With the 2020 election around the corner, Republicans have a digital fundraising problem, but it’s not what the left-leaning media want you to think.
Democrats have used their exclusive processing platform ActBlue to overwhelm Republicans with low-dollar, digital fundraising. During the 2018 election cycle, Democrats raised a whopping $1.6 billion via online fundraising from nearly 5 million unique individual donors. An impressive 63.8 percent of those donors, roughly 3 million, were first-time givers to the platform. Republican digital fundraising totals, meanwhile, failed to reach even half of what the Democrats accomplished last year.
The Left’s eye-popping numbers and the resulting Republican disadvantage lead many to mistakenly believe the Grand Old Party’s fundraising shortfall has everything to do with ActBlue. Because Republicans lack a monopolistic processing platform, many argue, they just aren’t organized enough to compete with Democrats.
But there’s much, much more to the story. ActBlue is simply a tool that Democrats have used since 2004 to process and report their advantage. ActBlue is the Left’s PayPal — it’s their personal GoFundMe platform.
But ActBlue isn’t causing the Left’s significant low-dollar advantage over its opponents. Democrats don’t process donations any better than Republicans. In fact, the Republican Party, through multiple processing platforms, has equal if not superior processing power. The top Republican platforms all have the same one-click donation system that has made ActBlue a media darling, whereby donors have their payment information saved and can one-click a donation to a candidate, saving minutes of data input.
The reason for the Left’s recent edge has more to do with three unrelated factors.
First, Democratic leadership is committed to low-dollar fundraising, whereas Republicans are not. The two leading Republican super PACs — the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund — raised less than $30,000 from low-dollar digital donors in 2018, while their Democratic counterparts raised more than $11 million. Think about that for a second. This has nothing to do with ActBlue’s processing power and everything to do with the Left’s powerful commitment to low-dollar digital assets. Moreover, those donors become immediately and easily available to Democratic candidates; Republicans don’t do the same.
Second, Democrats have followed up their commitment to low-dollar fundraising with massive investments. They have cultivated a pool of over 5 million low-dollar, digital donors ready to one-click donate. Republicans have less than half that, and they are far less adept at legally and affordably sharing those donors with the candidates they are entrusted to elect.
In other words, whereas President Trump and the Republican National Committee have set all sorts of digital fundraising records, those donors are not immediately and easily available to Republican candidates. Imagine if Republican super PACs invested a mere 10 percent of their roughly $290 million haul into the acquisition of low-dollar, digital donors, who also convert efficiently to voters. Unfortunately, they didn’t even spend 1 percent.
Third, no matter how robust our technology becomes, fundraising is impossible without manpower. And Republicans can lay claim to only a handful of digital fundraising professionals who focus on low-dollar donors. Digital fundraising is hard work and requires a long-term commitment. To be successful, political candidates need to start early, investing time and talent (often at break-even cost) into digital assets that will only pay off later in the campaign. Many Republicans still don’t get it. They forgo that hard work, instead spending their time and money on social media and digital advertising. They treat fundraising as an afterthought when it’s too late. Why? Because advertising is easier to execute and boasts higher profit margins. Fundraising is also continually monitored for concrete results in ways that digital advertising campaigns tend to avoid.
Rather than chasing a monopolistic ActBlue-style unicorn, the Republican consulting class would be better served remembering those three factors: commitment, investment, and personnel. A “Field of Dreams” mentality of “build it and they will come” won’t solve Republicans’ fundraising woes. There is simply too much to the puzzle to pin all hopes on a single payment processing platform.
Let’s take a page from the Democratic playbook. Truly commit to digital fundraising, and then invest the requisite resources, money and labor, to see it through. Only then can Republicans hope to match Democratic fundraising and emerge victorious in the elections to come.
Guy Short (@Shortguy1) is a former congressional chief of staff, six-time Republican National Convention delegate, and Republican strategist with over 25 years of experience in politics.
