How is WinRed Doing?
WinRed Background:
WinRed was created as an answer to ActBlue, the Democratic third party processing platform for donations, following a wave of small donors downballot in 2018 races that would help flip a lot of seats during the midterm. When the party and the Trump campaign officially chose the WinRed bid, to worked fast to secure full support for the caucus and built out an impressive way to integrate small donors. But it comes across a backdrop of questions on its effectiveness and I wanted to get an overview of its performance. It was a lot to bring in and sort, but the full collection paints a great picture on what brings in money and where it goes. Also a huge thank you to the people at the FEC who process it into a clean format that I can synthesize a lot easier. The file is here: https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?committee_id=C00694323&two_year_transaction_period=2020&data_type=processed
Summary Statistics:
With the history in mind, let’s take a look at WinRed’s fundraising record so far.
When counting below there are a few things to keep in mind. These totals are missing a very small share of money, almost exclusively from large donors, to PACs that weren’t with the official party or weren’t committed to a chamber. The number of small donors at the beginning may be overestimated and will need a rework at the end. Here I qualify small donors as those who have given $100 or less, medium as $1,000 or less, and large donors as everything more. Because this is done a quarter at a time, some small donors marked in one quarter will eventually become medium or even large donors later and the numbers should reflect. I would personally use small donors as a proxy for first time donors now though I hope to go back at the end of the cycle and correct these numbers.
Below is a screenshot for the interactive daily chart looking at the WinRed fundraising. On this chart, you can look at the breakdowns of where the money is going and what size the donor fits into. You can change the date on a sliding scale or by recipient qualifications and dive into the details of WinRed fundraising. The link for the interactive charts is here:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/noah7751#!/vizhome/WinRedDonations/AllFunding
Because the daily totals can be a lot, I also have a clean chart below showing the total through March 31st and introducing the color scheme. Trump and the RNC are in red while the House is in green and the Senate in blue. State parties are in yellow. The darker the color, the larger that donor has given in the cycle.
The breakdown is stark here, and Trump’s numbers tower above the rest. Through Q1, Trump and the RNC combined would raise $131.1 million compared to all others with $99.8 million, led by an army of small and medium sized donors. The next breakdown looks at where the money is going based on the amount that a donor has given, the earlier caveat applies.
These charts show a transition that larger donors are more likely to give to a downballot candidate or committee, about equally split between the House and the Senate. Among small donors, Trump is the target about 70% of the time but that shrinks to a little over half for medium sized donors and less than a third for large donors. This is important to keep in mind when WinRed releases toplines of how much it raises but also when the site tries to match ActBlue’s giving for downballot candidates. WinRed is still working to convert a small dollar giving operation for downballot instead of being a different conduit for donors who were already looking to give more. Things like automatic recurring payments or other means may mean more on converting from small to medium and that requires further analysis, though this early in the cycle is unlikely to cause massive movement. The next chart breaks down the donor categorization by size for each recipient.
While Trump donations are about half in small donors and only a sliver for large donations (most of those don’t go through WinRed), downballot donations are usually much larger and small donors make up only about a quarter of their giving.
Impeachment Kicks Things Off:
During the first few months, WinRed worked mostly to cement their status as the preferred choice of the party. This involved signing up a slew of candidates to their service and cutting off other processing platforms such as Anedot and Give.GOP. It had already been active about three months from Speaker Pelosi bowed to caucus pressure and announced on September 24th that they would begin impeachment proceedings in the House. The chart below shows that this set up a full week where there was a frenzy of WinRed donations. Giving would regularly hit $1.5 million a week that would last until a $3.5 million haul at the fundraising deadline.
Impeachment would not only be a boon for the site’s haul and awareness, but it was also a great way to direct more funds downballot and encourage more candidates to sign on. The chart below shows all categorized giving broken up by the impeachment timeline. The daily median brought in would rocket up in the following months and the chart below shows that the wealth became more even. During the House impeachment hearings, the share given to House members increased and after they were done, Senate fundraising saw an increase as well.
By the time the trial was over, Trump had gone from over three quarters of the money being raised on WinRed to under half. A lot of this could be attributed to the vast majority of candidates signing on and pushing their own fundraising, but the timely jumps suggest awareness around impeachment helped as well.
Donations are Diversifying…Sort Of:
The below chart is a 14-day rolling average and visual look of the table above showing where donations are flowing to. Trump’s numbers have stabilized the last 90 days at about half of donations which is lower than before and the House and Senate have grown.
Nominally, this is good news downballot and for boosting the numbers it still is, especially just spreading funds around. However, the handful of following charts will show that this growth is mostly in medium or large sized donors. Given the small threshold for small donors, recurring donations transitioning to medium donors is to be expected but it may indicate a slowdown of new or first-time donors if small donations don’t make up the difference. Further analysis should look at first time donors or people who have never given before or were never marked down on a list. Unlike ActBlue, WinRed does not release those numbers on their site. The first chart is the monthly totals, which show growth and then March was the same total as February. But it looks like since impeachment, small dollar totals have decreased, especially those going to Trump. The difference has been made up in medium and large sized donors, especially to downballot sources.
Just dividing out by donor size shows a clearer picture, as in the chart below. This breaks up the source of giving on a two-week rolling average. After hitting a peak of giving at the start of 2020, small donor share has fallen to a new low and both medium and large size donors have increased their share. Above, we saw that small donors have made up 40% of all dollars given so far, but by the end of March, it was down to about 25%.
In the impeachment section, I looked at the change among all donors and we saw Trump’s share fall to under half and the daily median grew a little after impeachment. This was not the case with small dollar donors. The chart below shows small dollar donations only and they still give mostly to Trump. The other number is that fundraising has slowed down with them, dropping down to a daily median below the point when Trump was impeached.
As a direct comparison to ActBlue and the purpose of engaging a small donor base, these numbers are important to keep in context as the platform grows.
Conclusion:
WinRed is finding its first steps and cementing an audience, which is also not easy to do during a recession and economic crisis. It has been adept at scaling up and Q2 has opened up to state legislative candidates and races even further downballot. The challenge will now be to keep adding new small donors to the rosters and convincing them to diversify their targets. I appreciate their transparency with the FEC to allow me to do these reports and I’m excited to see if anybody going through the dashboard finds anything I haven’t seen. With these numbers, WinRed is here to stay and judging the platform can come from multiple angles but having all of the numbers allows for a comprehensive case.
