Midterm Money

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Shane Goldmacher at NYT:

A dizzying amount of money is already pouring into the battles for the House and the Senate more than a year before the 2022 elections, as Republicans are bullish on their chances to take over both chambers in the first midterm election under President Biden, given the narrow margins keeping Democrats in power.

The two parties’ main war chests for the House total a combined $128 million — more than double the sum at this point in the 2020 cycle and far surpassing every other previous one. Top House members are now raising $1 million or more per quarter. And more than two dozen senators and Senate candidates topped that threshold.

Candidate after candidate, and the parties themselves, are posting record-breaking sums, even as the shapes of most House districts nationwide remain in flux because of delays in the once-a-decade redrawing of boundaries.

In Georgia, Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, raised more than $100,000 per day in the last three months for a $9.5 million haul. But his leading Republican rival, Herschel Walker, the former football player who was urged to run by former President Donald J. Trump, raised $3.7 million in a little more than a month, setting up a potentially bruising and expensive contest in that key state.

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The country’s increasingly polarized electorate has been hyper-engaged in politics since the Trump era began, and the ease of channeling that energy into donations online is remaking how campaigns are funded. The online donation clearinghouses for the two parties, ActBlue and WinRed, processed a combined total of more than $450 million in the third quarter.

 

The NRCC has a message for Trump supporters: "You're a traitor," it begins. "Was Trump wrong about you?"

The fundraising text orders recipients to "prove your loyalty" by sending money or "be branded a deserter."https://t.co/445GoBm9Gm

— National File (@NationalFile) October 14, 2021

WinRed

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance.  The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

And the grift goes on.  Erick Erickson at The Resurgent:

For years, Republicans have coveted ActBlue. ActBlue is a progressive fundraising engine started by the grassroots on the left who were frustrated with the Democrats’ ability to block progressive candidates from party fundraising. Through ActBlue, activists could compound small dollar donations and use ActBlue as a pass through entity to candidates.

It exploded over time and a non-profit has ActBlue under its wing. Democrat Party operatives often privately complain about it because of privacy and data concerns, but they recognize that ActBlue has become a crucial vehicle to mobilize the progressive grassroots.

Over the years, various conservatives have tried something like ActBlue. For two election cycles at RedState, we used SlateCard, which performed like ActBlue, allowed us to pick a list of candidates we supported, and fundraise just for them. SlateCard went away. ActRight sprung up to do something similar, then died. Someone else tried something. Nothing ever really took hold.

Well, the Republican National Committee, the President, and some from the President’s orbit have decided to try a top-down approach and build it by fiat, but I think we should all be really concerned with the product, privacy, its cost, and how undoubtedly it will be a get rick quick scheme for a select group of consultants.

This is not a non-profit effort to benefit candidates. This is a for profit effort to make consultants rich at the expense of candidates and small dollar donors.

David Nir at Daily Kos:

After a delay of 15 years, Republicans finally launched the site that’s supposed to level the playing field with progressive fundraising powerhouse ActBlue, only … it’s really just a landing page. There’s no directory of candidates, no ability to sign up for an account, no way to create a fundraising page, nothing. Just an animated GIF and a contact form. As of Monday at noon, its Twitter account hadn’t even tweeted.

WinRed (Donald Trump named it himself and tweeted a link to its lone functional page) has a long, long way to go to catch up with the $3.5 billion-with-a-b raised through ActBlue since its founding in June of 2004, and there’s good reason to doubt it ever will. For starters, there’s the grifty fee structure: While ActBlue charges a flat 3.95% per contribution, WinRed takes a 3.8% cut plus 30 cents per transaction.

That might not sound like a big difference, but it’s huge. On a $5 contribution, ActBlue will net 20 cents. WinRed, however, will take 49 cents, which in percentage terms is a giant 9.8%. What’s more, on a contribution page that lists multiple campaigns, it sounds like WinRed will get 30 cents per donation. (From the site itself: “There is a 3.8% + 30 cents per transaction fee with each donation made.”) In other words, if you split $25 across five candidates, that’s a cool $2.45 for WinRed. ActBlue would take less than a buck.

These high fees will make Republican campaigns want to look elsewhere, but the real obstacle for WinRed isn’t uptake from the consulting class. Republicans have long imagined that what they have is a technology problem—“Build a better website and we can take on ActBlue”—but what they really have is a culture problem.

ActBlue Envy

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.  Campaign finance is a big part of the story.

Stephanie Saul and Rachel Shorey at NYT:

With the election over, and the fears of Republicans partly realized, the party’s worry has shifted to the “green wave:” $39.67 here, $39.67 there.

That’s the average donation to ActBlue, the online fund-raising hub used by more than 90 percent of Democrats. Buoyed by ActBlue, more than 100 Democratic candidates outraised their Republican counterparts in hotly contested congressional races.
...
Overall, Democratic candidates in the general election collected nearly $296 million in small donations, more than three times the $85 million collected by Republicans. As Democrats have increasingly excelled in that area, aided by ActBlue, Republicans have come to realize that those little donations, repeated over and over again, add up to big numbers.
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But Republicans cannot simply copy the Democratic model. While ActBlue is a nonprofit, Republican efforts at collecting small-dollar donations are fragmented among for-profit processing vendors. There are more than a half-dozen such vendors servicing Republican candidates and committees. And there is big money to be made from their portion of the processing fees, typically around 4 percent, some of which goes to banks and credit card companies.
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In House races, the organization said, more than half the money from individual contributors to Democratic candidates was raised through ActBlue.

The site’s influence and fund-raising have grown exponentially in the past several years, aided by Senator Bernie Sanders’s appeal to small donors in 2016 and his campaign’s decision to use ActBlue. The service also collects a fee that it uses to pay banks and credit-card companies, and rolls the rest back into operations.

In addition to providing Democratic donors with a one-stop site, ActBlue allows them to store their credit card numbers and, with one click, donate to virtually any Democratic candidate or liberal cause through a process called ActBlue Express, which the group says has 5.8 million users.