2012 Numbers: First Quarter Roundup

If you've read the last few monthly numbers posts you're aware that it's been a good year for Democrats on ActBlue. But looking at our Q1 numbers, you can see that a huge amount of money is flowing to candidates and committees that don't make our top 5 for the quarter. While everyone else is consumed with the ups-and-downs of the presidential race, we're quietly helping Democrats up and down the ballot get what they need to win.

Let's take another angle on that: if every seat in Congress were constested, you'd have around 500 committees getting money. ActBlue has 2,050 recipients. That's the best expression of the kind of work we do, and how it ripples out across the country. Now, the numbers:

Number of contributions	333,928
Total raised	$18,070,391.02
Average Contribution size	$54.11
Committees receiving money	2,050

So, these numbers are the gold standard for year-over-year growth. While 2012 is a presidential election year and that pushes the numbers upward, you can glance at our 2008 numbers to see how much we've grown over the interim.

	Q1 2008	Q1 2011	Q1 2012	Change
Contributions	52,149	180,537	333,928	85%
Volume ($)	$6,945,713.73	$8,712,756.77	$18,070,391.02	107%
Mean Donation	$133.19	$48.26	$54.11	12%
Committees	992	881	2,050	133%

Here are the five top committees, by number of donors, for Q1 2012.

Name	Race	Donors	Dollars
DCCC	Party Committee	103,592	$3,036,757
Elizabeth Warren	MA-Sen	26,827	$1,310,832
Democratic Party of Wisconsin	Party Committee	20,974	$423,339
Democracy for America	Organization	20,602	$468,190
PCCC	Organization	16,566	$166,313

2012 Numbers: March Madness

Forgive the title, but March was a pretty crazy month. When you look at the year by year comparisons below, consider that March 2011 was the height of the Wisconsin protests, which drove hundreds of thousands of dollars through ActBlue. Now, in March 2012, we're a few months away from the final act: the recall election for Gov. Scott Walker (R). The real lesson of ActBlue in 2012 is this: Democrats up and down the ballot are benefitting from the work we've done since 2010. We're thrilled to see it pay off.

Number of contributions	167,080
Total raised	$8,987,964.89
Average Contribution size	$53.79
Committees receiving money	1,629

Here's what March 2012 looks like compared to 2011 (recall protests) and 2008 (last presidential election year):

	Mar 2008	Mar 2011	Mar 2012	Change
Contributions	25,344	143,012	167,080	17%
Volume ($)	$3,707,738.92	$5,847,994.09	$8,987,964.89	54%
Mean Donation	$146.30	$40.89	$53.79	31%
Committees	787	673	1,629	142%

Here are the five top committees, by number of donors, for March 2012.

Name	Race	Donors	Dollars
DCCC	Party Committee	67,792	$1,942,038
Elizabeth Warren	MA-Sen	10,526	$311,923
Democracy for America	Organization	7,791	$127,177
PCCC	Organization	7,454	$63,102
Alan Grayson	FL-09	6,543	$146,564

Bundles, "Bundles," and Blinders

A recent Seattle Times story on Maria Cantwell noted that, 

By far the biggest single source of Cantwell's fundraising last year was ActBlue, a political-action committee that acts as an online conduit for individuals who want to give to Democratic candidates. ActBlue "bundled" $365,000 for Cantwell.

Oh, hey scare quotes. If you check out Cantwell's ActBlue hub, you'll see she's received 7,333 donations through ActBlue totaling $750,000. That works out to about $100 a pop. Those donations were made by folks (real people!) who decided they wanted to support Cantwell's campaign and the money was disclosed to the FEC. So, we've got lots of people choosing to participate in a campaign, and doing so transparently. Terrifying. 

Let's return to those scare quotes. The author of the piece uses them to imply something inappropriate about small-dollar fundraising, as if totaling up grassroots donations were somehow the equivalent of, say, the K Street Project. It's ridiculous. Enabling small dollar donors to participate transparently and consequentially in the fundraising process only enhances democratic accountability. It's the opposite of the shadowy system of billionaire-financed campaigning that's kept the Republican nomination process going for so long. Bundling our "bundling" in with that sort of fundraising reflects a profound ignorance of what ActBlue actually does, and damages the credibility of the piece as a whole. 

