'A 5-alarm fire': GOP desperate to match Dems' online ATM

[DonViejo]

The gaping cash disparity in the midterms has Republicans worried about 2020.

By ALEX ISENSTADT 11/12/2018 05:05 AM EST

Mitch McConnell stood before a roomful of Republican donors on Wednesday night to thank them for their help in the midterms. But the Senate leader also issued a dire warning: Democrats had just thumped them in the all-important online donor game, and the GOP badly needs to catch up.

The heart of the problem, McConnell said at the event at party headquarters on Capitol Hill, is ActBlue. The Democratic fundraising tool funneled over $700 million in small donations to House and Senate candidates over the course of the 2018 campaign. The GOP leader said Republicans were getting swamped in the hunt for online givers and that he’d charged his political team with coming up with a solution to enable them to compete in 2020.

McConnell’s push underscores the urgency confronting Republicans. In race after race, turbocharged liberal donors pumped cash into Democratic coffers — much of it through ActBlue, an easy-to-use site that allows givers to plug in their credit card information and send contributions to their candidate of choice with a click. Republicans have no such centralized fundraising platform.

With the next campaign already on the horizon, Republicans view their online donor deficit — particularly acute in House races, but significant in Senate contests, too — as a primary obstacle. Josh Holmes, a top McConnell political adviser, has begun making calls to senior Republicans and a group of party figures are expected to convene after Thanksgiving. An ActBlue counterweight, he said, would require buy-in across the splintered Republican Party apparatus.

Republicans have long acknowledged the shortcoming and spoken out about the need to fix it, to no avail. But this year's gaping money disparity between the two parties has snapped the GOP to attention.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/12/republicans-fundraising-donations-2020-983243

[beachbum bob]

1. The fact is, GOP couldn't raise money in many races...and only outside money

was available. It's telling the GOP voting base won't put their money where their vote goes.

[NewJeffCT]

4. That was the way it was in Connecticut

the governor's race was very competitive and almost all the ads supporting Republican Bob Stefanowksi were from outside groups. Connecticut is not a cheap media market, either. And, for much of SW Connecticut, they get their main network channels from NYC and not Hartford (WCBS Channel 2 in NYC instead of WFSB Channel 3 in Hartford; WVIT Channel 30 in Hartford instead of WNBC-04 in NYC, etc) - which means it is expensive to the extreme if they want to reach wealthy Fairfield County voters by TV.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. "Republicans have no such centralized fundraising platform."

They don't care about no stinkin' people. Adelson, the Kochs, the NRA, and of course Russia, is good enough for them.

[NewJeffCT]

5. If Democrats can win the presidency and Senate in 2020

and hold onto the House, campaign finance reform should be right at the top of the list of things to do - kneecap the Adelsons, Mercers and Koches of the world.

[BumRushDaShow]

7. Agree.

While McCain was still alive, he could have tried to work on revising McCain-Feingold to accommodate the ridiculous SCOTUS decision - especially after Feingold lost in the wake of Citizen's United and the teabagger avalanche of dark money.

There was an interesting pre-election analysis piece on this from Vox here - https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/8/21/17764362/campaign-finance-reform-optimism

There is definitely a reason to re-look at this.

[0rganism]

3. happy to have pushed a few hundred into that pipeline myself

hint for Mitch: if your policies benefited the normal 90% at least as much as the tip-top 1% and your "president" wasn't a complete history-sized douche, this would be a non-issue for you. too bad your analysis will be all about how to achieve fundraising parity without adjusting public policy positions. oh well, see you in 2020.

[Blue_true]

6. Maybe I am dating myself. But I remember when the ActBlue staff was small enough to sign one

postcard. I first gave to what looked like a hopeless state legislature race after reading an article about how underfunded the democrat was. I was on business in Massachusetts at the time. ActBlue, or at least the woman that started it up, was mentioned. I logged onto the link and gave a donation. I found out later that the candidate got other donations and won. That Christmas, I got a postcard that the entire staff had signed, maybe 6-9 people, including the woman that started the portal. Interesting how things change, now ActBlue is feared by republicans.

BTW, rightwingers HAVE tried setting up rightwing competitors to ActBlue, all fizzled.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. I used to go directly to the candidate's office to donate

going back to '84 and then later I would snail mail a donation... all the way up until when Obama was running, when his "Obama for America" org made it easy to donate. After he won, his group briefly changed their name to "Organizing for America" and then finally became "Organizing for Action" (OFA) which is what I had generally used in addition to ActBlue (I think my first ActBlue was in 2014 as it was often posted about here on DU).

I noticed this year, ActBlue was literally melded into the various DNC fundraising arms and all of the DNC donation requests went directly to ActBlue to manage.

[Gothmog]

9. Yeah for ActBlue

[andym]

10. They have something better

the Koch brothers (and friends) and hundreds of millions they spend on elections through PACs and organizations that influence others.
They also have Fox News which has been hypothesized to give the GOP a 6% increase in voters as of 2008 in a recent academic study.