This post previously appeared in The Connector, Micah Sifry's newsletter. Subscribe here.
So far in 2021, the Democratic National Committee has raised $137 million, the best grassroots fundraising off-year in the DNC’s history. One million people have made a donation; 60% are women. According to Lauren Williams, its deputy chief mobilization officer, “it’s not supporters crisis giving—the DNC has more monthly sustainers than it did in 2020.” She adds, “the number one reported donor occupation: Teacher.”
Where is all this money going? Well, back in July the DNC announced a $25 million expansion in its “I Will Vote” initiative, adding to $20 million already committed to the program. What’s it paying for? “Millions in funding, including with partners, to pay for voter registration” particularly where voters are being targeted with new and difficult hurdles to voting; millions for voting rights litigation; “millions to television and digital advertising, especially digital communications, to better educate voters on how to participate; and “the largest tech team in the history of the DNC.” According to the DNC, “the team will use data and other tools to identify and contact voters affected by suppression efforts and voter roll purges, to ensure that all eligible voters have the information they need to cast a ballot.”
All that sounds great, but it also describes a very top-down and reactive approach to the crisis facing Democrats, which is the regular and predictable collapse in voter turnout that the party goes through in almost every mid-term election. 2018 was obviously an exception, thanks to the Organizer-in-Chief, whose 2016 victory prompted a huge surge in grassroots Democratic activism. That activist surge hasn’t completely faded, as the DNC’s big fundraising take shows. But while the data wonks on the DNC’s mobilization team may think that people aren’t “crisis giving,” that off-hand comment betrays a strange complacency. According to the course we’re on, the iceberg is less than 365 days away and there’s no sign that the ship isn’t just going to keep chugging right towards it.
I went looking to see how much of the money the DNC has raised is going to state party building, mindful of DNC chair Jaime Harrison’s May announcement that state parties would start getting $12,500 from the national committee, up from the $10,000 a month they got through the Trump years, with 18 swing state parties getting $15,000 a month. (Let’s leave aside for a moment what a paltry sum this is, a topic I covered back in July.) According to its FEC filing, the DNC has yet to live up to Harrison’s promise. By his declaration, through May the DNC would have given state parties $2.5 million; after May with the extra boost targeted to swing states, another $2.68 million would have flowed downward, for a total of $5.18 million. In fact, according to the filing, through the first nine months of the year the DNC transferred a total of $5,581,960 to the state Democratic parties. Woo-hoo, right? Well, a closer look shows that almost 43% of that total, $2.4 million, went to the Democratic Party of Virginia, for the disastrous Terry McAuliffe campaign for governor. Meaning that most state parties are still going wanting.
For example, so far this year, the New York State Democratic Committee has received about $34,000 in total from the DNC. The Nebraska Democratic Party has gotten $66,000. By comparison, in the same period, the DNC has paid Lexis-Nexis, a NY-based data firm, more than $800,000. The Michigan Democratic State Central Committee, in one of the swing states of greatest concern to Democrats, has received $138,800 in the first nine months of the year, slightly more than Harrison’s promise. The Arizona Democratic Party has gotten $148,000. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party has received $143,000.
Compare the pitiful sum sent from the DNC mothership to its Pennsylvania affiliate to the $500,000 that Paul Martino, a right-wing venture capitalist and James O’Keefe fan who lives in the Central Bucks school district, personally poured into local school board politics this past year to support candidates who supported reopening schools and loosening anti-COVID mask requirements. Much of that he dispersed in $10,000 increments to local committees and let them use it however they wanted. And here’s what is so important about what he did, as he told New York Times reporter Campbell Robertson on The Daily podcast recently: “We almost by accident built a completely bottom-up, grassroots, parents-based organization in six months. That is not an easy thing to do…. It turned out that activating a grassroots set of parents would be a potentially new powerful political force. I had no idea that that was going to be the case.” He goes on:
I think the core of this is that we woke up parents who were apolitical in the past to that the school boards were very fundamentally important to their family because it was their kids’ education. And so certainly, that would then mean other things like curriculum, et cetera, downstream. But having a network of activated previously apolitical parents, that’s a pretty interesting group of people who didn’t used to show up. These aren’t your every two-year voters. These aren’t people who probably even knew there were odd year elections. And it’s exciting to see those kinds of people be active for the first time. [hat tip to the always perspicacious Lara Putnam for flagging this interview.]
Let’s put aside for the moment Martino’s disingenuous claims that he had no idea what he was doing, or that he built the movement in just six months, or that he had no deeper partisan political intentions. (Those are all tartly debunked by Dina Ley, a 2021 Democratic school board candidate in Central Bucks, who describes how Martino started organizing “performative town halls” back in the summer of 2020 in what he called “the purplest of districts” with the help of a political consultant friend, belying what he said to the Times.)
What’s important to see here is what happens when relatively modest resources get into the hands of local political formations responding creatively to local conditions. The GOP seems especially good at hunting for new ways to stir up voters to change the political dynamic; the Democrats, by contrast, seem to spend most of their time reacting to the weather instead of trying to change it.
I can’t think of any national Democratic or progressive organization making meaningful microgrants to local grassroots activists. Well, I suppose I should note Indivisible National, which has harvested tens of millions from big and small donors alike since its founding in early 2017 mainly by claiming that it was prioritizing building up thousands of local groups when it did no such thing. It just launched what it’s calling its “largest ever reimbursement program, IndivisiGather,” offering up to $1000 to cover costs for local groups’ community-building events. Prior to that, Indivisible National had two programs offering groups local aid, a fundraising inducement offered local groups up to $500 in matching funds if they raised $500 for National, and a GROW Grant program that dangled up to $4000 to groups but only if ten or more locals were collaborating together. Indivisible National reports making a whopping ten of these grants in 2021, one-third as many as it did in 2020. Woo-hoo! (Befitting its DC-centric status, Indivisible Civics and the Indivisible Project report raising a total of $11.3 million in 2020, of which perhaps two percent was funneled back to local groups.)
Actually, there is one national network focused on supporting local grassroots organizing: the Movement Voter Project. Between 2016-2020, it helped more than 48,000 donors move more than $120 million to 750 local organizations in 47 states and 300 counties, along with providing trainings and technical support. Don’t waste your money giving to the DNC; give it to MVP.