Candidates celebrate when their campaigns are funded by small contributions. Small donors are playing far greater roles in American politics but they are not having the positive envisioned effects. Ray La Raja and Zach Albert find that small donors are just as advantaged, partisan, and extreme as larger donors, but more impulsive, empowering show horse celebrities and norm breakers over consensus-building lawmakers. They want to redirect reformers’ energy toward strengthening political parties and emphasizing local representation.
Guests: Ray La Raja, University of Massachusetts; Zach Albert, Brandeis
Study: Small Donors in US Politics
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: The rise of small donors is mostly making politics worse, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
Candidates celebrate when their campaigns are funded by small contributions. Reformers have sought to reduce the influence of big donors by empowering their smaller alternatives, and small donors are now playing far greater roles in American politics. But that doesn’t mean they’re having the positive envisioned effects.
This week I talk to Ray La Raja and Zach Albert about their new Chicago book, Small Donors in US Politics. They find that small donors are just as advantaged, partisan, and extreme, as larger donors, but more impulsive, empowering show-horse celebrities, and norm-breakers over consensus-building lawmakers.
Where does that leave us? They understand the reformer’s impulse. Larger sums from super PACs and unregulated flows are not helping, either. They want to redirect reformers’ energy towards strengthening political parties and emphasizing local representation. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So, Ray, tell us about the findings and takeaways from the new book, Small Donors in US Politics. What’d you find?
Ray La Raja: Well, the basic story is that small donors become much more important in American politics, especially in these kind of high-salience federal races. On the other hand, they’re not the democratic fix that a lot of reformers imagine. Our big takeaway is, small donors are not the ordinary Americans in miniature. We’ll talk more about this, but they’re more affluent, older, more educated, and much more politically engaged. Politically, they look like large donors, partisan, highly ideological and very engaged.
I would say our broader point in this book is, we’re what you would call in academics, the realist camp. We don’t think more participation is automatically better representation. And so, we’re concerned about reforms that don’t really consider other forms of mediation in institutions. So, that’s our big picture takeaway.
Matt Grossmann: So, Zach, candidates are often touting that they have a lot of support from small donors, and attacking one another for having support from large donors. The media kind of go along with those caricatures. So, what were the myths about small donors that you were tackling here? Are any of the common views true?
Zach Albert: Yeah. I think the idea that candidates are often touting their small donor credentials highlights what we see as a central myth here. It’s also the basis for a lot of reform efforts aimed at increasing small donations. The myth is basically that small donors are closer to the average citizen than the large donors, when it comes to their demographics, their politics, the issues that they care about, and their issue positions.
And so, the idea is that, as Ray alluded to, small donors are the electorate, a microcosm of the electorate, and if we just increase their participation, then you’re going to get a more representative donor pool. This is related to a second myth, which is the idea, again that a lot of reformers tout, that if you increase small donations, you’re going to make political outcomes and processes more representative.
You’re going to get politicians who are more broadly responsive to their constituents. You’re going to free up their time for them to legislate, rather than fundraise. And so, those are the two central myths that we, going into this, thought were probably not true, and that’s what we found.
The subtitle of the book is, Myth and Reality. And so, the reality is that small donors are really only somewhat more representative demographically of non-donors. They’re very similar to large donors when it comes to their political identities, their attitudes, their issue positions. Both large and small donors are very unrepresentative of non-donors.
We also find that small donors have some unique pathologies. They have reactionary responses to events and to negative rhetoric from candidates. They focus a lot on high profile races. This all leads to the second reality, which is that legislators who rely heavily on small donors are not more representative of their constituents, because these small donors are not just the constituents in miniature form.
The legislators who rely on them are not better legislators, they’re not more effective, they’re not more bipartisan. They tend to use more incendiary rhetoric, be more extreme in terms of their issue positions, and the like. And so, that’s the reality that we found when we dug into the data.
Matt Grossmann: So Ray, if you were called to offer a positive case for a reform that increased small donors, or for the general case for small donors, what would be left of that positive case that’s supported by the evidence? And then, what about the most negative or detrimental case?
Ray La Raja: Well, I think the positive case is that you’re broadening the fundraising base. I mean, our politics is dominated by wealthy donors, and now you are reaching out to more voters who aren’t as wealthy. I always think it’s good to have pluralistic sources of funding. I also think you could say that small donors could help challengers.
Challengers rely, to a greater degree, on small donors, particularly insurgents. Some people think you need insurgencies every now and then to take on the traditional candidates and donor networks. We do think it increases perceived legitimacy of the candidate. When you say, like Bernie Sanders, “My average donation is $28,” other voters say, “Wow, that person is not bought and sold by anyone.”
Like any other form of democratic politics, we want engagement. This is a relatively easy way to people to get involved. The money that goes to candidates is a signal of enthusiasm for candidates, and it demonstrates viability. So maybe we’ll have more competitive elections as small donors engage.
