Four years ago, as of October 15, 2020, I had raised a total of $4.52 million for Democrats up & down the ballot, broken out as follows;
- U.S. Senate: $3.67M (81%)
- U.S. House: $349K (7.7%)
- State Legislature: $409K (9.0%)
- POTUS: $83.0K (1.8%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $12.9K (0.3%)
- State Supreme Court: n/a (0%)
- Other: n/a (0%)
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TOTAL: $4,526,558
So how am I doing as of mid-October this cycle by comparison?
- U.S. Senate: $1.45M (12.0%)
- U.S. House: $1.02M (8.5%)
- State Legislature: $794K (6.6%)
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POTUS: $8.62 MILLION (71%)
- State Execs (Gov/AG/SoS): $90.2K (0.7%)
- State Supreme Court: $107.5K (0.9%)
- Other:$27.4K (0.2%)
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TOTAL: $12,119,545
Overall, I've raised 2.7x as much for Democrats so far this cycle as I had at the same point in 2020.
Needless to say, this has completely destroyed my prior 2024 cycle / 2020 cycle comparison graphs.
Here's what they look like side by side...scaled to reflect the massive increase in the overall size of the fundraising pie vs. four years ago:
When I launched my 2024 fundraising project, I was naively hoping to raise perhaps $4 million total, broken out roughly into thirds: 1/3 U.S. Senate races; 1/3 U.S. House races; and 1/3 State Legislative and Statewide Executive races. While I included President Biden on some pages as a courtesy, I was really hoping to focus heavily on down ballot races, especially at the state legislative level.
And until July 21st, that's pretty much where my 2024 cycle fundraising project was headed.
NOW, however...well, POTUS has skyrocketed from making up just 1% of my total fundraising this cycle to 71%.
Having said that, there's still great news elsewhere as well.
Here's what it looks like in bar graph format. For obvious reasons, I wasn't able to fit the fundraising for VP Harris on the chart; if I had tried, most of the other columns would have been virtually invisible:
My POTUS fundraising is up a batshit insane 10,400% higher compared to the same point in 2020 ($8.62M vs.$83K).
As for the other types of races:
- U.S. House: I've raised 2.9x more so far this cycle than the same point in 2020
- State Legislative: I've raised 1.9x more so far this cycle than the same point in 2020
- State Executives: I've raised 7x more so far this cycle, although it's actually more like 17.4x higher when you include State Supreme Court races and Other fundraising, which I didn't do at all in 2020.
The "Other" category includes Voters of Tomorrow, reproductive rights ballot initiative advocacy organizations in 10 states and a few other oddball organizations.
The one category where I'm running considerably behind the same point in 2020 is U.S. Senate Democrats, but this requires some context.
The bad news is that I've gone from raising nearly as much as 2020 to just 40% as much over just the past month. There's a very specific reason for this, however: Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on Sept. 18, 2020, which led to an immediate and massive surge in Senate Dem fundraising that year, not too different from the explosion in money raised by Kamala Harris in the first week or so after she replaced President Biden as the 2024 nominee.
You can easily see this in the following graph which overlays my 2024 fundraising over time (with & without POTUS included) vs. 2020 over the same time period:
However, a closer look at the U.S. Senate data shows that the dropoff from 2020 isn't quite as dramatic as it looks when you break it out between competitive and long shot races.
In 2020, there were a dozen Senate races which were generally considered up for grabs: AZ, CO, GA (x2), IA, ME, MI, MN, MT, NH, NM & NC.
There were another 16 Republican-held seats which were basically unflippable by Dems, but which I listed on the fundraising page in order to encourage party building and other reasons.
This year there's 10 Senate seats I consider competitive (or at least potentially competitive): AZ, FL, MD, MI, MT, NV, OH, PA, TX & WI. Florida and Texas are reaches but still in the "competitive" category. I also briefly included Tim Kaine (Virginia) before removing him, and Andy Kim was on the page for awhile earlier this year.
There's another ten GOP seats which are likely pipe dreams but again, you never know: IN, MS, MO, NE*, NE Special, ND, TN, UT, WV & WY.
Thru September 30, 2020, Senate donations were split 60/40 between the Competitive and Long Shot Senate races.
THIS cycle, however, 86% of the Senate funds I've raised have gone to one of the competitive races, with just 14% going to the other ten long shots combined.
As a result, while my overall Senate fundraising is indeed down a whopping 60% from 2020, for competitive races it's only down 43% (the long shot races are down 86%):
Here's how much I've raised to date for each U.S. Senate candidate. As you can see, the Tier 1 races are well ahead of the Tier 2 ones, with the exception of the two which I removed some time ago (Kim & Kaine).
(Joe Manchin & Zach Shrewsbury were both listed very briefly when I thought each of them was going to be the nominee, a mistake on my part).
Here's the breakout of my U.S. House fundraising thru Oct. 13th for the top 64 seats (plus another ~$19,000 for an additional 168 races combined). This is missing another ~$25,000 from Oct. 14th. I've color coded them by those for whom I've raised more than $30K, those $20K - $30K, those $10K - $20K, those $5K - $10K and those from $1K - $5K raised:
Here's the breakout of what I've raised for State Legislative Democrats, including the State Democratic Parties & Democratic legislative caucus PACs whose sole purpose is to elect state legislative Democrats.
The 8 swing states (in green) make up just over half of the total. The grey states are the ones which held their legislative elections in 2023 (LA, MS, NJ, VA) or which don't have any until 2026 (AL, MD). Connecticut (tan) state races are completely publicly financed.
Finally we get to social media donor sources. Using RefCode tags I'm able to mostly tell which donations are coming from which social media platforms or other sources. This isn't 100% accurate since I occasionally forget to include the tags, but it should be pretty close.
