In the first quarter of 2022 just over 9m Americans gave a total of $380m to Democratic candidates and progressive causes on ActBlue, a left-leaning political fundraising site. Contributions were more than double those in the first quarter of 2018, the last mid-term election cycle. WinRed, a Republican platform launched in 2019, processed $170m in donations over the same period. The average pledge on both sites was just $40.
The number of Americans donating to political campaigns is rising rapidly. Economists at Georgetown University, Harvard Business School and Sciences Po, a French research university, analysed 340m individual contributions reported to America’s Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2005 and 2020, or 92% of the total contribution. They found that the number of individual donors increased ten-fold to nearly 20m between 2006 and 2020.
Some 30m Americans donated to a political campaign at least once over that period. And 20m—one in 12 adults—did so during the 2020 election cycle: small donations surged in the days following Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death; Joe Biden raised $26m in the 24 hours after declaring that Kamala Harris, an African-American woman, would be his running mate.
All this has been celebrated by those who extol the virtues of democratic participation and decry the influence of large donors and corporate political action committees (PACs) on elections. And in turn, greater confrontation in politics may be one factor that is encouraging more people to donate. The researchers found that small Democratic donors tend to contribute to more progressive candidates on the left than to centrists. The researchers did not do the same analysis for Republicans, but they also appear increasingly dependent on small donations. Take Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016: 58% of his funds came from Americans who gave under $200. The rise of the individual donor is redrawing America’s political landscape. ■
For a look behind the scenes of our data journalism, sign up to Off the Charts, our weekly newsletter.