Now, the most negative case is, a lot of our book talks about that. We are concerned that it might intensify polarization and nationalization of politics, by channeling money towards these candidates who appeal, through these media ecosystems, to partisan emotions rather than local folks. It rewards outrage, conflict. Donald Trump is one of the best small dollar donors in America.
It can make politicians very attentive to the ideologically intense activists. Overall, we’re concerned that it increases what we see as the performative politics at the expense of governing. Particularly on the Republican side, we see some anti-institutional, confrontational type of politics. So, that’s the negative case.
Matt Grossmann: Zach, let’s make sure we’re on the same page with the basics. What is a small donor? How much of the total pool are they accounting for? How big is the increase in their participation, and what candidates are they donating to?
Zach Albert: Yeah. So, small donors are conventionally understood as those giving less than $200 to a given candidate. That’s because those contributions tend to be un-itemized. The candidates don’t have to report them to the FEC. And so therefore, we don’t have good information on who those donors were, and how much they gave. And so, we adopt that definition at various points throughout our book.
We also, though, take advantage of really nuanced data from ActBlue and WinRed, where they do have to report the total amounts that donors give, regardless of how much. And so, we also at times look at donors at various thresholds, those giving less than 25, 25 to 50, et cetera.
And so, when it comes to the conventional understanding of small donors as those giving less than 200, that’s how the media treats them. Our study was motivated in part by the fact that the media was really covering these small donors extensively in 2016 and 2018. And so we were wondering, is the role of small donors proportionate to their salience in news and campaigns?
What we found is that it largely is. Small donors have become a really major player in the campaign finance ecosystem. And so, just to put a few numbers on this, small donations were pretty flat throughout the early 2000s, 2010s. And then they increased a bit in 2016, and then they spiked tremendously in 2018 and 2020.
So, for example, in the 2020 Presidential election, small donations exceeded contributions from large individual donors giving more than $200. They exceeded the amount given by political action committees. They even exceeded independent expenditures in that election. And so, in 2020 for the Presidential race, small donors were the single largest type of donor in that race, which is fairly astounding.
In Congressional races, again, there were big increases in 2018 and 2020. Small donations were on par with independent expenditures and by far, those were the two largest sources of money in congressional races. Now they have declined a bit, small donations, in 2022 and 2024, but they remain really high, historically high, and relatively high compared to other sources of money. And so again, small donors are really an important source of money in today’s campaign finance system.
This money tends to be concentrated in really high profile races, mostly for President and for the Senate. These are candidates who have national profiles. They got lots of media attention. They’re often taking on a reviled opponent in the opposing party, and all of those things gain them the type of attention that they need to attract small donors.
Small donations are not as interpersonal and as transactional as maybe large donations are, when it comes to soliciting them. And so to get a lot of small donor money, you really need to have your name out there and have your face on social media and on traditional media.
And so what this means is that small donations, again, are really concentrated around a small number of candidates. Since 2016, the top 10 small donor fundraiser candidates for the Senate have accumulated about 60% of all small donations. In the House during that period, the top 10 candidates out of a thousand or more candidates received 30 to 40% of all small donations.
So we’re really talking about a concentration around a number of nationalized races. A lot of small donors are giving to out-of-state candidates with national profiles, whereas large donors are much more likely to give to in-state candidates, especially for less salient races, like those of the House.
Ray La Raja: Matt, if I could just add one thing to that. When Zach’s talking about the nationalization and going to concentrated races, we see that as a flaw, because these donations could have such a larger impact by going to more down-ballot races and distributing the money more. So there’s two kinds of inefficiencies. One is, it is very concentrated on a few races in the Senate, or a few House races.
And then we also noticed that they don’t always give to the candidates who are going to be in potentially competitive races. A lot of times it goes to a candidate who is opposing a Darth Vader in the other party, someone like a Mitch McConnell, or a Marjorie Taylor Greene, and that candidate who’s a no-name gets millions of dollars in small donations. So, that’s a second type of inefficiency. I mean, it happens with large donations, too, so it’s not just the small donations, but it is an inefficiency in the campaign finance system.
Matt Grossmann: Ray, in addition to using ActBlue and WinRed for data, you also track the history of the infrastructure development here. So, how did the parties build these small donor networks? How much did they share donors across races, and how dependent were they on any one candidate or provider in their success?
Ray La Raja: So, these platforms matter a lot. Without them, you would not see this tremendous increase in small donors. You needed that digital fundraising infrastructure. They allow campaigns to monetize emotion, instantly. After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, or a Dobbs’ decision, you can turn fear or outrage right into money, right away. On the Republican side, when Trump was being convicted and going to court, he was raising a lot of small donations.
So, the platforms are a way to reduce transaction costs of giving. It’s not the old direct mail where you have to write a check and send it in the mail. You can do repeat donations, faster response to political events. We have what we call impulse giving. You could be a member of Congress, say something provocative in the morning, and you’ll be raising a lot of money in the afternoon. All of this integrates easily with texts and messages.
