Democratic fundraising up in Q4. 📈 We are so back.
For those who’ve been reading our @MiddleSeatCo blog posts in 2023 about the anemic fundraising environment, we’ve got an update for you here.
Top Democrats running for the House and Senate just posted their best off-year Q4 of all time!
Some of us were a little worried. But the latest ActBlue figures are clear…We are so back.
Comparing 2023 and 2021 numbers
This analysis incorporates the latest FEC filing numbers through Q4 2023. Democratic small-dollar fundraising was down 19% compared to 2021 at the end of Q3. But a big surge in Q4 saved the day. Top Democrats saw a 52% increase in fundraising from individual contributions quarter over quarter.
Methodology note: To remove outliers and solve for the ever-changing total number of candidates running for office impacting dollars in the environment, we’ve isolated the sum of fundraising from the campaigns ranked 11–30 in terms of fundraising in each given quarter based on the categories below.
Totals for each category are represented as the dollars raised by only the top 11–30 campaigns from each respective party.
Looking at 2023 overall, we find the Republicans doing much worse than the Democrats. Compared to 2021, Republican fundraising has cratered, down a whopping 35% for their biggest campaigns.
Democrats, whose fundraising was down in the dumps from Q1-Q3 (although never as deeply down as the Republicans) have staged a full recovery. Democrats comfortably met off-year expectations.
It is true, however, that the rate of growth Democrats experienced in prior years has leveled off. For example, Democratic small-dollar fundraising was up 96% from 2017-over-2015. Up 213% from 2019-over-2017. Up 80% from 2021-over-2019. So a 7.38% growth rate indicates those days of seemingly-exponential growth in small-dollar fundraising are slowing for now.
Democrats are winning the Congressional cash race
These numbers aren’t looking good for the GOP. Democrats improved on their performance of a net $19 million lead over the GOP at this point in the 2022 cycle to a whopping $54 million lead heading into 2024.*
What’s happening at the presidential level?
The picture is slightly less clear at the presidential level, where large networks of PACs, joint fundraising committees (JFCs), parties and campaign-level organizations raise money more or less as a unit.
But if you add up individual donations to the key committees through February 2024, we see a $291 million to $278 million advantage in Donald Trump’s favor (based on total individual contributions).
Joe Biden | Donald Trump
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT | DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT 2024, INC.
BIDEN ACTION FUND | TRUMP SAVE AMERICA JOINT FUNDRAISING COMMITTEE
BIDEN VICTORY FUND | REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE | MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN INC.
| MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN PAC
| MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AGAIN! INC.
| SAVE AMERICA
| SAVE AMERICA FUND
Key insight: Joe Biden’s fundraising is heating up.
Since June 2023, Joe Biden has raised $190m to Trump’s $187m. And he trounced Trump $58m to $50m on small-dollar fundraising during that same period. For 2024 alone, Joe Biden raised $15.2m compared to Trump’s $7.9m in small-dollar money.
And that doesn’t appear to be slowing down in March… (we won’t get the official FEC numbers until 4/20)
How does this stack up to elections past?
- Joe Biden’s 2023 efforts is outperforming Barack Obama’s Obama 2011 re-elect when it comes to total fundraising. He’s posted the best off year fundraising haul of any Democrat in history.
- But Donald Trump’s 2023 effort is underperforming Trump 2019 by 35% — a huge drop partially explained by a massive 56% drop in small-dollar fundraising.
What is the state of fundraising overall?
Federal political fundraising (measured by individual contributions) is on a linear upward trend with some signs of a slowdown coming off of an extremely hot 2020 cycle. Of course, the 2024 numbers below are incomplete. We typically see a 2–3.5x increase in fundraising in an on-year compared to an off-year.
Congressional Candidates (House, Senate)
All Candidates (President, House, Senate)
All Groups (President, House, Senate, PACs, Parties)
In the example below, for PACs and Parties, the figure represents the total individual contributions made minus the total federal candidate committee contributions (an attempt to deduplicate the ActBlue+WinRed donations).
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Get in touch today for an introductory call to hear more. Drop us a line at hello@middleseat.com or visit our website.
