. Most donor money flows to Senate campaigns, but Blueprint went heavy on the oft-overlooked down-ballot races in 2020. Though this didn’t result in actual wins—2020 was an unexpectedly bad cycle for down-ballot Dems—it’s the right approach, particularly when you don’t have tens of millions to deploy on Senate races.
Why doesn’t the party itself have tools like these?
Swing Left is one of several organizations founded in the wake of 2016 that attempt to harness the energy and pocketbooks of Democrats in blue states and use it to win contested elections in purple states. This idea is to solve the problem of geography bedeviling Democrats: There are many would-be volunteers and donors in places like California and New York who want to help win elections in places like Virginia, but the party infrastructure is not really set up to channel that enthusiasm.
Not that the Democrats exclude anyone; you can always join the local branch of the state Democratic Party where you live. But that organization is going to be focused on winning elections in your state, which may already be deep blue. You can help out Democrats in other states by donating directly to them, but you may not know which candidates are worthy of help. And the big national committees, as we noted, can be annoyingly opaque. A donation to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which focuses on state-level races (we profiled the DLCC here), will help the effort to win races in Virginia, but it will also be spread around to serve a dozen other priorities, and it’s not obvious from a donor perspective which one. Small donors may be a powerful weapon in the Democrats’ arsenal, but the party doesn’t encourage them to give in optimal ways. The DNC is currently sending fundraising emails highlighting the urgency of the Virginia elections, but if recipients click “donate” they’ll be giving to the DNC, not directly to any Virginia-based candidate or organization.
Swing Left, on the other hand, is trying to get the ActBlue hordes to focus on the races where their dollars are most needed. This is clear in the case of Blueprint, and also in Swing Left’s “Keep Virginia Blue” ActBlue page, which splits donations among 10 key state legislative races and Terry McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign. The link to that page is prominent on Swing Left’s homepage, and the money raised goes directly to candidates. It’s a great option for donors who want to help Democrats and achieve maximum impact. But you have to wonder why it’s an outside group doing that sort of thing, and not the party itself.