So, it’s very important, this digital infrastructure. ActBlue was the first, and they built this powerful ecosystem for progressive groups and Democratic candidates. The Republicans have followed suit with WinRed. But, ActBlue, the Democratic infrastructure is more institutionalized and centralized than on the Republican side.
Zach Albert: I’ll just add that it’s not a surprise that you’re hearing some members of Congress talk about investigating both of these platforms, because of how central they’ve become to the fundraising in each party. As Ray said, the ActBlue platform and infrastructure is much more firmly established. We’re seeing some of that happen on the Republican side with WinRed now, but it’s no surprise that Republicans in Congress especially are calling for investigations into ActBlue, because it is a really crucial part of the Democratic fundraising system at this point in time.
Matt Grossmann: Zach, Ray mentioned that some examples of the most successful kind of instant fundraisers, and one of them, of course, has been Trump in several instances, but including after criminal conviction. So, that might seem like not necessarily the best process for how candidates generate funds. On the other hand, I think some of this…
… funds on the other hand, I think some of this goes back to the, I’ll date myself, but McCain winning New Hampshire fundraiser and being able to New Hampshire primary and then being able to immediately benefit from that to be competitive later on, some of that instant feedback might fit into our notions of how candidates should generate support. So what are these big examples of… Is this all outrage politics and does it work differently on each side?
Zach Albert: Yeah, I think a lot of it is outrage politics. And to understand that it’s really important to recognize that for small donors, much more than for large donors, donating is an expressive act that’s tied to their identity, that demonstrates support for their partisan team and that expression of support via making a quick donation in response to some event generates warm feelings for the donor. The act of donating and supporting the team itself is the payoff for them. Whereas some large donors are seeking access and influence over policy, small donors can’t reasonably expect to get that. And so what they’re doing here is something qualitatively different. They’re expressing support and gaining satisfaction from doing so.
And that makes identities really important. As a Republican, as a conservative, as a Christian, you are donating to express support for the team that supports people like you and supports your identities that are salient. On the democratic side, that could be being a Democrat, being a liberal or progressive, being a racial or sexual minority. And so when these identities are seen as being threatened and when those identities are made salient by candidates, small donors give as an expression of and a defense of those shared identities.
And so that’s where we can connect this back to something like Donald Trump’s conviction where populist candidates like him are really good at raising small donations because they can frame politics as an us versus them dynamic and get all those people that are on the us side of that equation to support the team and express their support financially. And so his conviction allowed him to claim Democrats are out to get me and they’re out to get you, they’re coming after me because I stand for people like you and I am pushing for people like you, and I need your support to fight them. And we have some examples in the book of the language Trump used, which really echoes this us versus them, they’re coming after you dynamic.
The other reason is his convictions were good fundraising events is because the media attention really raised the salience, this is something incredibly unusual in American politics. It generated a ton of media attention. And so it’s a highly salient event that taps into important identities and important emotions from would-be small donors. And we note some other events that share similar characteristics, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which elevated the threat to Democrats and liberals who cared about some of the causes that she might’ve championed on the court. At the State of the Union, Congressman Joe Wilson shouting “You lied, Obama” or Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting, “Liar,” at Biden, those are examples where those people reaped a lot of financial reward from small donors for expressing that outrage at the opposing party. The January 6th insurrection is another example that we look at. Those who were advocating the big lie and supporting the party team on that issue were gaining a lot of small donor support as well.
So the key thing here is that a candidate is doing something that challenges the out party, expresses support for the in group, and gains lots of media attention for doing so.
Matt Grossmann: So Ray, we have some less than ideal patterns among small donors, but you’re writing this in an era in which we have competing AI companies spending huge sums for a particular congressional race primary. We have Larry Ellison taking over a TV network to try to win regulatory approval and tech companies funding a White House ballroom and an inauguration to try to get on the good side of the President. Are you all focused on the wrong issue here at a unprecedented age of corruption?
Ray La Raja: That’s a great question. And as we were writing the book, we could see the wheels coming off with the campaign finance system at the top end. Yeah, it’s hard to fathom how much it’s changed. One way to look at this is there’s multiple channels of money expanding at once and much of it, both at the bottom end small donors and at the top end is moving away from the traditional groups, the traditional PACs and of course political parties and the candidate committees. So we have small donors, large donors, and the mega donors like Elon Musk who give to these super PACs or to groups that don’t have to report donors. Those are what people call the dark money groups. So money again is being squeezed outside this original system, which we see as a big problem. Large donors, the rise of mega donors since Citizens United and other decisions is really the next story that needs to be told.
And this is where reformers need to think heavily about how you figure out ways of mitigating how much money’s being poured in by single billionaires like Musk or we could name people on the liberal side because they can build on a massive scale and have a communication infrastructure, shape elite discourse and basically help to be the old party bosses in picking and choosing candidates. So it’s a significant problem. The book doesn’t address that directly. So let’s get another book out there.