It also reflects a real blindness about the role of money in politics. Money that comes from individuals and is disclosed in a way voters and reporters can access is hardly a corrupting influence. It's just another way for (actual) people to express themselves within the political process; the fact that ~$100 individual donations through ActBlue account for the lion's share of Maria Cantwell's fundraising is something to be celebrated, not scorned.

2012 Numbers: Fab February

ActBlue doesn't shut down after the election. We keep working to bring more and more people into the political fundraising process year in and year out. We get that a lot of our work is invisible during down times, but it pays off when the political cycle heats up.

February is a short month and it doesn't bump up against an end of quarter deadline. Last year was bigger than expected because of the initial fundraising reaction to Gov. Scott Walker's (R-WI) union-busting effort. But our slow-and-steady work has led to a February 2012 total more than twice the size of 2011, with nearly three times as many committees receiving money. That's the sort of big, broad base that we're trying to build, and we're thrilled to see it working.

Number of contributions	110,354
Total raised	$5,087,728.20
Average Contribution size	$46.10
Committees receiving money	1,340

February in context:

	Feb 2008	Feb 2011	Feb 2012	Change
Contributions	17,538	34,496	110,354	220%
Volume ($)	$1,879,868.94	$2,228,051.55	$5,087,728.20	128%
Mean Donation	$107.19	$64.59	$46.10	-29%
Committees	600	561	1,340	140%

Here are the five top committees, by number of donors, for February 2012.

Name	Race	Donors	Dollars
DCCC	Party Committee	28,942	$763,847
Democratic Party of Wisconsin	Party Committee	9,288	$166,872
Democracy for America	Organization	7,688	$156,479
Elizabeth Warren	MA-Sen	6,559	$344,854
PCCC	Organization	6,237	$51,762

2012 Numbers: Bigger, Badder January

Here's a rule about political fundraising: January is dead. People are feeling the pinch of their Christmas shopping, it's cold, and the political cycle doesn't really heat up for the non-primary-having party until later in the year. All in all, not a great time.

Not this January. This January was bananas. ActBlue sent over $4 million to Democratic candidates and committees this month, a nearly four-fold increase over January 2008. If you recall, in 2008 there was this little, kind of boring contest called the Democratic Presidential Nomination Fight--Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and so on. Still, 2012 is clocking in well ahead of those numbers, as you'll see below:

Number of contributions	87,408
Total raised	$4,021,352.93
Average Contribution size	$46.01
Committees receiving money	1,207

You can't really get a sense of how big January was until you see how it stacks up relative to 2011 and 2008:

	Jan 2008	Jan 2011	Jan 2012	Change
Contributions	11,835	10,120	87,408 (!)	764%
Volume ($)	$1,358,105.87	$636,711.13	$4,021,352.93	532%
Mean Donation	$114.75	$62.92	$46.01	-27%
Committees	535	460	1,207	162%

Here are the five top committees, by number of donors, for January 2012.

Name	Race	Donors	Dollars
Elizabeth Warren	MA-Sen	13,827	$658,329
DCCC	Party Committee	11,906	$332,746
Democracy for America	Organization	10,555	$187,149
Democratic Party of WI	Party Committee	7,400	$152,406
CREDO SuperPAC	SuperPAC	5,845	$133,896

There are a couple of big surprises in the data--the DCCC and the CREDO SuperPac make the leaderboard for the first time and buck expectations by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars with an average donation size under $30. We believe small donors and disclosure are the key to a healthy political system and it looks like folks are coming around.

Rubber, Meet Road

We have another milestone to celebrate around the office: 2 million donations! And we got there only a year and a half after we hit 1 million. Averaged out over that period, we're talking 55,000 donations a month during some of slowest months of the election cycle.

Here's why it matters: our infrastructure is what turns grassroots passion into political results. While the "enthusiasm gap" was making headlines across the country, Democratic donors flocked to ActBlue to connect with their chosen candidates. Our infrastructure enabled the Wisconsin Recall efforts to demonstrate their fundraising oomph in real time, and helped labor issues find their way back into national discourse. Today that conversation is in a dramatically different place than it was a few months ago.

