Butch Comegys/The Times Leader via AP
Biden en route to a private fundraiser near Philadelphia, April 2019
In a matter of days, we will know whether the 2020 election cycle will go down in history as a resounding Democratic triumph or another confounding loss. But even if Democrats underachieve what’s been a very favorable and sustained polling edge, this cycle will prove to be consequential just on fundraising alone, where Democrats have seen a paradigm-shattering shift in the way races are financed, a coming-out party for the individual small-dollar donor as one of the most powerful forces in politics.
Going into the race’s final days, Democrats—and Joe Biden in particular—enjoy a massive cash advantage all over the map. For a presidential challenger to outraise an incumbent is almost unheard of; even unpopular incumbents like George W. Bush enjoyed monster war chests in re-election bids. Meanwhile, the campaign of President Trump, whose major legislative accomplishment has been a leviathan of a tax cut for the rich, is now being referred to in the race’s final week as “cash poor.”
Joe Biden’s campaign raised $130 million just in the first two weeks of October, and enters the final leg of the presidential race with an astonishing $118 million cash-on-hand advantage over President Trump. That only adds to Biden’s numbers in September, when he raised a record-setting $383 million, $135 million more than the Trump campaign and Republican affiliates collected over the course of that same period.
Politicians don’t necessarily have to barricade themselves in cubicles and spend hours of “call time” begging rich people for money.
But what makes Biden’s fundraising juggernaut historic is not just its eye-popping dollar amounts, but how he’s bringing those dollars in. According to a recently released quarterly report, Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through the online campaign donation site ActBlue over the last three months. Biden, predictably, is the beneficiary of a large chunk of that total, after announcing that $203 million of his $383 million haul in September was raised online. That’s by far the most money ever raised for an individual presidential candidate in a month in American history, rivaled only by the totals in October that we don’t have yet. Small-dollar donors, giving in minor installments, have, by themselves, put up enough money to keep pace with the entire Trump fundraising machine, which going into the year was thought to be a daunting and historically high-powered engine.
Not only has Joe Biden and his high-profile presidential race benefitted. In South Carolina, Jaime Harrison, the Democratic challenger to Lindsey Graham, raised $57 million in the third quarter, obliterating the record for the biggest-ever fundraising quarter in a Senate race, set two years ago by Beto O’Rourke. Harrison is the first Senate candidate in American history to pass the $100 million mark for fundraising and spending. In other races, like Amy McGrath’s likely doomed bid to unseat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, the Democratic campaign has pulled in so much money it’s straining to spend it all. In total, donations to Democratic Senate candidates have tripled over where they were in 2018’s cycle, itself a record-setting year for small-dollar donations, evincing an aggressively upward trend. Even state parties are lapping up cash.
This begs the question: Why is Joe Biden still bothering with high-dollar fundraisers with Wall Street and Silicon Valley? In the last handful of days, despite an already insurmountable cash advantage, and without many places for additional funds to even be spent, Biden has gleefully taken in $100,000 from former Goldman Sachs president Harvey Schwartz for the Biden Action Fund, the joint fundraising committee with the DNC and state parties. That’s the largest check Schwartz has ever cut. He’s banked $150,000 from Tim Geithner, former Treasury secretary under President Barack Obama and current president of private equity firm Warburg Pincus, while John Doerr, chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, gave over $355,000 to the Biden Action Fund last quarter. In late September, Google CEO Eric Schmidt held a fundraiser for Biden alongside presumptive secretary of defense Michèle Flournoy. At most recent count, Wall Street has contributed $74 million to Joe Biden, even more than they gave to Barack Obama, money he can’t even plausibly claim to need.
While Biden continues to embrace big money unnecessarily, he’s doing so with the least transparency in a Democratic presidential campaign in recent memory. He hasn’t updated his bundlers list since December 2019, a stunning decision for a candidate claiming to be on the side of campaign finance reform. Given that he doesn’t even need the money, Biden’s continued openness to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and his concurrent lack of openness about who’s bringing in that money, appears to be all about auctioning off access. That’s extremely concerning, and at odds with the desires of the Democratic electorate.
Still, the rapid emergence of the small-dollar donor signifies a profound shift in the way campaigns are funded and should be envisioned going forward. While it’s possible enthusiasm is uniquely high this year, 2018 was a record-breaking small-dollar year as well. Joe Biden, meanwhile, had the lowest enthusiasm of any presidential candidate in the Democratic primary, and has still managed to put up these gigantic numbers. Democrats, it turns out, can compete, and dominate, solely on the backs of small-dollar donations.
There were indications of this development in the primary as well, as progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders in particular, put up titanic fundraising numbers month after month into the early part of 2020. And it’s also continued in the House, where high-profile representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pulled in huge hauls without having to do any formal fundraising events at all. It seemed at first that this arrangement would only work for nationally prominent progressives with an enthusiastic base. Now, it seems that even generic Democrats running in general-election races against Republicans can compete and even overwhelm opponents on internet donations alone. Even the Texas Democratic Party has seen a huge cash infusion for state House races.
This throws into question a lot of assumptions about the way campaigns are run and structured. Politicians don’t necessarily have to barricade themselves in cubicles and spend hours of “call time” begging rich people for money. Fundraising doesn’t necessarily have to compete with actual legislating and constituent service. Lobbyists for big business don’t necessarily have much of value to dangle over the heads of members of Congress. House and Senate members don’t have to worry about the implications of their governing on the money they will be able to extract for their next election. There are a lot of highly paid Democratic operatives who command significant power within the party for their fundraising prowess alone, people who bring with them concessions on policy that are arguably no longer necessary. This could be a sea change, not only in how campaigns play out, but what kind of legislation can happen in the space in between.
And the advantage that affords Democrats over Republicans is so significant that Republicans have begun to cry foul. Lindsey Graham has called for an investigation into ActBlue, after seeing the fundraising totals his opponent has put up. “When this election is over with, I hope there will be a sitting down and finding out, ‘OK, how do we control this?’ It just seems to be an endless spiral,” he said last week.
This should provide Democrats with ample opportunity and confidence to pursue campaign finance reform in the new year, one of many process reforms that was supposed to be a priority for the Democratic House in 2018. HR1, the first bite at that, continues to sit around, waiting for the Senate to take it up. If Democrats do retake the Senate (and they remove the filibuster), that could easily be accomplished. But that would require the Democratic Party to pursue a higher standard in campaign finance than it’s currently holding its presidential candidate to. While activists and progressives have pledged to keep Joe Biden accountable if he wins, that might have to start with money in politics.