Zach Albert: Yeah. And I think just to reinforce some of what Ray said, I think it’s really important to be clear here that we are not saying that because there are problems associated with small donors, therefore the status quo is the solution or therefore we should have more large donors and more super PACs. Rather, we’re focusing on one angle of a very multifaceted problem here. And I think the main takeaway from our book should be that small donor reformers need to think very clear eyed and carefully about how and whether simply increasing small donations is going to remedy some of those real problems associated with large donors and super PACS. And we largely conclude that simply increasing the number of small donors is not going to solve some of those issues.
Matt Grossmann: So one of the ways that you get at this, Zach, is by comparing small and large donors demographically and ideologically and thinking about their relationship to other voters or other party constituencies. So is there a big divide in terms of who is a small and large donor? Is there a huge divide between donors and non-donors? What are the big patterns we see?
Zach Albert: By and large, the bigger difference is between donors of any size and non-donors. We do note a few differences between small and large donors, but those pale in comparison to the gap between anybody who donates money and anybody who does not. And so where small and large donors differ the most is demographically. We describe small donors as kind of a halfway house between large donors and non-donors. They are not fully representative of non-donors, but they are more representative than large donors. The clearest example of this is with regard to gender. So women have parity with men among the small donor pool and this is very much not true of larger donors where men dominate. Small donors also tend to have somewhat lower incomes than large donors, they’re a bit less highly educated, a bit younger. They’re somewhat more racially diverse, but they’re still far from representative of voters, nevermind the general public on pretty much every dimension that we look at except for gender.
And then, when we look at small and large donors politically, we find that they’re nearly indistinguishable from one another, they’re both very distinct from voters. They follow news at high rates. They engage in multiple political acts beyond voting and donating to express their preferences. They hold strong partisan identities, strong ideologies, and they hold fairly distinct and internally consistent policy preferences. And so politically, small and large donors are quite far from non-donating public.
One other important finding that we have here using that nuanced contribution data from [inaudible 00:23:51], which we were able to match to voter file data from Catalist, is that the representativeness of the donor pool decreases in kind of a linear fashion as the donation amount increases. So in other words, the smallest donors, those giving less than $25 are most representative of non-donors, both demographically and politically, but donors become more distinct as you move up the donation scale. And this has implications for reform that we tease out where we shouldn’t be treating all small donors as equally representative, some are moreso, especially those who give less money.
Matt Grossmann: So Ray, you’re appropriately careful in what you can attribute to donors in terms of their larger political implications, but don’t we face this basic issue that donors are just like all of the other super engaged partisan audiences. And so it’s kind of hard to attribute something to donations via just kind of who are the engaged, most engaged pieces of the political system. So for example, if we’re talking about people who are engaged online and talking about politics, people who show up as party activists, people who show up to meetings or call their member of Congress, the staff that work on campaigns, all of those audiences are going to differ a lot from the general public in some of the same ways that you’ve found that donors differ. So when we’re thinking about a broader phenomenon like polarization or nationalization, how much can we attribute to campaign finance processes versus the other factors?
Ray La Raja: Well, you make an important conceptual point. I mean, the general activists, partisan activists, there’s a lot of overlap, both conceptually and empirically, to the activist ecosystem. They have a lot of the same attributes. They’re highly engaged partisans, sometimes movement activists. They’re heavy consumers of politics online. They’re often part of intense issue publics. We note several times in the book they’re ideological and they respond like other activists to symbolic conflict all the time.
And this matters just like it matters for the way activists kind of push and pull the party because small donors, like other activists, are unrepresentative of the electorate and that can create both distortions in what gets carried in the campaigns and who gets elected. So you could think of these as the financial expression of activists. Not all of them are activists all the time, but many of them I would consider activists because we noted that they also engage in other activities like volunteering for campaigns. So the small donors, because they’re activists, they are a signal about who is being rewarded in the parties, which types of candidates people want. And so again, we have this larger problem in the American system where the activists are moving apart very much and generally pulling the parties in different directions and small donors are part of that.
Matt Grossmann: Zach, you’re also able to look more specifically at the issues that distinguish donors from others. There is a story out there that both parties have donor bases that can make them unrepresentative, but maybe on different sets of issues where the Republican donor base maybe has economic policy positions that are further right than their base, whereas the Democratic donor base has social issue positions that move them to the left of their base on those issues. On the left, sometimes we get the critique that it’s these rich Democrats that are actually moving the party away from economic populism. So how much do we find support for any of those views in thinking about what issues distinguish small donors?
Zach Albert: Yeah, it’s an important question. And the first thing I’ll say is just overall, we find that democratic small and large donors are much more liberal across all issues than democratic voters, Republican donors of any size are much more conservative. And so if we are going to start from the premise that donors are pulling the parties apart, that the way they’d be pulling them apart is towards the more liberal or conservative positions on these issues. But that said, there is some variation across issues.
