The Tidal Wave of Small Dollar Fundraising Hits Republican Shores
Austin Botelho and Laura Edelson
Nearly 20 years ago, a huge shift in campaign finance began with the failed presidential run of Howard Dean. Today, Dean is mostly remembered for his ‘Scream’ moment that doomed his campaign, but before that happened, he pioneered a new style of running for office: online first. Dean organized rallies on Meetup.com, and he raised money online too — directly from individual supporters. In his brief campaign, he raised nearly $50 million and, in several quarters during the campaign, broke all-time Democratic fundraising records in a way that was unheard of for long-shot candidates like Dean.
The feedback loop of fine-grained online fundraising data informing more effective donation campaigns was most clearly demonstrated by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which made its low average donation a key part of its messaging. The party and the country got the message. In 2019, the Democratic National Committee made the number of donations a candidate had received a criterion for admission to the primary debate stage, and set the number high, at 65,000 donations.
This year, the Republican National Committee followed suit, leading to appeals for $1 donations from the less popular candidates. Republicans were slower to the small-dollar game, and did not initially understand the benefit of a grassroots fundraising platform like ActBlue. WinRed was founded in 2019, but major presidential candidates including Donald Trump did not use it during the 2020 election cycle. Instead, he opted to build his own infrastructure to accept small donations. But now, WinRed has become dominant, with all major candidates, including Trump, using the platform demonstrated by the six months of Meta fundraising ads and FEC fundraising data we collected.
The candidates aired 7,254 ads in this time period, 5,668 (78%) of which raised funds. Despite being (largely) uncontested, Biden far outspent the entire Republican field on fundraising ads $630k to $475k.
Joe Biden’s higher spending translated to more impressions, but at a lower rate per dollar. Biden’s impressions per dollar ratio (20.8) was higher than only Nikki Haley (17.7) and Mike Pence (10.1). Tim Scott’s (54.2) and Donald Trump’s (49.1) were the highest.
More than 80% of DeSantis’s, Biden’s, and Trump’s ads in this time period linked to either WinRed or ActBlue.
During the same time period, Donald Trump far outpaced all others in the number of individual contributors. This balances out considerably when looking at the total receipts. He also had the highest donation frequency; the average individual donor donated to Trump more than seven times.
Much of Trump’s support is driven by small donations and micro-donations: 94% of his individual contributions were for less than $100 and a third were under $10. Johnson is the only candidate with a higher percentage of small donations.
Trump consistently receives the most donations from individuals, but various candidates had periods where they led the total receipt amount: Haley in March, Biden in May, and DeSantis in June. Ramaswamy also had days where he donated large sums to his campaign, as high as $10 million on March 1st.
Individual donors’ occupations and employers are also listed more than 99% of the time. By calculating the percent difference between the share of each occupation and employer in a candidate’s data versus the overall data, we can determine the occupations and employers most emblematic of each candidate. The size of the word in the word clouds below corresponds to how much more over-represented a value is in the candidate’s data.
We also calculated the per capita individual donations by state and candidate. Unsurprisingly, many candidates’ (all but Trump and RFK Jr.) home states were the most enthusiastic donors.
These advertising and receipts data collectively show the ubiquity of grassroots fundraising platforms like ActBlue and WinRed. Almost all major candidates have coalesced behind them making it a part of their digital strategy.
Data
Ten 2024 Presidential candidates were analyzed: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Robert Kennedy Jr, and Perry Johnson. We pulled all of their Meta political ads between January 3, 2023 and June 30, 2023. After inspecting the domains in the links present in the ads, we determined that only those directing viewers to ActBlue and WinRed were for fundraising.
Over the same period of time and candidate set, we also collected FEC fundraising data filtering by those reporting only positive donation amounts.
The data and code to replicate these findings are here.
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Footnotes
- The per-person maximum is indexed to inflation; in 2004 it was $2,000.
