Why Kamala Harris and Donald Trump Request Small Donations

Inside six hours of President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race this past Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Americans’ inboxes asking for $20.

It’s common. Amid an unprecedented few weeks in U.S. politics, the Republican and Democratic parties — and their respective candidates — have proven relentless in soliciting political contributions. Voters have received a flood of emails and text messages desperately asking “will you pitch in your first $20 today to elect me as president?” (Harris) or saying “I would like you to do me a private favor by chipping in” (former President Donald Trump).

But they’re not demanding huge contributions. Though the tone is exaggerated, the actual request is normally small, with the candidates begging for $2, $7 or one other seemingly insignificant amount. So what is the deal?

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Jennifer Heerwig, a political sociologist at Stony Brook University, says the most important reason for these missives is an obvious one: Elections are expensive. In 2020, presidential candidates, congressional candidates, the parties and groups supporting them spent $14.4 billion. About $5.7 billion of that was spent on the presidential race alone.

Simply put, “candidates need money to run a viable campaign,” Heerwig says.

Donations are especially necessary for candidates who have not run for office before because they should spend money simply to get on the radar of voters.

Early in a campaign, raising a number of money is usually a method to show most of the people (and greater donors) that a candidate has a fighting probability. And while it’s not an automatic W, typically, the more a challenger spends, the more likely they’re to emerge victorious.

“The campaigns use that cash coming from donations for all styles of things we don’t see,” Heerwig adds. “Beyond direct interactions with voters, campaigns are using money to pay campaign staff, to do — perhaps, depending on the candidate — some polling, host events, all of these items that occur behind the scenes.”

These aren’t static expenditures, either: NPR reported in November that it costs money to stay agile, expanding to recent apps or micro-targeting certain demographics on the fly.

Why political candidates love small donations

Small-dollar donations are particularly coveted because they will telegraph grassroots support. Grassroots support, in turn, can indicate that a candidate is in contact with on a regular basis people.

That is something politicians like to tout. After announcing her campaign in 2019, Elizabeth Warren boasted that her average donation was $28. Last yr, the Latest York Times reported that 668,000 donors gave lower than $200 to Trump, now the 2024 Republican nominee. And after Biden endorsed Harris to interchange him because the Democratic nominee on Sunday, ActBlue — a left-leaning fundraising website — excitedly confirmed it had raised over $27.5 million from small-dollar donors in five hours.

“Every little bit helps, from the candidates’ perspective, even on the presidential level,” says Conor Dowling, a political science professor on the University at Buffalo. “Those individual contributions signal that they’ve support from people — and it is not just a couple of millionaires and billionaires.”

Size aside, one other major reason campaigns solicit donations is to gather data. Heerwig says that when a voter makes their first contribution, they turn into a part of the donor list, which might be shared with other candidates and the party, giving them direct access to a highly politically engaged audience.

Remember the fervor over Bernie Sanders’ 2016 email database? There’s a reason Politico called it his “secret weapon.”

Once someone donates, “that person might be targeted with get-out-the-vote communications or [become] a volunteer, anyone who’s engaging with the campaign differently,” says Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel in campaign finance on the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “They will turn into an lively participant within the campaign.”

They also can, crucially, be asked for further donations. And all those small donations add as much as big numbers that make headlines.

“[Campaigns] know that number goes to be splashed around within the press, and it becomes a metric of their likelihood of success,” Ports says. “In the event that they can get a number of $2 donations, which may put them over the sting to that number they’re targeting.”

On a practical level, Dowling says emails and texts just like the ones you are getting are relatively quick and cheap for campaigns to send. The lift is low, and the payoff is potentially great. Some back-of-the-envelope math: If a message goes out to 500,000 people, and a fourth of them feel moved to donate $2, that’s $250,000 more within the bank.

No candidate goes to show their nose up at 1 / 4 of 1,000,000 bucks.

“They will discover a use for money in the event that they have it,” Dowling says.

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