The gaps between large and small donors are largest in both parties on economic issues. And so democratic large donors are much more liberal, or I shouldn’t say much more, they’re somewhat more liberal than small donors on things like raising taxes, prioritizing the environment over jobs. For Republicans, large donors are a bit more opposed to increasing the minimum wage, raising taxes. These are not huge gaps, but it does make sense that economic issues would be a dividing line and small donors would be a bit more favorable toward economic redistribution given their comparatively moderate incomes. And so that’s where we see the biggest gap between the small and large donors in each party.
And so, there could be a story here to tell that large donors are pulling the Republican Party to the right on economic issues. I think that story is a little bit harder to tell on the Democratic side. When it comes to social issues, small and large donors in both parties are highly unified. And so it makes it very difficult to kind of disentangle who is driving the boat here. It’s difficult to make the claim that small donors are pushing the parties apart on these issues, but they’re probably playing some role in supporting or sustaining that polarization. And they’re part of this broader polarizing ecosystem alongside other activists, organized interests, think tanks, media. They’re not uniquely polarizing, it doesn’t seem, but they do play some role, as I said, in sustaining and supporting polarized candidates. And so I’ll just end by…
… supporting polarized candidates. And so I’ll just end by saying that reformers who claim that small donors will make politics more responsible and more representative need to contend with this fact that small and large donors across a range of issues are very similar to one another and seem to be exerting similar forces on the two parties.
Matt Grossmann: And you don’t buy this prioritization story at all, that they might have different issues priorities and that might be what’s moving the parties to their focus? One of the stories is that the Democratic donors are focused more on social and cultural issues than the base compared to economic issues, I don’t know. You said there wasn’t much support for the theory that the donors are stopping the Democrats from embracing more populist economic messages, but maybe they could be moving them toward less focus on that and the Republicans the reverse?
Zach Albert: Yeah, I think that story is consistent with our data, where non-donating Democrats are more moderate on social issues. And so if the perception is that the Democratic Party is out of touch with its broader base on some of those issues, then donors may be playing a role in that, both small and large donors who have much more liberal issue positions on social issues compared with non-donors. And on the Republican side, a fair number of Republicans support things like raising the minimum wage and some of these economic issues and so I think it’s certainly fair to say that Republican donors are, if not causing, at least supporting the polarization of the party on economic issues.
Matt Grossmann: Ray, we’ve talked about some specific examples of the candidates that have benefited from this, but what are the broader patterns and who is left out? Are there candidates that really would be the most electable for their parties and the most important for partisan majorities that really just aren’t attractive to donors?
Ray La Raja: Well, I’ll start with the candidates who benefit the most. There is an ecosystem out there that directs donors to give to races that might be close. So you’re going to see money flowing, for instance, to the Senate races in Maine or in Texas. So obviously, if you’re in a race that people think might make the difference in controlling Congress, there’s a good ecosystem to push the money there. But other than that, having high name recognition, benefit of that. Having strong media skills, social media. Having clear ideological brands that are compelling to donors. Having some type of national symbolic appeal matters. Or even insurgent narratives, “the establishment is against me.” All of that stuff helps.
The candidates who are going to struggle are candidates who are not especially charismatic or nationally visible. The ones who are wonkish policy folks, probably. More institutionalist moderates, they don’t excite the national donor base. And in terms of how much does it matter for electability, well, small donors can absolutely matter because it demonstrates viability when others, activists see money going to particular candidates, especially in primaries and challenger campaigns.
But it’s not the same as being the strongest candidate, general election candidate. It can favor candidates who love or who the activists really love, but frankly, they’re misaligned with their local electorates. And that can happen, just as it can happen with the way large donor money flows because it’s really a kind of movement enthusiasm that draws money to particular candidates. So it’s a mixed bag, but it is an important part of the electoral process. No doubt about it.
Matt Grossmann: So, Zach, some of the reformer focus shifted away from campaign finance with broader challenges to democratic backsliding in the US, but some people see campaign finance reform as an important aspect of responding to democratic backsliding. So what is the role of campaign finance in our broader democratic deficits and how important is reform of this system relative to other efforts to counter it?
Zach Albert: Our research suggests that small donors at the very least are supporting candidates who engage in norm-breaking and anti-democratic behavior. They probably are not first movers in terms of causing those types of behaviors, but they are responding to and perhaps incentivizing those. And we find consistent evidence that lawmakers and candidates who do these types of things, break norms, engage in anti-democratic actions, they attract more small donations.
