Campaign fundraising continues to fall short of expectations

Last quarter, we wrote a blog post about the weak fundraising environment for political candidates in 2023. This post serves as a bit of an update, while also adding some context. We’ve incorporated the latest FEC filing numbers from Q3 2023.

To remove outliers and solve for the impact of the total number of candidates running for office on total dollars in the environment, we’ve isolated the sum of fundraising from the campaigns ranked 11–30 in terms of total fundraising in each given quarter.

What we found in the first three quarters of the year is a sharp decrease in small-dollar fundraising across the board compared to the previous cycle. High-dollar fundraising took a smaller hit. Republicans appear to be suffering even more than Democrats, which may be due to their ongoing presidential primary monopolizing donor attention. However, presidential candidates across both parties this year have been underperforming expectations, too.

Conclusions:

• Small-dollar fundraising is down worse than high-dollar fundraising.
• Republicans are worse off than Democrats.
• Overall, there’s still an upward trend in fundraising across cycles, but this year was a dip compared to expectations based on the usual growth trend. Yes, 2019 was worse in terms of total numbers than 2023. However, expectations for fundraising have been going up year after year. On trend, we expected to see much more money this cycle.

What’s the trend?

The trend in fundraising is upwards. There’s been more money in politics cycle-over-cycle recently. So the gap between the trend line and where we’re actually at is a big part of why fundraising “feels” low.

But what about 2019?

A number of people have pointed out that the data show this is a better fundraising year than 2019, so far. The claim is that 2023 should look more like 2019 because they are both off-years during presidential cycles. But two counterarguments to this comparison should be considered:

1. 2019 was roughly on trend. Looking at the chart above, we can see that 2019’s results were more on-trend than 2023’s. As fundraising goes up more broadly cycle-over-cycle, we should be adjusting our expectations. 2019 exceeded the performance of 2017, but 2023 is not exceeding the performance of 2021.
2. Presidential committee fundraising was bananas in 2019. And that typically causes some money to get sucked out of House and Senate campaigns. This cycle? Not so much. In 2019, we had the best off-year presidential fundraising of all time. And 2023 just isn’t off to that same start.

Will it turn around?

There’s a different short term answer and long term answer.

The long-term trendline in American politics remains clear. Fundraising goes up. And we shouldn’t expect the fundamentals to change as long as this remains true:

1. We’re in a period of great consequence. Both sides feel like something big is on the line. Money in politics remains a critical way to win for your side.
2. Super PACs can continue to inject a lot of money into our politics.
3. We have no serious campaign finance reform to reduce the impact of money in our politics.

Short-term, House and Senate Democrats saw their small-dollar fundraising go down by 9.1% last quarter compared to Q2. Early indications don’t show this trend reversing in October.

That being said, there has never been an on-year that didn’t beat the off-year. So we can assume that on-year fundraising will increase. The question is: will we get back up to where we thought we might based on the trend line? In order to beat 2020, we’d have to see $500 million+ in individual contributions to the top 11–30 campaigns alone for 2024. And, right now, it doesn’t seem that’s going to happen.

Our best guess is that, pending a major news event (Roe v. Wade ruling, death of RBG, war, etc.), fundraising for 2024 campaigns will fall short of the 2022 cycle.

Data tables

To remove outliers and solve for the total number of candidates running impacting the total number of dollars in the environment, we’ve isolated the sum of fundraising from the campaigns ranked 11–30 in terms of total fundraising in each given quarter.

Methodology

In order to remove outliers from this analysis, we excluded the top 10 fundraising committees from the data set. And, as a result of the fact that the number of committees shifts up and down from year to year, we also limited the data set to only the top 30 fundraisers.

• We downloaded the entire FEC filings report for congressional committees here.
• For each quarter, we selected the columns titled “individual_unitemized_contributions_period” and “individual_itemized_contributions_period”
• We rank-ordered the committees from the highest number of unitemized and/or itemized money to the lowest.
• We selected the committees ranked 11–30 and summed them to get a quarterly total for small-dollar or big-dollar fundraising by major campaigns.
• Total numbers were created by combining big- and small-dollar fundraising totals in sums.