But 2012 is where the rubber meets the road. It's our transparent, participatory architecture against the small and increasingly shadowy world of Republican fundraising unleashed by Citizen's United.

2 million grassroots donations or five guys writing blank checks: which system would you rather have?

Mobile Giving and Infrastructure

Sam Stein of the Huffington Post has a well-reported item up on mobile giving and campaigns. The takeaway is that everyone knows mobile giving is the next big thing but the actual "how" of the process as it relates to political donations is still unclear. As I've mentioned before, what we're dealing with is fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Amazon's one-click model works for two reasons: you can buy almost anything on Amazon and people are now broadly comfortable with the idea of purchasing things on the internet (in no small part due to Amazon's work in that area).

In the political world, neither of those conditions hold. For starters, the environment is far more fractured, with most candidates pursuing a la carte solutions. If you take a random sample of 25 campaigns, you'll find ten different vendors are responsible for processing donations, each with a particular set of technical constraints that means they can't play nice with one another. That means that each campaign would have to set up their own mobile donation platform, which in turn would require donors to create a mobile profile for each and every candidate they want to give to. Surprisingly, most people aren't up for that. 

Second, online political donations are a fairly new phenomenon and people's comfort zones are still adjusting. A few years ago, an online fundraising program was an optional part of your campaign plan. Today, it's essential. That change happened very fast, and it's why we regularly receive calls from folks who want to give to a candidate but aren't comfortable doing so over the internet. That's not unusual in circumstances like these. In 1998, Newsweek ran an editorial questioning whether anyone would ever buy books--much less other things--using internet retailers like Amazon. Today, the questions are somewhat different: will Amazon kill off book publishers, for example.

The reason ActBlue Express has succeeded relative to many other approaches to mobile giving is that we provide the same clearinghouse advantages that Amazon enjoys. You can create a single profile and give to every Democrat listed on our site (which is to say: almost every Democrat). Instead of campaigns pursuing endlessly duplicative infrastructure and trying to lure donors to this website or that website, they can come to a single place and connect with a pre-existing community of users. Crucially, the fact that these users have ActBlue Express accounts means they're donors and they have a pretty high level of engagement with politics. 

The fact that we've been around for a while and people know and trust us doesn't hurt either.

But the single greatest advantage we enjoy in here is the fact that we're a political committee, not a business. That means we can innovate in ways that for-profit vendors can't match. Simply put, they have to look after their bottom line. Because margins in this business are thin, if something isn't going to be immediately profitable it tends to land on the back burner. At ActBlue, we're able to get out in front of things like mobile giving because we're not as constrained in that regard. Our constituency of interest is our userbase, not our shareholders. If we can provide value to our users, that's the metric we're interested in.

ActBlue Express is simply one expression of that core tenet. 

2011: Q3 Statistics

The third quarter of this year was an odd duck, because it mixed the massive off-year fundraising of the Wisconsin Recalls with the start of federal campaign season as seen in the kickoff of the Elizabeth Warren campaign. Those two events brought a huge influx of grassroots donors to ActBlue, driving down our average contribution size to around $50. It's shaping up to be another big cycle for grassroots fundraising.

Number of contributions	199,585
Total raised	$10,229,392.76
Average Contribution size	$51.25
Committees receiving money	1,388

Here's how those numbers stack up relative to 2009, and to the same point in the last presidential election cycle (2007). Change is calculated with 2009 as the baseline.

	Q3 2007	Q3 2009	Q3 2011	Change
Contributions	36,938	105,266	199,585	47%
Volume ($)	$4,793,375.78	$9,368,191.06	$10,229,392.76	9%
Mean Donation	$129.87	$89.00	$51.25	-42%
Committees	625	1,160	1,388	19%

Here are the five top committees, by number of donors, for Q3 2011.