Now to be fair, this is a difficult concept to operationalize, democratic backsliding or at the candidate level. It’s difficult to operationalize something like norm-breaking behavior or anti-democratic behavior. But we do a number of things where we look at members who devote more time to personally attacking members of the other party and they attract more small donations. We looked at examples, like as I mentioned, Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting liar at President Biden in his 2023 State of the Union. That’s not necessarily the most important thing that’s happening right now in terms of democratic backsliding, but it’s an example of norm-breaking behavior that slowly chips away at the norms of sustained democracy. Maybe a bigger example is the most vocal supporters of Trump’s big lie after the 2020 election are in significant small donor support as they were out there claiming election fraud and stolen elections.
And so we have a number of ways that we try to look at the types of behaviors and actions that feed into democratic backsliding and see how they relate to small donor support and what we find is that they largely attract more small donations. And there’s two mechanisms that we kind of tease out here. The first is what we call the spotlight effect. Because norms are still fairly widely adopted and adhered to, when people break them or when people engage in anti-democratic actions, it is newsworthy and so candidates can get a lot of attention for doing these things and attention is probably the most important thing when it comes to raising small donations.
But the other thing about some of these anti-democratic behaviors is that they speak directly to the partisan inclinations of donors. They are often done in order to further some party victory, whether it’s policy or domination over the opposing party. And so it really taps into and expresses those in-group, out-group dynamics that are really important for attracting small donations. And so small donors seem to be responding to and sustaining some of the individual-level actions that are going into the democratic backsliding at the moment.
Matt Grossmann: Ray, we’ve talked mostly about the implications for campaigns and elections, but obviously we’re also interested in what this means for lawmaking and some of the patterns that Zach mentioned don’t sound fabulous for that. They might be orienting candidates toward big public moments of yelling things. They might more generally reward the show horses over the behind the scenes work horses. They might move candidates just from a time perspective toward spending money on fundraising instead of policymaking. Or they might be creating distorted perceptions of what members, constituents believe. So which of those are the important implications that you find for lawmaking?
Ray La Raja: Well, one thing we noticed is we didn’t see real differences in terms of effective lawmaking between candidates who rely a lot on small donors versus those who don’t. And this is part of the claim we were challenging, if you rely on small donors you’ll be more effective, maybe you’ll be more bipartisan, you’ll represent your constituencies better. We did not see evidence of that. We show clear examples of show horse behavior and those who are less active on social media don’t tend to get as much small donations because they’re not appealing to these national audiences as much.
So in terms of the fundraising, are they spending more time fund? We’ve had a problem with members of Congress spending time fundraising for decades. We know the stories of members, once they finish at the Capitol, they’re in their booths raising money. So this is no different. It’s a different style of fundraising because it’s more oriented towards mass audiences than just talking to someone who’s a wealthy person and that could be a good thing because you’re reaching out to more people. But it does emphasize a more performative, mass-oriented behavior in raising money. But again, we don’t see clear differences in how people conduct their lawmaking.
One interesting thing we saw, we can’t make much of it. We noticed that the Freedom Caucus folks tend to get more earmarks, at least in one Congress, a lot more earmarks. We were wondering why that is, and they’re the ones who raised the most small dollar donors.
But I want to caution overall that it’s very difficult to make causal claims about any of this right now. We want to emphasize that this is part of a larger ecosystem of activists who are pressuring members, who are pressuring the party in certain directions. I just want to make that clear.
Matt Grossmann: Yeah. So, Zach, this is part of a broader process of nationalized polarized politics, but donors and small donors could really be more of a symptom of that than a cause. Obviously, when politics are more nationalized, you have more potential for these kinds of fundraising routes. When they’re polarized, they might become more important. So are the donors really an effect that you’re looking at or are they a potential cause of some of these broader patterns?
Zach Albert: Yeah, I’ll hedge a bit and pick back up where Ray left off in saying that we generally try to avoid making really strong causal claims in the book. Difficult to establish causality with observational data, but also these are multifaceted outcomes that are the result of many different causes and so it’s difficult to really nail down the unique, independent role of small donors in something like nationalization or polarization.
And so with that in mind, I will try to answer your question a bit more directly. I will say that when it comes to nationalization, small donors are embedded in this nationalization feedback loop and it’s not clear where they entered into that and how early on they were a cause. I would say that nationalization really precedes the rise of small donors and so I think that small donors are probably responding more to nationalization. And we see a lot of evidence of that in the fact that they really give to these high profile races that have been nationalized within the party, within the public imagination, within media coverage. And so by doing so, they are further elevating the profile of those candidates and those races, they’re connecting them to national activist preferences rather than local constituencies. And so small donors are probably an accelerant that is thrown onto the fire of nationalization, which was already burning before they came onto the scene in large numbers.
The same is probably true of polarization as well, I think that’s what our data supports. Small donors don’t seem to be first movers. Your listeners, I’m sure, are aware of the many different causes of this complex phenomena. But small donors do breathe life into polarized candidacies. They support candidates who combine not just extreme positions, but they combine them with extreme behavior as well. And so we’re talking here not just about ideological polarization, but also affective polarization, some of the norm-breaking that we talked about, negative partisanship. And candidates have learned that a fruitful path to financial success from small donors is to emphasize salient, often extreme issue positions, and then to gain attention by attacking the other side, by breaking norms, by doing things that gain you coverage in the media and on social media. And in this way, small donors sustain and even incentivize politicians to polarize.
