My first co-authored book, 2006’s Crashing the Gate, featured a special House election in Ohio in which a candidate named Paul Hackett—in a supposedly unwinnable race—raised $500,000 from 9,000 blog readers (the blogs were Daily Kos, MyDD, and Swing State Project). It was the first sign that this “ActBlue” thing was real, an inkling that perhaps we could build an answer to the conservative parade of billionaire donors. As I wrote, “the tens of millions the big donors can raise annually pales in comparison to what small donors can raise on their own.”
Still, that was the dream, not the reality. And while we saw that progressive donor infrastructure grow cycle after cycle, this is the year where it has absolutely blown everything out of the water. I mean, South Carolina Democratic senate candidate Jamie Harrison raised $57 million. In one quarter. For context, $5-6 million a quarter for a Senate candidate was considered awesome fundraising last cycle; top-tier Democrats are regularly pulling $20+ million these days.
Republicans, obviously, are freaked out, as Politico reports. Long used to financial dominance thanks to their network of selfish greedy asshole billionaires, they are suffering under the new grassroots-fundraising world.
The online fundraising edge that Democrats have enjoyed for years has mushroomed into an overpowering force, with small-dollar donors smashing “donate” buttons over the last three months to process their disgust for President Donald Trump, fury with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and grief for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Propelled by the wave of money, Democrats have suddenly expanded the Senate battlefield to a dozen competitive races, burying long-contested states like Iowa and Maine in TV ads while also overwhelming Republican opponents in states like Alaska, Kansas and South Carolina that are suddenly tightening.
Quick lay of the land: Republicans have a 53-47 Senate majority. Democrats need to pick up a net three seats for a 50-50 majority, assuming a Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties. We will likely lose the Alabama seat, while we are favored to win seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina.
Iowa and two seats in Georgia are tossups. Then we have (in my estimation) lean-Republican races in Alaska, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas. That’s the dozen races Politico mentions. Note that only two of them—Colorado and Maine—are in 2016 blue states.
“The money is indicative [of] how much energy there is on their side, and the lack thereof on our side,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant. “I think we’re finding that Trump — the energy for Trump — is not always transferable...
Core Donald Trump supporters don’t give a shit about Republicans. For one, you have Trump shit-talking his party. That certainly doesn’t help. Then you have Trump bragging about how rich he is. Remember how Michael Bloomberg had to fund his entire campaign himself? People aren’t generally motivated to give money to people who are already rich. But then there’s the fact that the GOP never had to bother appealing to its core base. I mean, look at those deplorables! Much more pleasant to collect checks over cocktails from the Captains of Industry and assorted trust fund babies.
Last month, Republicans were lifted by the news that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson had upped their contribution to Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with the Senate GOP, to a whopping $50 million for the year. But days later, ActBlue’s FEC report showed that the top nine Democratic Senate candidates raised over $50 million online in August alone.
Delicious. The promise of what I wrote in 2005 has come true: They write the big check, and millions of us click “donate,” and we raise more money. Far more money.
One wonders why Adelson and Charles Koch don’t write even bigger checks. Why not toss around billion-dollar checks? I guess their greed is our advantage.
Josh Holmes, a top McConnell adviser, said every news development activates Democrats’ donor base and “their default is to give $5 every time something angers them.”
But “when your average Republican is watching Hannity and something upsets them, their response is to write something on Facebook,” Holmes added.
Just watch the Democratic fundraising tsunami from the Supreme Court hearings.
Republicans have their own online fundraising platform, launching WinRed in 2019 in an effort to build their own online giving ecosystem. But several Republican operatives said Democrats have spent years conditioning their supporters to give online, and it will take time for Republicans to build their digital infrastructure, as well as more buy-in from Republican candidates.
So WinRed is just the latest Trump grift on the Republican Party, and the chances that it survives Trump’s exit from the White House are just about nil. In fact, there is a long and rich tradition of failed ActBlue clones littering the political battlefield—RightRoots, Big Red Tent, Slatecard, ABC PAC, and RedStormPAC. WinRed will slot in nicely on that list, and the reason is quite simple:
ActBlue emerged from the grassroots, and harnessed the networked power of the early blogs and emerging social media to become the Democratic fundraising standard from the bottom up. It bypassed traditional Democratic fundraisers and incumbent fundraising platforms and other entrenched consultants, who were powerless to stop its adoption by the likes of us.
WinRed is being imposed from the top, by Trump and his operation, to enrich Trump’s friends. It has no grassroots buy-in, while other Republican consultants and campaigns look on with fury and jealousy, cut out of the pie. And the second Trump loses his hold on the party? That’s the day WinRed gets kicked to the curb, because other grifters will want their piece.
We must flip the Senate! Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial races!