What's working in U.S. elections? Small-dollar donations
By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
Colin Allred, a former NFL player now in his third term in the U.S. House, plans to give up a safe Texas seat to take on Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate in 2024. He is probably Democrats’ best hope to challenge the Republican incumbent. While his bid, announced Wednesday, is a long shot, Allred’s candidacy is proof that the torrent of money involved in political campaigns, and specifically the huge number of small-scale donations, has been a boon for American democracy.
A lot of people have been critical of the unprecedented sums of cash that even U.S. House campaigns now raise from donors who give under $200. The surge in small donations, especially in nonpresidential elections, has occurred over the last decade thanks to the ease of online fundraising. Raphael Warnock raised a staggering $81 million from small donors in 2022, about 45 percent of the total, during his successful quest for one of Georgia’s Senate seats. Plenty of House candidates in that election cycle raised $2 million or even $3 million that way; far more, in all cases, than such candidates could raise from all sources before fundraising went online.
(The first campaign famous for relying on small donors was Jerry Brown’s go-nowhere presidential run in 1992, which asked supporters to call an 800 number to donate. Howard Dean’s slightly more successful 2004 presidential campaign was the pioneer for raising shockingly large amounts over the internet. Key to the whole thing is the low overhead; before the internet, campaigns could solicit relatively small donations, but it was costly to do so and therefore not worth bothering for $20 or $50 checks.)
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For elections to be meaningful, they need to be seriously contested. Too often in the U.S., this has only been true in the most competitive districts. Without real campaigns, the winners have little incentive to do the hard work of representation, which involves making promises during the campaign about what they will do and how they will act if elected.
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