Matt Grossmann: And is there any natural break on that in the fundraising process? On the one hand, this is going way up over time. On the other hand, you do often have people complain about their daily or hourly text messages and emails, and even more abrasive, and misleading and crazy messaging. I think in 2020, Trump basically automatically signed up his people for recurring donations and in the last month of the campaign, a surprisingly large portion of people’s complaints to their credit companies were actually about their donations to the Trump campaign, who presumably they supported. So is there any way that we’ll reach a limit here, or should people just expect more and more of these text messages and emails to come?
Zach Albert: Yeah. This is something, I think it’s maybe a little bit too early to nail down, but this is something I’m keeping an eye on. This idea of donor burnout because of the incessant text messages, and phone calls and emails to fundraise. It’s very low cost for candidates to send out 1,000 text messages and emails and phone calls a week. You can do this very cheaply and easily and if your hit rate is several percentage points, if you do it enough, it’s going to add up to some money. But that has the possibility of burning out donors.
In the examples of the Trump campaign, but it’s not unique to them, are examples of how deceptive fundraising practices, incessant fundraising practices can turn some people off and lead them to stop contributing. And some of these small donors are not as deeply embedded in politics and connected, especially ones who come out for the-
… embedded in politics and connected, especially ones who come out for the first time to support someone like Trump as maybe larger donors are. And so they might be more likely to fall off. But we’re talking about huge numbers of donors here. And so it’s really a numbers game. If you’re sending enough of these requests to enough people, even if your hit rate is very low, it can still pay off. But that said, there are some alternatives. We did a few interviews for the book and we talked to some folks that were talking about relational organizing and sustainable fundraising practices. So we’re placing the churn and burn tactics that are largely implemented via text message and email with something that builds more durable connections among donors and activists and staffers and has these people connecting online and in real life and sustaining a network or a community of donors. And so there are campaigns that are thinking about ways to have more sustainable practices and avoid some of that donor burnout. And so this is something I’m definitely keeping my eye on.
Matt Grossmann: Ray, you mentioned that there are some different infrastructure and dynamics on the right and the left. And you all talk about the role of donors in the Freedom Caucus and the anti-institutional politics among Republicans. On the other hand, we had three government shutdown attempts in the last year that were more driven by Democrats and their demands from donors potentially. So what’s the role of donors on each side in the party’s current approaches to governance?
Ray La Raja: Well, for sure. Well, let me start saying there are asymmetries, and you’d be one of the people who best knows about that. But on the Democratic side, small donors for sure have empowered insurgents and movement candidates. I mean, AOC is a perfect example of someone like that, and she continues to be one of the top small dollar donors. And she uses her money to fund candidates just like her. So she’s a mini party within herself thanks to small donors. But as you’ve pointed out, the party has stronger internal incentives for coalition maintenance and governing. Now that’s going to be challenged even in this recent election. I haven’t looked at the small donors going to these folks in the DSA, the Democratic Socialists America who just won some primaries. But you might be seeing more factionalism as the size of this group increases within the Democratic Party.
Now on the Republican side, it’s a different story. I think the consequence has been more destabilizing, because these small donations and small donors have meshed together with this anti-establishment populism, this distrust of institutions, the larger conservative media ecosystem. And it’s not just about small donations of course, but the party and the party leadership have struggled to keep things in line. And so I think already the incentive structure within the GOP makes the behavior more attractive to be anti-institutional. And that does attract small donations, and that’s where they play a role.
Matt Grossmann: And is there any way to put this back together? I know that you have historically advocated for more of the money to go through the parties, and you have some proposals about shielding small donors in the book, but it still seems like small potential changes in a system that has got a lot of dynamics that will keep it running in the same direction. So is there any way out here that’s worth pursuing?
Ray La Raja: So we do have a few proposals. One thing we leave readers with is to really think more about the kind of institutions that are going to be accountable and also distribute funds in ways that support the parties, the political parties. But in terms of advancing small donors in a way that might not be so polarizing is to focus more at the local level to match contributions from people in the district rather than a national constituency. And to the degree you’re going to subsidize national constituency, going back to what Zach said earlier, it should be at the very low level, below $25, because as you go higher, that’s when small donors start to look like large donors in terms of their politics.
So we definitely would want to see reforms like that. New York State has something like that currently where they match the money in a district. But you can’t think about small donors outside without thinking about the larger system. And yes, as you alluded to, I’ve always favored more money going through the political parties. And there’s a Supreme Court case here where that might start to happen, where they’re going to rule on whether parties can use more of their money to coordinate with the candidates, which we think would be a good thing. And we also should think more about developing organizations that represent more voters and not just the voters who are highly engaged.