Name	Race	Donors	Dollars
PCCC	Organization	41,715	$418,964
Democracy for America (WI Recall)	Organization	38,694	$440,989
PCCC Wisconsin Recall	Organization	37,951	$356,104
Democracy for America	Organization	34,961	$385,044
Elizabeth Warren	MA-Sen	27,756	$943,366

Small Donors and 2012

A few weeks ago, Nick Confessore of the New York Times wrote a piece about the reluctance of small donors to return to the Obama fold. Shira Toeplitz of Roll Call recently examined the slowdown in traditional fundraising: major bundlers and PACs. For Confessore, the fact that President Obama has to work harder for small donors stems from his sagging popularity. For Toeplitz, it's a sign of the down economy that the deep-pocketed can't dole out the sort of financial largesse they used to.

Both of these theses have some real problems.

Confessore runs into the problem that conventional methods of reportage are a terrible fit for assessing as broad a category as grassroots donors. Dozens of interviews are a poor way to figure out what's going on in a population that numbers in the millions. Some people are undoubtedly disappointed in President Obama, but many more may not have tuned into the process yet. In 2007, Democrats were where Republicans are today: focused on a contested primary process to replace a President that was wildly unpopular with their base. It's no surprise that it's harder to engage the Democratic grassroots now; whether that will remain the case is anybody's guess. Finally, it's not as if the President has some special claim to these donors--they're a political constituency like any other. Even if there were reason to accept Confessore's thesis without question, we should be celebrating the fact that political actors have to work for their support, rather than ignoring it as irrelevant or taking it for granted. Today, there are lines of accountability and financial interdependence between legislators and grassroots donors that didn't exist ten years ago, and that's a good thing.

The Toeplitz piece is a bit harder to find bright spots in, as it takes the same basic error and adds a laundry-list of excuses for a poor fundraising quarter. Hurricane Irene, the debt ceiling melee, the (crippling!) impact of the economy on our nation's wealthiest donors, and even the Jewish New Year all come in for blame for the lower-than-average haul, as if that were the important aspect of those events.

I bring these articles up because ActBlue has access to a pretty good cross-section of small donor activity. Every day, we process contributions to state and federal candidates from across the country. That immunizes us to some extent from the problems these articles run in to. In the spirit of lending a little clarity to the debate, here are our numbers from Q3 2009, and Q3 2011:

'09: $9,368,191 from 105,266 donors to 1,160 committees. 

'11: $10,230,421 from 199,595 donors to 1,388 committees. 

Hardly the declines we'd expect to see if Confessore and Toeplitz are right. Grassroots donors are more engaged in the fundraising process than ever before. Even if the sources Toeplitz quotes are right, it may not be the case that fundraising has declined, rather that its character and the methods used to go it are changing and the political sector is lagging a bit in recognizing that trend. As political fundraising becomes increasingly digital and grassroots, the value of traditional methods may lose a little of their centrality. (They'll still be important!) That's not a bad thing--it will create a political system that's more dynamic and has fewer barriers to entry. There will be more voices and more choices for voters to listen to and weigh, and that's the essence of representative democracy. 

Over $100,000 Delivered to Warren

In July, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) asked ActBlue to set up a draft fund for Elizabeth Warren. By mid-August the PCCC had shattered all records for the largest and fastest growing draft fund in our history, raising over $102,000 from around 7,000 supporters even before Elizabeth Warren formed an exploratory committee for a Massachusetts Senate run.

Today, their unprecedented success is the reason we're sending her committee a six-figure check.

The PCCC's landmark efforts are not only impressive, they tell us something important about the way politics is changing in response to the digital age. In 2009, the PCCC was a brand new organization. Today, the PCCC has a played a central role in a number of key battles over the last two years -- from the fight for the public option and the push to keep Keith Olbermann on the air, to this year's Wisconsin recall elections and the Draft Warren fund. With the help of a large and active donor community, the PCCC has raised millions even though their average donation size is just under $15. In short, they've become a major political player at a speed and donation size that would've been unthinkable five years ago.

Much the same can be said of ActBlue. Seven years after our founding in 2004, we've become the single largest source of political funds in the United States. Our mission was (and is) to give voice to the voiceless, and bring attention to those donors and communities that are often ignored or overlooked. We call it "Democratizing Power," and this is how it works:

ActBlue raises up small donors, who raise up the PCCC, which raises up Elizabeth Warren. 

