Tiny Donations, Big Impact: How Small-Dollar Donors are Eroding the Power of Party Insiders
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SYMPOSIUM: THE 2020 U.S. ELECTIONS
Tiny Donations, Big Impact: How Small-Dollar Donors are Eroding the Power of Party Insiders Brian Arbour 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The shift to small- dollar fundraising in the 2020 Democratic nomination contest is not only a change in how campaigns operate. Campaigns that depended on small donors also shifted their rhetoric and behavior, flaunting their “outsider,” populist credentials and decrying politics as usual. The new power of small donors has the potential to be the greatest challenge to the control of party elites over the presidential nomination process since the reforms of the 1970s. Keywords Campaigns and elections . Money in politics . Presidential primaries . Political parties . Campaign finance . Bernie Sanders . Elizabeth Warren . Democratic party
How does a candidate raise the money needed to win a party’s nomination for President? For years, he standard method was to cultivate a large rolodex, compiling a network of wellheeled friends and party insiders. Candidates would spend seemingly endless hours calling people on this list and asking them not only to donate money, but also to host fundraising events where their wealthy, politically connected friends could also donate and be added to the rolodex. Scholars have identified these donors as “investors.”(Feigenbaum and Shelton 2013; Francia et al. 2003; Swearingen 2019). Investors seek access to a future president and their donations are based heavily on a candidate’s viability (Dowdle et al. 2009; Whitby 2014). In primary elections, many of these donors are themselves party insiders; others are part of the social networks of these insiders. Their donations are also attempts to signal voters to nominate a candidate supported by these insiders (Bawn et al. 2012; Cohen et al. 2009). In the 2020 Democratic nomination contest, however, these traditional rules of campaign fundraising were turned upside down. The process was dominated not by big donors and their exclusive fundraising events, but by small-dollar donors who gave primarily out of loyalty to their favored candidate (Mutz 1995). These donors were seeking neither
* Brian Arbour [email protected] 1
John Jay College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA
transactional access to a politician, nor to boost a candidate minimally acceptable across different party factions. Instead, they sought to promote their ideological faction within a party coalition (Ensley 2009; Kayden 1985), or to receive solidary benefits from participating in a campaign (Johnson 2013). Together, these small-dollar donors had a large monetary impact. One analysis of campaign finance reports found that over half of the money raised by Democratic presidential candidates in early 2019 came from donations of $200 or less (Levine 2019). The focus on small donors also changed the behavior of candidates, who. Voluntarily restricted themselves from receiving money from specific categories of donors, such as registered lobbyists, corporate PACs, and
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