And that’s a tough nut to crack, how do you create packs that really are more reflective of the population? But bottom line for me is we should have much more money flowing through accountable parties. We know who they are, they have incentives to finance candidates who are going to win races, but there’s a lot to be done. As I said earlier, the wheels are off with this campaign finance system currently. And it’s going to be very difficult, it’s going to be a big challenge, need a lot of creativity to how do you put this thing back together again?
Matt Grossmann: And Zach, the wider party system is in a lot of turmoil as well. We’re speaking right after some additional incumbent members of Congress or establishment-supported candidates were knocked off by leftist insurgent candidates. The president has successfully gotten two incumbent senators to lose primaries and others to not run. So there’s quite a bit of turmoil within the parties as well. Are small donors going to be a part of whether those insurgencies succeed, whether we see something that looks more like a Tea Party on the left this year and going forward?
Zach Albert: Yeah, small donors certainly play a role in the decline of party gatekeeping, which is what you’re describing, the weakness of the parties when it comes to screening out insurgent candidates who might pose issues for the party when it comes to governing, who don’t adhere to the party agenda, who are as likely to aim their fire within the party as outside of it. And we’re seeing some examples of that in the recent primary elections. We have examples of that going back quite a ways, especially to 2016 with Donald Trump. And this touches on actually another book that Ray and I are wrapping up focusing on the feebleness, especially of the GOP when it comes to gatekeeping. And we talk a bit about donors, large and small, independent expenditure groups, as well as challenging the party establishment, supporting these insurgent candidates, and allowing candidates to run and succeed without the support of the party establishment, which they would’ve needed in the past to secure the nomination. But we also talk about a number of other institutional vulnerabilities that parties, especially the GOP have.
So it’s not just about the money, it’s also about the nomination system, the use of direct primaries and attitudes of primary voters who seem to have some preference for these types of insurgent candidates, especially in party-safe seats. And we also talk a bit about the media ecosystem as well that allows insurgent candidates and factional candidates to mobilize financial support, but also support at the ballot box, support on their campaigns, et cetera. And we do focus in this forthcoming book a lot on the GOP because it seems to be drawing on some of your research on the parties as asymmetric, it seems to be a problem that is uniquely afflicting the GOP at least at the moment. Whether that changes in the future is, I think an open question. Are we going to see a Tea Party of the left? If we do, I think small donors would play a key role in that as they did in the Tea Party itself and more recently the MAGA movement. But I also do think that the Democratic Coalition is somewhat distinct that a Tea Party of the left that emerges would be qualitatively different than the Tea Party that we saw on the right.
Matt Grossmann: Ray, what should we be looking for in this election cycle and the upcoming presidential cycle for signs that things might be changing? And what will you be looking for as you move to the next projects?
Ray La Raja: So we’ll obviously be looking at where the dollars are concentrating in these high-conflict, high-profile races. Is money going to Alaska? I mean, we have a candidate there on the Democratic side who is not a high-conflict person. And I see that she’s not necessarily getting as much small donations as the Senate candidate in Maine. So right there we see something that we’ve observed in our book. Whether digital fundraising will continue depend on a lot of outrage. And I’m curious to see whether we do see down-ballot candidates benefiting more from online donations. So that’s what I’ll be thinking about as I look at this election.
Matt Grossmann: Here’s your chance. Tell us about what’s coming.
Zach Albert: Yeah. So in addition to the project I mentioned looking at the feebleness of GOP gatekeeping, we’re also starting to study primary election challenges at the state. And I think that’s a related topic here because it speaks to questions of nationalization and polarization. And so we’re asking questions with Ray, myself, Rich Barton and Rob Boatright, we’re asking when and why do ideological challenges emerge at the state level, what role do they play in polarizing and nationalizing politics, what role do donors, large and small, organized and individual, play in supporting such challenges? And by focusing at the state level, we’re really able to exploit a lot of variation to understand the causes and consequences of primary challenges.
A lot of what we talk about in the book, a lot of the examples we give are examples of primary challengers who relied on small donors to sustain their early candidacies and have continued to ride that small-donor support throughout their careers. And that gives them some degree of insulation from party gatekeeping, from establishment donor networks. And they’re able to continue to act as insurgents and as challengers even once they get elected to office. And so we are turning our attention now to the state level to try to understand these dynamics, how do these candidates emerge and win and what effect does that have on politics more broadly?
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you liked this discussion, here are the episodes I recommend checking out next. How Donor Opinion Distorts American Democracy. Legislators are Raising Money Instead Of Making Policy. If We Don’t Like Polarizing Politicians, Why Do We Get Them? How Campaign Money Changes Elections Before and After Citizens United. And How The Money Chase Governs Our Elections. Thanks to Ray La Raja and Zach Albert for joining me. Please check out Small Donors in US Politics and then listen in next time.