It's an organic, bottom-up process that's based on shifting the incentives that politicians face in a direction that's a win for everybody involved and the political system at large. By using ActBlue, the PCCC can demonstrate to everyone who cares to look that they can have a major impact on campaigns, and their donors can see exactly how powerful they are when they work together. Politicians learn that grassroots donors can be counted on to produce major results when it matters. And over time we get a political system that's responsive to the needs of folks who contribute $25, not just those who can afford $2500 donations.

Our architecture and their work--which has already raised another $7,000+ for Warren--improves your government. It's a good thing, man.

In the IRS We Trust

Restore Our Future, a so-called super PAC formed to support the presidential bid of Mitt Romney, recently reported receiving a one million dollar contribution from a company, which has caused a stir. It's not the size of the contribution that caught everyone's attention since super PACs can legally accept unlimited contributions even from corporate contributors as a result 2010 court decisions. Rather, campaign finance reformers are crying foul based on the lack of disclosure of exactly who was behind the contribution. They're just crying to the wrong agency.

W Spann, LLC, the company that made the contribution, was formed in Delaware in March and then dissolved in July. A Boston lawyer specializing in wealth management handled the paperwork, but otherwise the person(s) responsible for the company — and the resulting contribution — is entirely unknown. A consensus has emerged that W Spann probably violated the law because making the contribution caused it to become a political committee, and W Spann failed to register with or report to the FEC. Even opponents of campaign finance laws agree that this is the case. In response, reformers have called on the FEC to investigate.

But the FEC will do nothing. There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps principally among them the fact that the FEC has been largely unable to act in its current configuration of commissioners. Even if the FEC were to act, however, it's not clear that the consensus presents a sound legal argument. A political committee is defined as a group of people who make contributions together; a single person cannot constitute a political committee. If W Spann was established by a single person, therefore, the complaint will fail. And there are additional complications of line-drawing (should any company that makes a contribution be forced to register? if the company made charitable contributions in addition to its political contributions?) that the Republican commissioners will almost certainly balk at, making any action even more unlikely.

The complaint overlooks the real issue in this case: disclosure, not whether the company is a political committee. And there is a better way to force W Spann to disclose who was behind this major contribution. All organizations or companies whose primary purpose is to make political contributions are required to report those contributions and the original source of the funds to the IRS. Everyone has to register with the IRS, and line drawing is the essence of the IRS's day-to-day operations, so they are much more likley to exercise jursdiction over W Spann than is the FEC.

If it is the case that the primary purpose of this shell corporation was to make this contribution, regarless of how many people were behind it, then W Spann broke the law by not reporting the source of the contribution to the IRS. Setting a precedent by forcing the disclosure of anonymous donors to the IRS rather than the FEC (which has demonstrated itself to be a poor watchdog) would be just as effective a means of getting large donors to think twice before laundering their millions through shell companies. Unfortunately, instead we're likely to end up with nothing from the FEC.

Political Actors, Not Political Addicts

In yesterday's Washington Post, T.W. Farnam apparently thought it would be illuminating to compare grassroots donors to addicts. The article is the other half of a classic D.C. lose-lose attack on the grassroots: if you don't give, you're a feckless mass who can't be trusted to come through for candidates, and if you do give you're rubes at mercy of canny political operatives.

Unconsidered in the article is the apparently outlandish possibility that grassroots donors are making their own decisions about who to support--that they aren't just money pinatas to be beaten by enterprising staffers when cash gets low. Crazy, I know. 

Beyond the condescending frame and patronizing tone, the article still has a huge problem: what's the alternative? Over the past two years we've seen a marked erosion of campaign finance law, always to the benefit of monied interests. If grassroots donors don't step up to provide a counterweight to that ever-increasing concentration of power, the end result will be the total capture of our electoral system by those interests. Voters will just be the people who show up on election day to ratify a choice that was made long before ballots were printed.

And that's the real reason why grassroots giving matters: by engaging in the fundraising process, grassroots donors are taking ownership of their political future. To use a well-worn GOP chestnut, they have "skin in the game." Grassroots donors raised over half a million dollars for Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and helped her pull out an unlikely win in NY-26. That kind of participation fulfills the promise of American democracy, and shouldn't be treated like some kind of hideous affliction brought on by the digital age.